Harvard would not let him take a doctorate. He took one in Vienna — and then built medicine out of soybeans.
He arrived at DePauw University in 1916 as a "sub-freshman" — admitted on condition that he make up, at night, the high-school education Montgomery had never offered a Black child. Barred from the dormitories, he waited tables and fired the furnace at a fraternity house and slept in its attic. Four years later he graduated first in his class. It was the shape the rest of his life would take: a door closed, a way found around it, and then work so good the door had to be explained rather than defended.
Percy Lavon Julian became one of the great synthetic chemists of the twentieth century — the man who beat Oxford to a glaucoma drug, who pulled human hormones out of soybean oil, and who made the arthritis medicine cortisone something a hospital could actually afford. He held some 130 patents. He was also the first Black family on his street in Oak Park, Illinois, which is why, on Thanksgiving Day 1950, someone set his house on fire.
Montgomery to the Academy
The lifeline
1899
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, grandson of people who had been enslaved
1920
Graduates DePauw as valedictorian and Phi Beta Kappa, out of the fraternity attic
1931
Takes his doctorate at the University of Vienna, under Ernst Späth
1935
Synthesises physostigmine at DePauw — and corrects Oxford's Robert Robinson
1954
Founds Julian Laboratories; sells it in 1961 for some $2.3 million
1975
Dies at 76, two years after election to the National Academy of Sciences
By the numbers
The measure of him
130
Chemical patents in his name, across drugs, foams, paints and paper
1935
The year a small Indiana lab beat Oxford to physostigmine
$2.3M
Paid for Julian Laboratories in 1961 — a fortune built on the soybean
1973
Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, at 74 — its first Black chemist
What he made
The work
1935
Physostigmine. With Josef Pikl he completed the first total synthesis of the Calabar bean alkaloid used to treat glaucoma — and showed that a structure published by Britain's Robert Robinson was wrong.
1940
Aero-Foam. A fire-fighting foam made from soy protein — the Navy called it "bean soup" — that smothered petrol and oil fires aboard ships through the Second World War.
1940
Hormones from beans. Isolating stigmasterol from soybean oil in bulk, he made progesterone and testosterone cheap — where before they had been extracted, gram by costly gram, from animal glands.
1949
A road to cortisone. His synthesis of Reichstein's Substance S from soy sterols opened an industrial route to the new arthritis drug, and drove its price down toward the reach of ordinary patients.
1954
Julian Laboratories. His own firm, with a plant outside Mexico City working wild yams of the genus Dioscorea — steroid chemistry built on a root, and owned by a Black chemist.
The doors, and the plaques
Recognition
In his lifetime
Harvard gave him a master's in 1923 but withheld the teaching post that led to a doctorate — fearing white students would not accept him
DePauw declined to make him a professor after the synthesis that made its chemistry department famous
A paper-chemistry institute in Appleton, Wisconsin, withdrew its offer: the town did not permit Black people to stay the night
His Oak Park house was firebombed on Thanksgiving Day 1950 and dynamited in June 1951
Today
The American Chemical Society made his physostigmine synthesis a National Historic Chemical Landmark in 1999
Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, 1990
Honoured on a United States postage stamp in the Black Heritage series, 1993
Oak Park's public middle school carries his name — on the street where the fire was set
Where it began
Montgomery, Alabama
He was born there in 1899, the eldest of six, to a railway mail clerk and a schoolteacher. By the family's account, his grandfather's hand was maimed as punishment for learning to write. Two years after Percy's birth, Alabama adopted a constitution that stripped nearly every Black man in the state of the vote. There was no public high school open to him; he took what secondary schooling the city allowed at the State Normal School for Negroes, and left for Indiana at seventeen.
8th
The grade at which public schooling for Montgomery's Black children stopped
6
Julian children — every one of whom went on to an advanced degree
1920
Valedictorian at DePauw, four years after arriving as a "sub-freshman"
"I have had one goal in my life, that of playing some role in making life a little easier for the persons who come after me."
— Percy Lavon Julian
