a quarter-century-long string of intense selection panel jousts over who’s really the “Best of the Best”–brings out important insights about the impact of the Black Engineer of the Year Awards.
T Consider the years before anything like a Black Engineer of the Year Award
ever existed. A young John Slaughter entered high school in Topeka, Kansas, dur- ing the late 1940s, aspiring to be an engineer despite the polite disbelief he met in the counselors’ office. Those counselors had never heard of a black man working at the high levels of technology development populated by engineering profession- als, so they kept trying to get him to take classes to prepare for a trade. Never mind college.
Individual Drive
That John Slaughter persisted is a testament to his own internal fortitude: In 1952 when he graduated and enrolled at Kansas State University, role models for African Americans in scientific pursuits were rare. George Washington Carver had recently died and although the great Percy Julian was at the top of his game, rewriting the books on endocrine chemistry, stories about him were not widely disseminated.
That same year, a young Waymon Whiting graduated from historically black
Prairie View A&M University, beginning his professional climb in a world totally unprepared to expect the burst of inventive energy he would unleash at Boeing, the aerospace pioneer whose bombers had put an end to World War II. Not only were there no role models for young blacks like Whiting and John Slaughter, there was in all of American society no organized nationwide effort to support the rise of young African Americans into the professional technology careers to which many aspired. The G.I. Bill prompted an expansion of HBCU technical programs to add to the corps of engineers streaming out of Howard University after World War II, but the image of anyone other than whites becoming world-beating technology pioneers remained indigestible to many Americans. That began to change decades later, when Dr. John Slaughter led a National Academy of Engineering study group looking for answers as to why so few African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans were making their way into the engineering profession despite the vast increases in college entrance by minority youth prompted by the post-war expansion of higher education and the opening of massive Equal Opportunity programs driven by the decades-long civil rights cam- paign. NACME, the National Action Council on Minorities in Engineering, was founded on the results of that study, providing scholarship funds that supported thousands of career-aspirants from the nation’s underserved minority communities as they pursued the college curricula Dr. Slaughter’s high-school counselors once thought too rigorous for people like him.
Feeling All Alone Still, something was missing. As Tuskegee University Engineering Dean
Legand L. Burge, Jr., a mid-level Air Force officer when the Black Engineer of the Year Awards began, said in an interview, “When I came out of Oklahoma State University, there were no role models. Young beginners like me had no one we could look up to and say, ‘Oh, this is what we could be; this is how we could contribute.’” Dr. Eugene DeLoatch, a graduate of historically black Tougaloo College who had taught engineering at several institutions before founding Morgan State University’s Clarence Mitchell School of Engineering, had an idea. And at a 1985 luncheon meeting with then-Howard University Engineering Dean Dr. Lucius Walker and Tyrone Taborn, CEO of Career Communications Group, publisher of this magazine, the three men fleshed it out: Develop a set of high-profile, peer-re-
www.blackengineer.com USBE&IT I WINTER 2011 75
he perspective of years brings out insights on developments that would not be so obvious in the events of everyday living and working. Look- ing back over a quarter-century-long string of high-profile conferences, workshops, symposia and HBCU Deans Roundtables–and, significantly,
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