UW Law School Class of 1966 alumnus Percy Julian, Jr., is interviewed in the documentary "Forgotten Genius," a profile of groundbreaking scientist Percy Julian, Sr., which will air on Wisconsin Public Television (WPT) on Tuesday, February 6, as part of the Nova series. The program, which is being broadcast nationally, will run from 7 to 9 p.m. CST (8 to 10 p.m. EST).
The film presents the first biography of Percy Julian, Sr., a scientific genius, industrialist, self-made millionaire, humanitarian, and civil rights pioneer who broke the color barrier in science more than a decade before Jackie Robinson did in baseball.
"It’s a wonderful film," says Percy Julian, Jr., who traveled to Boston to see it at the studios of WGBH, where the Nova series is based.
Percy Julian, Jr., made a major contribution to the film by providing the film-makers with 300,000 still photographs he had taken. "As a child I carried a camera everywhere," he explained in a recent phone call. "I used to be a photojournalist before I went to law school."
The film crew spent four months in Madison poring over the photos. "Quite a few are in the film," Julian says.
An extensive Web page about the film can be accessed at http://www.pbs.org/nova/julian and another at http://www.depauw.edu/julian/ .
Included on the PBS Web site is an account by Stephen Lyons, one of the film’s two creators, of how the film on Julian was conceived. It begins:
In 1998, buoyed by the success of the 1996 broadcast of ‘Einstein Revealed,’ a two-hour biography that explored Einstein's personal life as well as his science, NOVA set out to launch a bigger project using similar production techniques. We called it Lives in Science: four films that would combine documentary and drama, each focusing on the life and work of a single scientist, played by an actor speaking words drawn from the scientist's own writings.
Looking for an African-American scientist whose story would allow us to explore the issue of race in science, we considered agronomist George Washington Carver, biologist E. E. Just, and blood bank pioneer Charles Drew, among others. But Percy Julian's story stood out. While he'd encountered the same racial obstacles all black scientists of his generation faced, Julian had overcome them more successfully than any other African-American in the first half of the 20th century.
The film is narrated by Courtney B. Vance and stars Tony Award-winning actor Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Percy Julian.
Percy Julian, Jr., a long-time Madison civil rights lawyer, is a member of the Law School’s Board of Visitors.
Submitted by on February 7, 2007
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