Percy Julian Biography

WHENEVER PERCY JULIAN TOLD his friends ab appear his life, and how he had overcome all the obstacles from his number 1 as the grandson of a slave, born at the corner of Jeff Davis Avenue and South Oak Street in Montgomery, Alabama, the Capital in the cradle of the confederacy,1 to scientist, inventor, business leader, humanist, protagonist of human rights, he liked to illustrate this long arduous climb by Donald Adams The Seventh FoldMy dear friends, who daily climb iridescent hills in the countries of their listens, hills that have to do with the future of our country and of our children, may I humbly submit to you, the only thing that has enabled me to keep doing the creative work, was the constant determination Take heart Go farther on 2 This imperative, go on , characterizes not only his life but his research, where each answer created at least two new questions and led to the exponential growth of science as Percy experienced it in his lifetime. With this growth, he later r ealized the concomitant responsibility and questions of ethics.Percy Julian was born on April 11, 1899, the oldest of six children of pile Sumner Julian, a railway mail clerk, and his wife, Elizabeth Lena Adams. Since 1976 his birthday has been a holiday for the Village of Oak Park, a modernistic suburb of Chicago where the Julian family has resided since 1950, initially under precarious conditions (the Julian home, the first in the part to be owned by a black family, was the victim of arsonists on Thanksgiving Day, 1950, and the target of a dynamite bomb on June 12, 1951), and where other famous people, such as Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright, had their residences.Because Percys father was a federal employee, the family held a higher status than most blacks of that day. This advantage, and the fact that his well-read father had a enormous love for mathematics and philosophy, helped him on the way to a formal education. Clearly, his must have been a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought (Wordsworth), or a restless curiosity about things which he cannot understand (Pascal), but the cultural and, above all, religious tradition in his family provided not only a epository of substantive values, but also a coding device for new ideas and achievements. That the fear of the Lord is the starting signal of all practical wisdom was taught him, and not in Latin, by his revered paternal great-grandfather. My children and my friends all recognise him as Grandpa Cabe because theyve heard me speak about him so many times. My great-grandfather, with the rest of us that day, was interpret in the cotton field, where we children, particularly Dr.James Julian, my next brother, and I were sent to my grandfathers farm to work during the summer. We were singing on that day a beautiful spiritual, at that place is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. Grandpa Cabe, I asked, whats a balm in Gile ad? Well, Sonny, you see, Gilead was a famous town in Israel for the manufacture of salves to heal wounds and sores, he told me. And they called these salves balms.Now one day Jeremiah was having a unuttered time trying to lead his people the right way. Everything was going wrong for Jeremiah, and he cried out in anguish, Is at that place no balm in Gilead? You see, what he was saying was, Aint there no way out? I want you to know that, Sonny, because I believe there is always a way out. It was thus that I made my vowthat I would forever fight to keep hope alive because there is always a way out . . . . His optimism was one of the most pertinent lessons I learned as a youngster. Next t