Edwin Roberts Russell

Chemist from South Carolina Who Helped Bring WWII To An End

01 / 08

“I wanted to become a carpenter and build things”

Edwin Roberts Russell was born in Columbia, SC, on June 19th, 1913. Since he was born in the segregated South, he envisioned himself becoming a carpenter, a noble profession. He never considered the possibility that one day he'd help our nation end WWII.

Russell attended Voorhees High School, in Denmark, SC. He graduated in 1931. He then decided to attend college instead of training to become a carpenter.

He enrolled at the Historically Black College/University, Benedict College, in Columbia, SC. He majored in science and graduated with honors in 1935.

Here is a current digital map of where Benedict College is located in Columbia, north of the Waverly Historic District.

Now, zoomed in a bit, a historic map of Columbia has been overlaid and fitted to the current digital map.

This historic map from 1933, is what the city of Columbia would have looked like around the time Russell attended Benedict College. Note Waverly district, just south of the college.

During this time, Russell worked as a carpenter and brick layer to help pay for his studies.

After graduating from Benedict College, Russell moved to Washington, DC, to attend Howard University. There he focused on chemistry and earned his Master's of Science in 1937. He spent the next several years as a chemistry instructor at Howard.

Around 1942, Russell decided to pursue his Ph. D. in chemistry at the University of Chicago. His specific field of study was surface chemistry.

Surface chemistry is extremely valuable to various industrial technologies for chemical and energy conversion.

WWII was raging in Europe and the Pacific when Russell entered the University of Chicago. At this time, the University was selected to serve as one of the several centers of science for the Manhattan Project, the U.S.-led project to develop an atomic bomb.

Russell worked as a research chemist on the Manhattan Project, focusing on isolating and extracting plutonium-239 from uranium. Other African American scientists who worked with Russell, contributing to this effort, included Harold Delaney, Moddie Taylor, Jasper Brown Jeffries, and Benjamin F. Scott.

“We were not thinking about the destruction of anybody,” explained Russell. “Our goal was to produce energy, and you have to remember that ten times as many people could have been killed if the war had continued.”

On August 6th, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Then, on August 9th, the second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945. The formal surrender was signed on September 2, 1945, officially ending WWII.

Russell served as Chairman of the Division of Science at Allen University in Columbia, SC after the war. In 1953 he worked as a Research Chemist at DuPont's Savannah River Nuclear Laboratory, in Aiken, SC. He retired in 1976.

Russell earned 11 patents while researching atomic energy processes and wrote several classified publications. He served as an editor to the National Nuclear Energy Series. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Chemical Society (ACS). In 1974, he received an Honorary Doctorate from Benedict College. He died on Easter Sunday, April 7th, 1996, in Columbia, SC, at the age of 82

“Success is setting one’s mind to achieve the seemingly unreachable goals.” Edwin Roberts Russell