Chapter 1 John Brooks Slaughter 1987 Black Engineer of the Year Dr. Slaughter, a product of schools still segregated during the 1940s, had met stunned laughter when he told his high school counselors he wanted to be an engineer. Neither he, nor they, had ever seen a Black engineer, and they tried to steer him into vocational courses. But the young John Slaughter would not only become an engineer, but also go on to a distinguished career as an educator. Beginning as an electronics engineer at General Dynamics—a company that made everything from supersonic airplanes to submarines—the young John Slaughter moved steadily up the ranks, crossing the lines from industry, to government, to academia, and back again. Bonnie Winston reported in a 1987 US Black Engineer & Information Technology magazine story that when Slaughter joined the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, Calif., in 1960, he was refused a supervisory position. Two years later, Slaughter was running a department with 250 researchers, including the man who was hired for the supervisory job Slaughter had been denied. Slaughter simultaneously stood duty as director of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington. His team developed some of the early theories for computer control systems in naval weapons. Another Slaughter-led initiative delved into underwater acoustics research and applications that had critical implications in the decades-long confrontation between U.S. forces and submarines from the Communist-led Soviet Union. Down the Pacific Coast, at the University of California, he completed studies for his master’s and doctorate of philosophy in 1971. Six years later, Dr. Slaughter, then one of only three Blacks elected to the prestigious, 1,100-member National Academy of Engineering, moved east to Washington, D.C., as assistant director of the National Science Foundation. In 1979, President Carter named him director.
11
