Black voices in physics: James Stith

This interview is part of PT‘s “Black voices in physics” series of Q&As with Black physicists.

James Stith grew up in Virginia on a tobacco farm. The first in his family to go to college, he earned his bachelor’s in physics in 1963 at Virginia State University, an HBCU. After earning a master’s degree and teaching physics at Virginia State, serving in the US Army, and working in industry, he went back to school for a PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. Had he gone straight to graduate school, says Stith, “I may not have survived. I was more mature and recognized junk when I saw it.” He taught at West Point from 1972 to 1993 and at the Ohio State University from 1993 to 1998. He then served as vice president of the American Institute of Physics from 1998 to 2008.

PT: Why did you go into physics?

STITH: As a senior in high school, I took my first course in physics, and many of the questions I had always been asking suddenly started getting answered. My high school teacher taught me how to learn, and I grew to love science and became hooked.

Later, after I got out of the army, I worked for RCA in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I was having fun, but I missed the classroom, and I missed being around students and interacting with them. So I went back to graduate school at Penn State. I wanted to teach at a liberal arts institution, and after a year and a half, I learned about the doctor of education degree. I had to take all the physics courses, do research in physics, and take an additional five or six courses in the school of education.

PT: What barriers did you encounter?

STITH: I had taught modern physics and thermodynamics at Virginia State. So when I looked at my course of study at Penn State, I decided it made no sense for me to take those courses. I validated modern physics without issue. When I asked to validate thermodynamics, they said they would give me an exam. I had two hours, and I worked furiously. When the professor walked in and said I had 10 minutes left, I was on question 3, out of 10 multipart questions. I later learned from my office mate, who had taken the course from the same professor, that I’d just had two hours, closed book, on what had been a take-home, open-book exam. I was really angry. I went to the chair and relayed what had happened. He said, “Stith, there are problems you fight and problems you don’t fight.” He cut the first guy out of the loop and gave me another exam. I passed. But the incident cemented my belief that the first guy was trying to drive me out. There were a number of similar interactions.

I was having trouble getting a research adviser because no one, quote, had money. The chair became my research adviser. I did my work in nonlinear optics.

I was the only African American in the physics department at the time. There were two young women, white, in the department. None of us was having a great time in terms of interacting with the department, and the three of us formed a study group. They got me through.

PT: Were there similar obstacles during your teaching career?

STITH: Teaching, we have always done demonstrations. For one, we would put an induction coil and a student—a resistor—in parallel with a battery and a switch. When the switch is closed, the student feels no current flow. When the switch is opened, the student will jump because they get a slight shock. On one occasion I worked with a white faculty member who told me not to pick a Black student volunteer. “Why not?” I asked. “Black people don’t feel pain,” he told me. We talked about misconceptions. I am a strong believer that you have to have conversations.

Other than when I taught at Virginia State, I have never had a job where there has been another person of color at my level.

PT: Have things changed?

STITH: One difference is what I call the mental health aspect. Folks in my generation didn’t think about it, but today’s generation is very aware and is seeking help. That’s a good thing.

But today’s underrepresented students still talk about having difficulties finding an adviser. They have difficulties getting the adviser of their choice. One can surmise that racism is part of the reason.

PT: What can help to improve the situation for Black physicists and to increase their numbers?

STITH: My style is to try to have conversations at the individual level. I also give talks. When David Baltimore became president of Caltech [in 1997], he asked me to give a talk to senior faculty about diversity. I shared some of my feelings and experiences. And I mentioned that too many Black students are pushed away because of perceptions on the part of faculty that they are not good enough.

A few years later I was at a garden party, and a guy came and told me he had been in the audience at Caltech and that my comment about faculty pushing students away had stuck with him. After my talk, he said, an African American student came to him and asked to work with him. “I looked at him and said, ‘I don’t think you are good enough.’ But as he was leaving, I heard your voice booming in my head. I told him to come back. He is the best experimentalist I have ever had in my group.”

In terms of getting more underrepresented minorities into the field, it’s a matter of expectations. I did an informal study of some students at West Point, and I saw that the Black students were not doing as well as their white peers. I talked to the faculty about the students’ board exam scores and overall preparation, and in almost every case students’ grades improved. It was important to me that I not accuse faculty of having a bias, but I sought to raise the possibility that their expectations needed calibration.

Another thing is that my good Black students would be irritated when, on the first day of class, the instructor would say, “Come and see me if you have trouble.” The student was thinking, “Why would he assume I’m going to have trouble?” I still see some of those things when I participate in departmental evaluations.

In my experience, when students of color come to university, a major difference is that when they have their first adverse experience—they don’t do as well on an exam as they are used to, for example—they immediately think they don’t belong there. And they are not talked out of that. But when a majority student goes to an adviser and says the same thing, they are told it’s not a big deal. I have seen this firsthand. When I was at West Point, I had a number of underrepresented minority students stay and get degrees in STEM because I told them, “No big deal. Go back and buckle up. Do better and move on.” It’s amazing what students can do when they know you believe in them.