Edward Bouchet

Edward Alexander Bouchet was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on the fifteenth of September 1852, the son of a former Yale-attached domestic servant and his wife. He took his secondary education at the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven — graduating valedictorian in 1870 — and entered Yale College that fall as one of the first six African Americans admitted to the university.

He graduated from Yale College in 1874, sixth in his class and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He continued at Yale for graduate study in physics, completing his doctoral dissertation on the optical refractive indices of crystals in 1876. His doctorate, conferred on the twenty-eighth of June 1876, made him the first African American to earn a PhD from any American university — and the sixth American of any background to earn a doctorate in physics.

The American physics establishment of 1876, comprehensively segregated, offered him no university faculty position. He accepted a teaching position at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia (the predecessor of Cheyney University) and taught physics and chemistry there for twenty-six years (1876-1902). He subsequently held teaching positions at Sumner High School in St. Louis, Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, and Lincoln High School in Gallipolis, Ohio, before retiring in 1916.

He never married. He published no scholarly work after his doctorate — the institutional structures that would have supported it were closed to him — but his Yale doctoral dissertation and his subsequent teaching trained generations of Black students in physics at a time when the discipline was almost universally white.

He died at his parents' New Haven home on the twenty-eighth of October 1918, age sixty-six. Yale established the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society in 2005 to recognize African American doctoral students; chapters now exist at several dozen U.S. universities.

He is honored here as the first African American doctor of philosophy.