Willie Hobbs Moore (left) with her daughter, Dorian, in the 1980s. (Courtesy of the Ronald E. Mickens Collection on African-American Physicists, AIP Niels Bohr Library and Archives.)
Topics: African Americans, Civil Rights, Diversity in Science, Education, History, Theoretical Physics, Women in Science
The first African American woman to earn a PhD in physics remains little known. But her legacy is enormous.
There was a time when I believed that Shirley Ann Jackson, who received her PhD in physics from MIT in 1973, was the first African American woman to attain that degree. I realized that view was incorrect around 1984 when I learned that Willie Hobbs Moore (1934–94) finished her PhD in physics at the University of Michigan in 1972. At that time, for more than a decade I had been collecting data on African Americans with advanced degrees in physics—and had even published a list of Black physicists. Needless to say, learning about Moore came as a welcome surprise for me.
The fact that Moore received her degree from Michigan was of additional interest to me because of the long-standing connection between its physics department and that of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. While I was at Fisk, first as an undergraduate student in 1960–64 and later as a professor, the physics department had several faculty members who obtained their doctorates from Michigan, including Nelson Fuson in 1938, James Lawson in 1939, and Herbert Jones in 1959. Moreover, Elmer Imes, who received his BA and MA from Fisk in 1903 and 1915, respectively, became the second African American to earn his PhD in physics, from Michigan in 1918 (see my article in Physics Today, October 2018, page 28).
For some unexplained reason, Moore and I never ended up at a conference or workshop together. We never met! By the time I gained a better understanding of who she was, her research, her career in industrial research and management, her role as a mentor, and her community involvement, she had died of cancer. One of my greatest personal and professional regrets is that I didn’t have the opportunity to meet her in person. I am certain that the two of us would have had much to discuss.
The trailblazing career of Willie Hobbs Moore, Ronald E. Mickens, Physics Today
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