Saint Elmo Brady (December 22, 1884 – December 25, 1966) was the first African-American person to receive a PhD in Chemistry in the United States. In an earlier post, we wrote about the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in Chemistry which you can read here. In 1916, St. Elmo Brady obtained a doctorate in Chemistry at the University of Illinois. He obtained a PhD after only two years after receiving a Masters Degree in Chemistry. Brady conducted research at Noyes Laboratory in Urbana, Illinois. At the time Brady conducted research for his doctorate, Noyes laboratory was considered the largest chemistry department in the United States.
Saint Elmo Brady was born in Louisville, KY. He was raised in a two-parent household and was the oldest of three children. He was raised during the Jim Crow era and attended segregated schools in Louisville. St. Elmo graduated from the Louisville Colored High School and attended and graduated from Fisk University. Fisk University was created to educate free and former slaves. Brady then taught at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which is now Tuskegee University, a HBCU. While teaching, he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Illinois where he completed his Masters Degree in 1914.
During the two years it took to complete his doctorate there, he published three scholarly abstracts with Professor Clarence G. Derick. Additionally, he also collaborated with Professor George Beal on a paper titled “The Hydrochloride Method for the Determination of Alkaloids,” published in the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. In his PhD research, St. Elmo Brady investigated the acidity of straight- chain carboxylic acids in which a pair of hydrogen atoms was replaced with an oxygen atom to give a keto acid. His research included new methods for preparing and purifying certain compounds and clarifying the influence of carbonyl groups on the acidity of carboxylic acids, an early contribution to the nascent field of physical organic chemistry.
While attending the University of Illinois, he was the first African-American admitted to Phi Lambda Upsilon, the chemistry honor society. Also, he was one of the first African-Americans to be inducted into Sigma Xi, the science honor society. After receiving his doctorate in 1916, The Crisis, the monthly magazine founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois and continued by the NAACP, selected Dr. Brady for its biographical sketch as “Man of the Month.” After earning his PhD, he went back to Tuskegee to teach. At Tuskegee, he served as head of the Division of Science and developed the undergraduate program in chemistry. In 1917, he published a 66-page monograph on Household Chemistry for Girls.
In 1920, Dr. Brady accepted an offer to chair the chemistry department at Howard University, an HBCU founded in 1867. He worked at Howard University for seven years before returning back to Fisk University to chair their chemistry department. While at Fisk University, he taught general and organic chemistry and developed an undergraduate curriculum. Furthermore, to honor his mentor at Fisk who encouraged him to study chemistry, he began the Talley Lectures, which drew famous chemists to Fisk University. Later, Dr. Brady obtained funds for one of the first infrared spectrophotometers and collaborated with the University of Illinois to establish a summer program in infrared spectroscopy. As a result, the famed Infrared Spectroscopy Institute was founded.
Dr. Saint Elmo Brady coordinated construction of the first modern chemistry building at an HBCU. Opened in 1931, the Fisk facility is now named the Talley-Brady Hall chemistry building – named in honor of Thomas Talley and St. Elmo Brady. The Talley-Brady Hall is on the U.S. National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places. Today, the Talley-Brady Hall is in operation. The building serves science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students at Fisk University. After retiring from Fisk University, Dr. Brady spent 14 years collaborating with educators at Tougaloo College, another HBCU, to help build their chemistry department.
According to his students, Dr. Brady stated when he first entered the University of Illinois to begin his doctorate, there were twenty white students, and one “other”. Indeed, he was the one “other” as a black man. However, by the end of his doctorate, there were six white students and one other. St. Elmo Brady was the one other who became the first African-American to receive a doctorate in Chemistry in the United States.