Day 27 Black History Month 2021 - Dr. Shirley A. Jackson
Dr. Shirley A. Jackson (August 1946 – present)
For day 27 of Black History Month, we’d like to highlight Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, an American physicist, researcher and educator, and the first African American woman to earn a Doctorate degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and to hold the position of President at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Shirley Jackson grew up in Washington D.C. and was one of a handful of African American students to graduate from her high school. She went on to MIT, and despite being valedictorian of her high school class, she was shunned at MIT by other freshman students. She recalls a time where she approached a group of freshmen women and asked to join them to help solve one their first problem sets. She asked, “May I join you?” and one of the students looked up and said, “go away.” Insisting, she replied, “I’ve done half the problems already and I know how to do the others.” Another young woman looked up and said, “Didn’t you hear her? She said go away.”
Other students in her class would avoid sitting next to her in lectures and she would often eat her meals alone in the dining room. Despite the bigotry, she was a relatively quiet student until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. After that, she saw an opportunity at MIT to, “open the aperture” as she put. She gathered other African American students and started the first black student union. During her first semester of graduate school, she would travel around and do something that MIT had never done before, recruit African American students. The following year 57 African American freshmen entered MIT, up from 2 the previous year.
In her career, she has been one of the leading minds in theoretical physics and has held positions both in the public and private sectors. She worked for AT&T as part of their Theoretical Physics Research Department, was appointed by Bill Clinton as chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is currently the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
“We need to go back to the discovery, to posing a question, to having a hypothesis and having kids know that they can discover the answers and can peel away a layer.” – Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson