Profi le: Scientist Ernest Just

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By Erin Weeks

Media & Communications Coordinator SCDNR Marine Resources Division

“[It] was full of birds and fl owers, especially in the spring, when the wrens awakened to the smell of wisteria and dogwood. Azaleas and camellias blossomed along the ditches where tadpoles swam, and Spanish moss gleamed from the trees…” — Ernest Everett Just on the James Island of his childhood

From 1883 to 1941, Ernest Everett Just lived through an extraordinary period in American history and science. His own life was no less exceptional. Though little-known today, Just was a pioneering biologist who used sea urchins, worms, and sand dollars to study the development of embryos. As a scientist, he challenged theories of the most renowned minds of the day – and in some cases successfully proved them wrong. He published more than 70 scientifi c papers over a three-decade career, dying a year after his release from a World War II prisoner-of-war camp.

He did all of this as a black man in an era hostile to the very idea of his success.

Though born at an auspicious time – the 100-year anniversary of the incorporation of Charleston, South Carolina – Ernest Everett Just’s early life was marked by tragedy.

Just after Ernest’s birth, outbreaks of both cholera and diphtheria ravaged Charleston, hitting the medically underserved black community with particular severity. Ernest’s elder brother and sister both died as a result of the epidemics.

In the 1880s, the Just family attended Emmanuel AME church and lived on Inspection Street, near the wharfs where Ernest’s grandfather, Charles Just, Senior, made his living as a skilled wharfbuilder. The former slave was one of the most prominent members of the local black community, and his death – just a month after Ernest’s own father’s death by alcoholism – was a terrible blow to the family, emotionally and fi nancially.

Mary, Ernest’s mother, soon moved the family to James Island. There she took up work in the nascent phosphate mining industry and became a leader in the Gullah-Geechee community, founding the area’s fi rst school and church. There is evidence to suggest the township of Maryville, located in present-day West Ashley, was named in her honor. Strongminded and strict, she stressed the values of education and cleanliness in Ernest.

Ernest later recalled his time on the island with a nostalgia and love of the natural world that remains familiar to many who grow up in the lowcountry, even a hundred years later.

Just never returned to the Carolina coastal plains after his mother died, but he retained a keen interest in natural history that would deeply infl uence his scientifi c work.

Just obtained his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College, and later his PhD from the University of Chicago. But in academia, he continually came up against the punishing boundaries of being a black man – even an exceptionally well educated one – in the United States. The color of his skin profoundly limited his social and scientifi c aims, making it impossible to secure a position at a predominantly white school, for example, or even attend events where his only dance partners would be white.

Just became a professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and grew its new department of zoology. He spent summers working at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studying mating behavior and egg fertilization in marine worms, sand dollars, and sea urchins. As time went on, however, he increasingly looked to Europe, where the scientifi c community welcomed him without prejudice. By the end of his life, he was living in a kind of self-imposed exile in France. Following Nazi occupation in 1939, however, he was fi rst imprisoned and then returned to the United States. Within a year, he died of pancreatic cancer.

After his death, Ernest Everett Just nearly disappeared from the records. Other researchers continued to build upon his contributions to embryology, but rarely was he referenced after the end of World War II.

The 1983 publication of his biography by Kenneth Manning, MIT historian of science, brought Just’s unusual life and scientifi c contributions back into public consciousness. The U.S. Postal Service honored Just in 1996 with a stamp bearing his image. Now, each February, the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston hosts the Ernest Just Symposium, an event dedicated to celebrating the scientist’s legacy and providing guidance to students interested in graduate studies at the University.

Here at the SCDNR, marine biologists have benefi tted from the contributions of natural historians like Ernest Everett Just to our understanding of animals such as sand dollars and marine worms.

If you’re interested in learning more about this pioneering scientist, I highly recommend Kenneth Manning’s Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just.

And lastly, many thanks to SCDNR’s Bea Calhoun for the tip to read up on Ernest Everett Just in the fi rst place.

Photo at left: public domain image. Photos at right by Alfred Huettner/Marine Biological Laboratory