BY: FARRELL EVANS

At least 12 Black chemists and physicists worked as primary researchers on the team that developed the technology behind the atomic bomb.

During the height of World War II between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government’s top-secret program to build an atomic bomb, code-named the Manhattan Project, cumulatively employed some 600,000 people, including scientists, technicians, janitors, engineers, chemists, maids, and day laborers.

While rarely acknowledged, African American men and women were among them—their ranks bolstered by greater wartime employment opportunities and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 of 1941 outlawing racial discrimination in the defense industries.

At the project’s rural production sites in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, Black workers were relegated to mostly menial jobs like janitors, cooks, and laborers, regardless of education or experience. But in the project’s urban research centers—the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory and at Columbia University in New York—several Black scientists were able to play key roles in the development of the two atomic bombs that were released on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, effectively ending the war.

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