Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3033-9801
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
6-2025
Abstract
The chapter illustrates what it meant for Carolyn Beatrice Parker (1917–1966) to be a Black woman physicist in the US during the Jim Crow era. Her father, a physician, and her mother, a teacher, shepherded her into Fisk University, an historically Black college. As a physics major she studied infrared spectroscopy with the Black physicist Elmer Imes, graduating with a BS in 1938. She later attended the University of Michigan, obtaining an MA in physics in 1941. But like many Black women, she spent time before and after graduate school teaching in the K–12 system. In 1943, she became a research physicist at the Aircraft Radio Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, where she stayed for four years. Although she co-authored a governmental report about her work on signal attenuation in coaxial cables, her name only appeared in the acknowledgments of the ensuing academic publications, thus partly obscuring her contributions. In 1947, Fisk University welcomed Parker on the faculty, but she soon after enrolled in a nuclear physics PhD program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After dropping out, she worked as a laboratory technician until she grew too ill and died a short time later.
Recommended Citation
Long, C. C. (2025). Carolyn Parker's Electronic Frequencies. (Chapter. 13, pg. 361-383) In P. Charbonneau et. al. (Eds.) Women in the History of Quantum Physics: Beyond Knabenphysik. University of Cambridge Press.
Subject
History
Publication Title
Carolyn Parker's Electronic Frequencies
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Included in
Black History Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Women's History Commons