On Thursday, April 15th, ODUS hosted “The Black Scientific Renaissance at Bell Labs,” a virtual panel discussion with Professor William A. Massey ’77 and Professor James E. West H14. The event was the latest in the FOCUS Speaker Series, a program designed to deepen and broaden Princeton University’s anti-racist programming.

Dr. Massey is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor in Princeton’s Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering. After graduating from Princeton with a degree in Mathematics, he was admitted to Bell Labs’ prestigious Cooperative Research Fellowship Program, where he met and worked alongside Dr. West. West is now a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He worked at Bell Laboratories for forty years – where he invented the foil electret microphone, which is used in nearly all modern recording electronics – before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty.

After being introduced by Bryant Blount ’08, the Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Students and Manager of Strategic Communications, Dr. Massey guided the conversation with a presentation that traced Bell Labs’ history during the “Black Scientific Renaissance.” From approximately the 1970s to the 1990s, Bell Labs (now Nokia Bell Labs) was the site of extraordinary achievement by Black scientists and engineers, due largely to the efforts of Dr. West himself. In the early ‘70s, he and the “handful” of Black professionals at Bell – West estimated that there were seven Black members of Bell’s technical staff, and even that was large for the time – formed the Association of Black Laboratory Employees (ABLE) to promote diversity in the STEM world. West recounted meeting with Bell’s board on behalf of ABLE, and urging them to hire more scientists of color. The board, he said, “turned the tables.” They said, “You find them, and we’ll consider.” So, according to West, ABLE looked for qualified candidates only to discover that there just weren’t enough. ABLE’s representatives returned to the board, and suggested something new: making quality candidates instead of finding them.

Bell’s board agreed to fund what became the Corporate Research Fellowship Program (CRFP). The program recruited promising young scientists of color early in their careers, funded their PhD research, and, critically, paired them with a mentor already on Bell’s staff. West attributed the program’s small attrition rate and resounding success to the effects of the mentorship specifically. Likewise, Massey said the program “dramatically increased the number of Black physicists and Black electrical engineers.” He listed just a few of the alumni of the CRFP through the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, many of whom graduated from Princeton before going to Bell Labs and careers in industry and academia, just to give the audience a sense of how successful the program had been. James Hunt ’73/CRFP ’73, who passed away this year, was famous for co-inventing the Hunt-Szymanski algorithm which is widely employed in computer science and mathematics. Ayana Holloway Arce ’99/CRFP ’99 is a professor of physics at Duke University, before which she won a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Robert Hampshire *07/CRFP ’01 was Professor Massey’s last mentee at Bell Labs and became his first PhD student at Princeton when, in 2001, Massey accepted a professorship in the ORFE department and Hampshire began his graduate study there. Hampshire is currently the Acting Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology at the United States Department of Transportation.

Of course, one of the most prominent recipients of the CRFP was Professor Massey himself. When he arrived at Bell Labs, he was mentored by James McKenna *61. Massey described the experience in detail, and was especially grateful for the interdisciplinary, cooperative nature of the work at Bell. “Now that I am an academic,” he said “I realize how lucky I was to spend my first 20 years in industry because somehow there isn’t that collective mission [in academia] that gets people collectively doing things like this and making this impact.” Over his long and successful career, Massey became a mentor in his own right, guiding a number of CRFP recipients including Hampshire and Arlie Petters *91 who is now the Benjamin Powell Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Duke University. The mentorship program at Bell Labs created a self-sustaining group of Black professionals in an overwhelmingly white field. “The recurring theme is community building, thinking plural. Ideas get transmitted through communities,” said Massey. Scientists and engineers who were already well-established and respected were able to pass their experience and advice to new generations of students and ensure that representation would only continue to grow.

Sustaining the program was not easy. As Bell’s parent companies – AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Alcatel and finally Nokia – went through leaner times, funding for the CRFP was threatened. The resources required for mentorship were significant, since nearly every employee of color was mentoring at least one student. But West worked tirelessly to ensure that the program survived because he firsthand how profound its impact was and how great an opportunity it offered to subsequent generations of people of color in STEM. He offered CRFP as a model for achieving both excellence and equity in the field. “When I look back on what was accomplished, essentially by a handful of Black technical people, it behooves me to give a shout out to all of you, no matter where you work. It is a good idea,” he went on, “to organize around your brown people. And I say that because in many cases companies are looking for ways to improve diversity but they don’t know how. But we do know how.”

Massey and West closed with a few words of advice to the audience. Both he and West emphasized the importance of publishing work early, and of finding employers who allow their employees’ work to be published under their own names. They also urged students to broaden their horizons and work across departments and disciplines. ”Silo thinking is deadly,” said Massey. “Real life is interdisciplinary. You’ve got to be interested and be good at what you do and also learn how to talk to people in other fields.” Professor Massey mentioned the movie “Hidden Figures”, which is about the Black female mathematicians who worked at NASA during the Space Race, and its prescriptions for racial and gender equality in STEM. “If you’re white,” he said, “you’ve got to learn how to work with people of other backgrounds, but there’s another equally important message in the movie, which is that if you’re Black you have to learn how to program in Fortran.”

The lack of diversity in the STEM fields is a serious problem, and Massey and West did not shy away from the challenges still ahead. Not only does discrimination damage the careers and the well-being of people of color in the field, but chronic underutilization of talent slows scientific progress itself. Still, both Massey and West were hopeful for the future in part because of all they had accomplished in the past. Their own remarkable careers, and the careers of the dozens of other professionals they mentored and supported, were proof that things could change for the better. Dr. West ended the conversation with a reminder of how much had been accomplished by the Black scientific community in such a short time, and how each generation had built on the accomplishments of its predecessor: “Bill mentioned Hidden Figures. My mom was one of them.”

The FOCUS Speaker Series is a program designed to offer students and the wider university community the chance to participate in meaningful discussions with some of the foremost anti-racist writers, activists, and thinkers in the world. New FOCUS events can be found on the FOCUS website or on our social media, so please continue to check back!