Carolyn B. Parker (M.A. 1941) was settling into a new job teaching mathematics and physics to African American students at West Virginia’s Bluefield State College when the federal government quietly approached her in 1943.
The United States was deep into World War II, and the Army Corps of Engineers was recruiting scientists to develop a powerful secret weapon: an atomic bomb.
Parker’s work with the Manhattan Project would contribute to ending the war and unleashing a frightening new weapon. It would also lead to an early death for Parker.
With a physics degree from Fisk University and a master’s in mathematics from U-M, Parker was skilled in using infrared spectroscopy, electronic testing equipment, and advanced math skills. The government recruited her to work on the Dayton Project, an Ohio-based research and development site that was part of the larger Manhattan Project. Dayton scientists processed polonium, a radioactive material that would help to trigger the atomic bomb.
It was an extraordinary role for an African American woman in the 1940s.
The oldest of seven children, including one who died as a child, Parker came from a Florida family that prized higher education. She and her adult siblings all earned advanced degrees, including a brother, Julius, who received a master’s in chemistry from U-M.
Parker graduated magna cum laude with a physics degree from Fisk University in 1938. Her Fisk advisor, Professor Elmer S. Imes, suggested she continue her studies at U-M, where 20 years earlier he had become the first Black man at Michigan to earn a physics degree.
The research work of Parker and other scientists with the Manhattan Project led to the U.S. dropping the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, forcing Japan to surrender and ending the global conflict.
Parker remained in Dayton until 1947; her workplace was torn down because it was so contaminated with radiation.
After returning to Fisk for four years as an assistant professor of physics, Parker enrolled as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student. In 1953, she became the first Black woman in the country to earn a master’s degree in physics. She began doctoral work in physics at MIT but did not complete her degree; instead, she worked for 10 years at the U.S. Air Force Cambridge Research Center.
It was during her time in Massachusetts that Parker was diagnosed with leukemia, which her family attributed to polonium exposure. She returned home to Florida, where she died at age 48 in 1966.
In 2021, physicist Ronald E. Mickens and historian Charmayne E. Patterson of Clark Atlanta University penned a detailed essay about Parker for the American Physical Society.
“[Parker’s] story is important because she had a productive life in science during a time when few African American women or men could realistically hope to achieve this goal,” they wrote. “Carolyn was not a ‘hidden figure.’ She was an ‘unknown to the general public figure’ and the difference in meaning between these two concepts is huge.”
