August 14, 1883 – Birth of Pioneering African American Biologist Ernest Everett Just

Ernest Everett Just was born on August 14, 1883, this day in history, in Charleston, South Carolina. He overcame a background fraught with hardship and heartbreak to become a pioneering African-American biologist, academic, and writer.

Ernest Everett Just at Dartmouth (class of 1907)

His primary contribution was the recognition of the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms. His scientific techniques were also new: collecting his own specimens and working with marine biology, he studied cells as wholes under the microscope in their natural environments, rather than in parts in a laboratory.

Just faced a number of obstacles: after a bout with typhoid fever, he lost the ability to read and write, which he had to relearn; he became the sole supporter of his siblings after the death of their mother; and most of all, he faced discrimination as a Black man. In fact, the latter situation became so intolerable to him as an adult that he moved to France to do research. No American university would hire him. As the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine reported, “In 1929, the administration of Brown University found Professor E. E. Just ‘quite ideal except for his race.'” In Paris, however, was asked to present seminars at the prestigious Sorbonne University. Just returned periodically to the US, each time observing, as he saw the Statue of Liberty, “This is where my liberty ends.”

Just eventually wrote two science books and more than seventy journal articles, some in German. He had to flee Europe when the Germans invaded France in 1938 and he was briefly held in a Nazi detainment camp. A year after his return to the States, he died of pancreatic cancer in 1941 at age 58.

Notably, in 1915 Ernest was awarded the first Spingarn Medal, now awarded annually by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for outstanding achievement by an African American.

Ernest Everett Just