Whoever thought that the words “do better” would become a tell for a proto-Stalinoid mindset?
Last month,
Nature’s photo editor discovered that there are few images available of the people involved, many of whom are Black.
Recently, we also needed an image of the physicist Elmer Imes, who, in 1918, became only the second African American to be awarded a PhD in physics in the United States. His doctoral work provided early evidence of the quantum behaviour of molecules. But university archives that
Nature contacted did not have a copy of his photograph. Commercial photography agencies also had nothing. Low-resolution, grainy images do exist, but, shockingly, even the US Library of Congress in Washington DC which holds images of many important scientists from the nation’s history does not have a photograph. However, such images are available for a number of notable white scientists from Imes’s time.