User:Pcampbell30

During his career, Ernest Everett Just published more than 70 papers in his own and related fields, he published two books both of which were crucial and heavily influential in the world of biology, and he received a NAACP award for his contributions to his work and race. When it came to his work not many were as dedicated and talented as him, he was called “a biologist of unusual skill and the greatest of our original thinkers in our field”, he was highly regarded by coworkers both white and black and in multiple countries; but he is not taught about in American curriculums today. Everett Just was simply born at the wrong time; he was in his prime during a time in science when many theories were not able to be proven and/or supported by numerous pieces of evidence simply because of a lack of high-tech equipment, like what we have today, and as a black scientist in the early to mid 20th century he struggled to find research opportunities in the United States to further his work. Just was a prominent figure in a popular and widely discussed field, he was at the peak of his career during a time of economic (The Great Depression) and social (Jim Crow Laws) despair in the United States, and then his ability to continue his work was drastically shortened because of World War II and serious illness, which would sadly lead to his death. Just is not taught in American curriculums for three reasons: He was not afforded the ability to work with high-tech equipment like scientists today, he was unable to continue his work in the United States causing him to often be forgotten, and he held holistic views which he firmly believed in even though many of his American peers believed in the exact opposite. He is often forgotten by the masses because during his career his work and theories were hard to prove because of a lack of technology. One of the biggest marks against Just was that he had a holistic point of view about life. Just believed that the overall being was the most important thing and that everything in this world, especially people, can’t be defined by one or two elements like an inanimate object, and that people are affected by more than just their biological makeup. Just believed that the genetic makeup, alone, was not the only element that affected living things but that the environment that the subject lives in has the same amount of input and effect on the makeup of the subject. What didn’t help Just was that his beliefs were in something that the majority of people in his field disagreed with; many of his fellow American biologists believed that humans can be categorized, only one element describes and affects their development, and that they need to be categorized in order for our society to be able to successfully carry on over time. Just did not believe that to be true. Just didn’t believe that was how life needed to or should be because if it were then someone like him, a black man, would not be able to hold the job that he did because he would be deemed not intelligent enough to handle the work and he would just end up being a criminal or someone’s help, even though there was a lack of solid evidence to prove that. Unfortunately for Just he would not see the time where the majority of people in our country, following WWII, would discourage with these eugenic beliefs.