Our
Celebrating Diversity Special Interest Group is commemorating the 2024 edition of
Black History Month. This year’s theme, ‘Reclaiming Narratives’, marks a significant shift towards recognising and correcting the narratives surrounding black history and culture.
Here the group chair, Altea Lorenzo-Arribas, with contributions from Liam Brierley and Penny Reynolds, profiles seven leading black statisticians who made a significant contribution to their field as well as in the fight against racial discrimination.
James McCune Smith (1813–1865)
James McCune Smith was a pioneer in the use of medical statistics to assess therapeutic claims of efficacy and to use data to argue against inequality and health care disparities. He was also the first African American to be elected member of the American Geographical and Statistical Association.
Born in 1813 to a poor South Carolina runaway slave who had escaped to New York City, McCune Smith soon shone as a bright student. After he was denied admission to to Columbia University and Geneva Medical College due to racial discrimination, he travelled to Scotland and enrolled in the University of Glasgow with financial support from his mentor, the African American reverend Peter Williams Jr. and abolitionist benefactors. He got his BA degree in 1835, followed by a MA degree in 1836, and a doctorate in Medicine in 1837, becoming the first African American to both receive a medical degree from a university and to graduate from a Scottish university.
He then joined a prestigious clinical residency program in Glasgow’s Lock Hospital under the eminent Scottish obstetrician and gynaecologist, William Cumin, treating women who had contracted sexually transmitted diseases. Following his residency, he became the first African American known to publish in a British medical journal. In his two 1837 articles in the
London Medical Gazette, he exposed how an ambitious medical professor, Alexander Hannay, had been conducting painful trials to treat gonorrhoea on vulnerable women in the hospital in the 1830s, using the experimental drug solid nitrate of silver. McCune Smith made his case against the experiments by extracting, assessing and analysing handwritten clinical records of patients being treated in the hospital over an entire year. His articles showed that the drug trials were ineffective and presented an unnecessary risk, despite the efforts of Dr Hannay to cover up the evidence.
When he returned to America, he became a leading physician as well as a tireless abolitionist and activist who supported other major social battles, notably the women’s suffrage movement alongside the famous American feminist and anti-slavery campaigner Susan B. Anthony. He continued to fight with the power of accurate evidence and the firm belief that ‘figures cannot be charged with fanaticism.’ When a pro-slavery senator claimed that freedom damaged the health of African Americans, based on the 1840 national census data and the apparent higher mortality rates of black people in northern asylums compared to those in the southern states, McCune Smith wrote a letter to
The New York Tribune showing mistakes in the northern states’ data. He also found that the health of African Americans did in fact thrive once they left the south and lived as free citizens in the north (as much as improving ‘the ratio of their mortality 13.28%’ in the case of some of the free black population of New York). In a later ‘Dissertation on the Influence of Climate on Longevity’, he would further justify his findings by comparing mortality rates with latitude coordinates and by stratifying the figures by age and place. With his sophisticated work, he disputed that racial differences in longevity were inherently biological and proved that socioeconomic factors were behind the trends.
Despite his significant work in the field of medicine, McCune Smith was never admitted to the American Medical Association because of racial discrimination. His statistical contributions were officially recognised, however, when he joined the American Geographical and Statistical Society in 1853.
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the first African American to obtain a doctorate from Harvard, was a pioneer in sociology and data visualisation. He conducted the first statistically based sociological study in the United States, mapping demographic and sociological data for African American populations on their corresponding neighbourhoods.
Du Bois graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1888 from Fisk University, a historically black college, but had to take a second bachelor’s degree in Harvard University (which did not accept degrees from Fisk) in order to obtain his doctorate in history. He wanted to study the reasons why the African diaspora in America was being held back and, when he was hired as a professor at the historically black Atlanta University in 1897, he established a sociology programme, now recognised as the first school of American sociology. 'It is not one problem', he wrote in 1898, ‘but rather a plexus of social problems, some new, some old, some simple, some complex; and these problems have their one bond of unity in the act that they group themselves above those Africans whom two centuries of slave-trading brought into the land.’
A former classmate, Thomas Junius Calloway, who had been appointed as the US Special Commissioner in charge of 'The Exhibit of American Negroes' at the United States pavilion of the 1900 Exposition Universelle (the Paris World Fair), approached Du Bois to contribute his expertise on the social aspects of African American life. Du Bois carefully curated 500 photographs depicting a nuanced snapshot of what life was like for African Americans, which aimed to combat racist stereotypes. However, he felt the images alone did not fully reflect the underlying ways that slavery continued to impede African American progress, and he complemented them with 60 carefully handmade data visualisations showing to the world in vibrant colours that inequalities and institutionalised racism were still prevalent. One of these groundbreaking visualisations was 'City and Rural Population, 1890' (pictured above) which represented the numbers of African Americans living in small and large cities compared to rural environments in Georgia.
Gertrude Elzora Durden (1880–1962)
Gertrude Elzora Durden became the first African American female lawyer in Iowa in 1918 and cofounded the National Bar Association in 1925. She was also a pioneer suffragist and one of the first US Census African American female enumerators.
In the United States, the fight for women’s right to vote reached one of its milestones with the 19th amendment ratification on 18 August 1920, which gave white women the right to vote. However, it wasn’t until 45 years later in 1965 that the Voting Rights Act secured the same for black women. Those women had to fight even harder for their right to vote and were discriminated against by the mainstream white suffrage movement.
The ‘National Association of Colored Women's Clubs’ (NACW), formed in 1896 to merge a number of black women’s social clubs together, also included suffrage within its platform. Among prominent members of the Association was Durden (pictured above) who would be president of the NACW from 1911–1915, and a lifelong member afterwards.
In early 1910, Durden passed the enumerator examination and became one of the 1,605 African American enumerators working nationwide. An example of her contribution that same year was work on the Census, conducting door-to-door visits to around 1,530 families—most of whom were white. For that two-week job, she earned approximately $42 (around 2.5 cents per name), at a time when average weekly pay was $6. In Iowa, the biggest problems with the decennial tabulation occurred in Des Moines where a small handful of people were reticent to answer any census questions, regardless of who posed them. Following the appointment of black census takers,
The Des Moines Bystander, a four-page weekly that served as the voice of Iowa’s African American community, congratulated the enumerators for their hard work and hailed them as respected citizens, which would finally encourage those who hadn’t responded until then. Durden would later move on to law, becoming the first black woman to pass the Iowa state bar in 1918. After she was refused membership in the American Bar Association in 1924 because of racial discrimination, she co-founded the ‘Negro Bar Association’ which would become the ‘National Bar Association’ in 1925.
Altea Lorenzo-Arribas, highlighted the contributions of Durden in a talk as part of the International Day of Women in Statistics and Data Science 2024. A recording of the presentation will be available soon on the
Caucus for Women in Statistics YouTube channel.
David Blackwell (1919–2010)
David Blackwell was an eminent mathematical statistician, best known for the eponymous Rao–Blackwell theorem, the mathematical footing for the theory of dynamic programming (for which he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1999). He also made major contributions to game theory, probability, information theory, mathematical statistics and statistical inference, and wrote the first fully Bayesian introductory textbook in 1969.
David Blackwell enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at age sixteen and received all three of his degrees (bachelor’s in 1938, master’s in 1939, and doctorate in 1941) by age twenty-two. Throughout his entire education and at least his early academic career, Blackwell faced disabling discrimination. He was denied a position when he originally applied to the University of California, Berkeley on account of his race. He then spent his first twelve years as an academic at historically black colleges and universities (mostly at Howard University). When the Statistics Department was established at the University of California, Berkeley in 1955, Blackwell was hired as a professor in what was becoming one of the top faculties in statistics worldwide and where he was the only ‘new Bayesian’ in a large department headed by Jerzy Neyman and dominated by frequentist statisticians.
Blackwell was the first African American to be elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) in 1962 and member of the National Academy of Sciences (1965). He was lauded for his wide-ranging genius and ‘rare combination of exceptional scholarship and superb teaching’, and as an ‘everlasting exemplar of courage, perseverance and brilliance’ in the face of tremendous systemic racial prejudice. He was elected Honorary Fellow of the RSS in 1976 and would become Vice president of the ASA in 1978. In 2012, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the National Medal of Science. You can watch the associated
NSTMF video.
Annie T. Randall (1925–2021)
Annie Mae Turner Taylor Randall was a mathematical statistician at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). She was an early user of one of the first mainframe computers for solving complex equations and provided extensive statistical contributions to NIMH research, including two classic books on human aging.
Randall was one of the pioneering African American ‘Government Girls’ to take a position first at the War Production Board, then the Navy and the Air Force. She accepted an appointment to work at the Office of Biometry of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) where Dr Donald F. Morrison trained her to become a mathematical statistician. She worked at NIMH for 16 years where she learned to calculate complex mathematical equations on one of the first mainframe computers and the Friden Calculator (featured in the film
Hidden Figures and pictured above).
Her great work did not go unnoticed, and she was commended by the University of Pennsylvania and National Academy of Sciences. She was also acknowledged for her ‘extremely competent and untiring efforts’ and expert statistical contributions to the research behind the books
Human Aging: A Biological and Behavioral Study (1963) and
Human Aging II: An Eleven-year Follow up Biomedical and Behavioral Study (1971). The study ran between 1955 and 1960 with a focus on the relation between cerebral physiological changes with advancing age and psychological capacities and psychiatric symptoms, and it is still of great relevance in the behavioural sciences today.
In 2020, the American Statistical Association launched the
Annie T. Randall Innovator Award to recognise the contributions of early career statistical innovators across all job sectors, and of any level of educational attainment.
You can watch ‘
the Life and Work of Ann Randall’, a talk given by Aura Wharton-Beck (University of St Thomas) at the 2021 RSS Annual International Conference.
Albert T. Bharucha-Reid (1927–1985)
Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid was a mathematical statistician best known for his work on probability theory and Markov chains.
Bharucha-Reid graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor of Science from Iowa State University where he studied Biology and Mathematics. He held academic positions at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and the University of California, Berkley, and continued his career at the University of Oregon from 1956–1961. In 1961, he began working at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he eventually rose to the position of Director of the Center for Research in Probability and later the Dean and Associate Provost for Graduate Studies. From 1973–1974 and then from 1981–1983, he worked at the Georgia Institute of Technology as a professor of mathematics. In 1983, he began working at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) as a professor of mathematics and physics. He later served as the director of the Center of Computational Sciences at Atlanta University until his death in 1985.
He published over 65 papers and articles and several books during his career. Some of his most significant contributions to the field include his 1957 book
An Introduction to the Stochastic Theory of Epidemics and Some Related Statistical Problems and
Elements of the Theory of Markov Processes and Their Applications, a graduate-level text and reference in probability, with a focus on the theory of Markov processes and numerous scientific applications.
Bill Jenkins (1945–2019)
William Carter Jenkins was an epidemiologist, best known as one of the Tuskegee Study whistleblowers. He worked tirelessly throughout his life to counter the concept that ‘race’ was a biological phenomenon in humans, arguing that racism and culture were key determinants of health inequity. He cofounded the Society for the Analysis of African-American Public Health Issues and is remembered as a campaigner for social justice and a champion for community-based participatory research.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Morehouse College, Jenkins was awarded a master’s degree in biostatistics from Georgetown University and master of public health and doctoral degrees in epidemiology from the UNC Gillings School. He completed postdoctoral work in biostatistics at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. From 1980, he worked as a statistician at the National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention. He went on to become chief of the research and evaluation statistics section, supervisory epidemiologist and manager of the centre’s Minority Health Activities Program.
Jenkins is best known for trying to halt the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1969, called the most unethical clinical study in US history. Clinical researchers wanted to study the natural history of untreated syphilis, but for 40 years the Public Health Service deliberately withheld effective treatment from poor black men, deceiving them into thinking they were receiving medical care. Shockingly, it had the full support of many leaders in the medical profession. A blue-ribbon panel convened to discuss the ethics decided that the men should not be treated because ‘the study [was] too important to science’. The story was leaked to the press by fellow epidemiologist and whistleblower Peter Buxtun and
The Washington Star broke the story on 25 July 1972.
After 1980, Jenkins managed the Participant Health Benefits Program, which assured medical services to the Tuskegee survivors. In 1997, he helped to obtain a presidential apology for the study, and, in 2002, he produced a documentary video with study survivors.
Jenkins was a fellow in the American College of Epidemiology, where he was elected to the board of directors and chaired the minority affairs committee. He was active in the ASA and chaired its epidemiology section. He was also involved in the American Public Health Association (APHA), serving on the governing council and executive board. In 1991, he and a group of other African American epidemiologists and statisticians founded the Society for the Analysis of African-American Public Health Issues (SAAPHI), an organization that became instrumental in placing on the national public health agenda the goal of eliminating health disparities and racism.