Roger Arliner Young

American biologist

• Born: August 20, 1899; Clifton Forge, Virginia
• Died: November 9, 1964; New Orleans, Louisiana

An African American woman, Roger Arliner Young rose from poverty to become a respected biologist and zoologist. The first black female in the United States to earn a doctoral degree in zoology, she began her career as a researcher, but spent most of her adult life teaching at historically black colleges and universities.

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Zoology; marine biology; embryology

Early Life

Roger Arliner Young was born on August 20, 1899. An only child, she was the daughter of a poor African American couple living in Clifton Forge, Virginia, a small town in the Allegheny Mountains near the border of West Virginia. Her family relocated to Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, a village west of Pittsburgh, when she was a young girl. Young faced significant challenges as a female minority in a white community during an era of endemic racial discrimination and gender prejudice. Because little schooling was provided for black children, Young was largely self-educated. In addition, she was required from an early age to work part-time jobs in order to support her family. Her mother was a woman of fragile physical constitution, and was often sick. Perhaps because of the difficulties of her early years, Young suffered from bouts of depression throughout her life.

After passing her college entrance examination, Young was accepted at Howard University in Washington, DC, in 1916. A part-time student who had to work to support herself, Young began with a concentration in music. She was active in the glee club, in the Young Women’s Christian Association, and in the Howard University Players, a student drama group.

By 1921, her fifth year as a part-time student at Howard, Young had accumulated enough credits to be classified as a junior. Still undecided about what career to pursue, she registered for a general science class.

Life’s Work

Young’s science course at Howard brought her into contact with a person who would exert tremendous influence on her life, Ernest Everett Just (1883–1941), the head of Howard’s Zoology Department. In 1915, Just was named the first recipient of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Spingarn Medal for outstanding achievement, and was the first African American in the United States to earn a PhD in zoology (1916). He was well known in the scientific community for his groundbreaking research in embryology.

Though Young’s performance was lackluster—she earned a C in science—she nonetheless caught Just’s attention. She was one of only three women students who enrolled in Just’s courses during the 1920s. (The others were Marguerite Thomas Williams, the first African American to earn a doctorate in geology, and Lillian Burwell Lewis, the first black woman to earn a natural science doctorate at the University of Chicago.) Just encouraged Young to pursue a career in science, as most of his male students were focused on careers in medicine, as opposed to research. Young blossomed under Just’s mentorship, talking courses in vertebrate and invertebrate biology.

In 1923, Young earned a bachelor of science degree from Howard. She was hired as assistant professor of zoology, and Just helped her acquire funding to attend graduate school. In the summer of 1924, Young became a part-time student at the University of Chicago, where Just had earned his doctorate. At the same time, she conducted research connected with Just’s studies, and later that year published a brief article in Science magazine on her findings.

Young, balancing her graduate studies with her teaching assignments at Howard, was awarded her master’s degree in 1926. The following summer, Just invited her to the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, as his research assistant. The first black woman admitted to the lab, Young would spend ten seasons at Woods Hole conducting research.

From 1929 onward, however, Young worked in Massachusetts without Just. After procuring funding from fellowships and grants, he began spending much of his time traveling, lecturing, and researching in Europe. During his prolonged absences, Young added Just’s teaching load to her own. She also took over his duties as head of the zoology department, which rankled the all-male teaching staff.

In 1930, an overburdened and underprepared Young took qualifying exams for the doctoral program at the University of Chicago. She failed the tests. Undeterred, she returned to teach at Howard, and continued her yearly research at Woods Hole. During the 1930s, she authored or coauthored several papers on different aspects of marine biology.

By mid-decade, Young’s tenure at Howard University was drawing to a close. Her original sponsor, Just, was no longer enamored with his protégé, and chose a man, Hyman Y. Chase, as his successor as head of the Zoology Department in 1936. Young was dismissed. Soon afterward, one of her colleagues at Woods Hole, biologist Lewis V. Heilbrunn, suggested she enter the doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, and helped her secure a grant to fund her studies. Young took him up on the offer, and in 1940 earned her PhD, becoming the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in zoology.

Despite earning her doctorate, Young struggled to advance her career. She could only find work to support herself and her mother at a succession of historically black colleges and universities. In the early 1940s, she was an assistant professor at North Carolina College for Negroes (later North Carolina Central University). A few years later, she headed the Biology Department at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. She afterward taught briefly at Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas, before moving on to Jackson College for Negro Teachers (later Jackson State University) in Mississippi.

Young was at Jackson in 1953 when her sickly mother died, an event that plunged her into a deep depression. Her psychological health deteriorated to the point that she voluntarily checked into the Mississippi Mental Asylum (later Mississippi State Hospital). For most of the next decade, she was a resident at the then-segregated 350-acre facility.

Discharged in 1962, Young relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana, where she was a visiting lecturer in biology at Southern University. She died two years later, never having married.

Impact

As a poor African American woman born in the racially segregated American south, Young faced numerous obstacles throughout her life. However, she used her talent and determination to flourish for a time in a hostile, prejudiced academic environment.

Her association with Just was both a blessing and a curse to her career. His early sponsorship allowed her to become a pioneer of her race and gender in education and research, and brought her into contact with others beneficial to her growth. Her academic work in the master’s degree program at the University of Chicago led to her acceptance into Sigma Xi, a national science society honor normally reserved for doctoral students.

However, Just’s role in Young’s life was not an unmixed blessing. To keep grant money flowing, he convinced her to reject a 1931 job offer from Spelman College and stay at Howard. Embittered over the disparity between European and American racial attitudes, he spent considerable time in the laboratories of Germany, Italy, and France, leaving Young to fill in for him as department head during her last five years at Howard. Just did not attempt to quiet stories that he and Young had been romantically involved, and he fueled rumors of infidelity by divorcing his wife; in 1939 he married a German woman. Just demonstrated little appreciation of Young’s taking on his many responsibilities at Howard. In the end, he diminished her reputation by firing her for seemingly petty reasons, denying her the departmental head position for which she seemed well prepared.

While Young’s research of the 1920s and 1930s largely represents an extension of the innovative work of Just, her legacy to science probably lies in education. A science instructor for over four decades, she led by example, and inspired countless young black students to follow her into the field by introducing them to zoology.

Bibliography

Carey, Charles W., Jr. African Americans in Science: An Encyclopedia of People and Progress. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2008. Print. An illustrated two-volume reference that explores the full range of personal experiences of African Americans attempting to make their marks within scientific communities.

Manning, Kenneth R. Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Print. A Pulitzer Prize–nominated biography of the brilliant but controversial zoologist who initially inspired Roger Arliner Young to pursue a career as a biology researcher.

Warren, Wini. Black Women Scientists in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. Print. Presents a collection of brief, annotated biographies of African American women—many of them, like Young, virtually unknown to the general population—who made significant contributions across a wide range of scientific disciplines.

Williams, Zachery R. In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2009. Print. Discusses the intellectually stimulating and culture-changing environment that prevailed at Howard in the years when Young and her mentor Just were active, leading up to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.