Ruben Santiago-Hudson in his role as Percy Julian
This 2007 film, which is being rebroadcasted throughout February in honour of Black history month, documents the extraordinary life of Percy Julian, the grandson of a slave who became one of the first African Americans to receive a doctorate in chemistry. Julian’s story is a complex one of incredible scientific accomplishments in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles.
Julian, born in 1899 in Alabama, had no choice but to pursue his chemistry doctorate at the University of Vienna in Austria when Harvard denied him the teaching assistantship needed to earn his PhD after getting a master’s degree there in the 1920s. In Europe, which was at the time much more open-minded about race than the US, Julian he was free to truly be himself and explore his full potential as a scientist.