A Hidden Figure In Pennsylvania

He has only 3 more years at Lincoln University. During retirement, he says he will be following UFO leads and travelling the world. Today, he is standing before a projected copy of his resume on the wall and tells his story to an audience of eight 8th grade students. This is only part of the story, though.The rest of the story explains the 2.2% bar on the graph titled "Physics Degrees by Race" and his life in the color black as an academic in the United States. 

He was the first African American to earn a doctorate in physics from the State University of New York at Brookhaven. He became one of the 2.2% on the bar--the number of African Americans out of 100 with a Ph.D in physics in the United States. He shares with the group of African American middle school students gathered in front of him in desks in a Lincoln University lecture room his journey from there to here. In his tale, there is a sense of triumph that he made it through. 

He remembers struggling with Calculus.  One day he was approached by a white male student who offered to help him with Calculus in exchange for help in physics.  He agreed. The exchange was an eye-opening one for him.  It made clear the white privilege keeping afloat white men wading through the academic marshes on a quest for power and status in America.  Why was it, he wondered, that he had such great difficulty passing the tests in Calculus, and the white classmate who agreed to tutor him could pass each one with such ease?  On top of that was the issue that the test was designed in such a way that it was difficult for anyone without knowledge of mathematical dialogues on ideas of how to solve some of the perplexing contemporary problems in the field of math to pass it.  On every test, Yet, his white classmate was passing them. One day, he got his answer.  On his way down a hallway in a college building, he happened across a room that contained members of his Calculus class.  He learned as he stood and watched that they were preparing for the next Calculus text by looking at a practice problems he never received.  In the group was his Calculus tutor, who caught his eye as Roberts stood at the door looking in--his expression revealing a sense of shame, Dr. Roberts remembers.  His relationship with his white classmate ended that night.  No further tutoring sessions were ever to happen again after that night between the two of them.

He continued his story of his journey in black in the world of academia.  The indignities peppered the narrative, shaping the character of Roberts--an aspiring physicist moving in spaces where ones of his color had not appeared before him--out of triumphs in spite of adversities into a hero.  

Professor-of-the-year award twice in a row, even after the volume of a journal in which an important paper he had written was published disappeared from an institute's library and the libraririan made it clear that it was no accident. professor refused to give him credit on a paper he co-wrote , and a group of professors tried to block his tenure.  "When I got my Phd, ...there were a lot of people that got very upset because there are the stereotypes about us in this field and there are many, many people that just felt that I shouldn't be able to do these things."

"When I started publishing papers, I did it at Brookhaven National Laboratories and they got very, very upset.  Very upset.   A shockwave went around there and I proved something that they said if you proved it you would become a very famous person.  The physics community is fickle because when I proved it and it was published, then they simply ignored it and turned their attention elsewhere."

"I went into latticegate's theory where what I did is that I formulated the Robert's formulation of Latticegate's Theory.  What I did was I did this problem that nobody else could do," which was published in Nuclear Physics B.  And then I added to that.  The person I collaborated with was my overseer at Brookhaven and he claimed that he did the work and that I didn't know how to do anything.  And so then I went and formulated" corrections to a theory which was published in Nuclear Physics B.   As you can see, that's a single-author paper. That is where I formulated the Robert's Formulation of Latticegate's theory.  And so when he came back from Santa Barbara, because he had written a bunch of negative evaluations of me--.  And I guess the man expected me to roll over and die.  But when he came back at the end of the summer from Santa Barbara--Insitute forTheoretical Physics--then I presented him with the published results of this right here which extended the results and formulated them in a new way--a completely new way."

And so I did this.  Then I moved into the accelerated deparment, which I didn't want to do, and there's a project over there called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Project and I was over there--.  I wasn't even interested in that field.  I did some work on over there.  And one of the papers that I wrote there...  And then I looked at what they were doing and at that time, oh it was about time for them to throw me out because they didn't want me there.  I said, 'Well in years to come, what's going to happen is that when this relativistic heavy ion collider comes on line, then Im going to make a few predictions as to what it is that people will see.  And so one of them--one of my predictions was" published in a journal.  "And then I wrote a paper

"And as you'll notice with these guys, most of the papers that I've published are single-author papers.And that was because I just found I couldn't trust too many people.people started saying these things and I said 'Aw listen. I don't need you. I carry my brand of physics with me wherever I go.  

One other thing that I did and one of the things that is the most [controversy is that I did this thing on the millennial problem.And this was something that was claimed that nobody could prove and so what happened was that I was working on this and ..I published "an article.... it was submitted for publication and it was to this journal called "Frontier of Science and Theory and it was published there.  I've had a hard time with that since then because a lot of folks don't want to acknowledge  it.  But it went through the referees and everything and they accepted it for publication, ok?  and so the thing is right.  and as far as Im concerned, they can go and jump in a lake because I am done with that subject

 I fell on the ground"How dare I do this," Robert says to the students