Chemists Who Work in Academia

Abstract

Etta Gravely (Fig. 3.1) is a retired professor of chemistry and former head of the Department of Chemistry at North Carolina A&T State University at Greensboro (North Carolina A&T). Etta was born on August 30, 1939, in Alamance County, NC. Now the town of Green Level, it was then a rural community near Burlington. Most of the people there farmed, raising tobacco. Everyone had private gardens and Etta’s grandmother canned their food. The area where she went to school is still very rural; the school building is now the town hall. Etta’s mother was Kate Lee McBroom and her father Rufus Leith. Her mother, a homemaker, did general house cleaning for families. Her father had a high school degree, had served in the army during World War II, and worked as an orderly in a hospital. Etta is the only child of her mother, but her father had a son named Frederick Leith. Her brother went to Graham Central high school and upon graduation went into the army and subsequently died. Etta did not go to kindergarten because there was none. She started school in the first grade in a four-room school that had classes for grades one and two, three and four, five and six, and seven and eight. The principal was Mrs. Mary Holne, and there were three other teachers, each teaching two grades. Since Etta loved to read and liked to do school work, she skipped fourth grade and went on to fifth grade: fourth and third grade were taught in the same room, and when she completed her third- grade work she would do fourth-grade work. Her teachers probably had bachelor’s or master’s degrees in their subjects. Both Etta’s school and community were segregated; she went to school in 1945, before the Brown vs. Board of Education act, which was Supreme Court decision. When Etta graduated from the country school, she was bused to Pleasant Grove High School—for African American students, five miles from the high school for white students. The school taught grades one through twelve; the curriculum was the usual reading, writing, and arithmetic.