Ernest Just

Ernest Everett Just was born on the fourteenth of August 1883 at Charleston, South Carolina, the son of Charles Frasier Just — a Charleston wharfman who died of alcoholism when Ernest was four — and Mary Matthews Just, a public-school teacher and the founder of the principal Black community school at the James Island village of Maryville, South Carolina.

He was placed at six at his mother’s Maryville Industrial Training School and at fourteen at the South Carolina State College at Orangeburg — the historically Black state college of South Carolina. He took the secondary education at the Kimball Union Academy at Meriden, New Hampshire from 1900 to 1903 on a scholarship secured by the Kimball Union principal Henry Hard.

He took the bachelor of arts at Dartmouth College in 1907 — magna cum laude as the first Black valedictorian of the institution. He had concentrated at Dartmouth in biology, history, and Latin.

He was hired in September 1907 at twenty-four by the Howard University Department of Zoology at Washington, D.C. as instructor in zoology, and rose by 1912 to head of the department. He held the Howard chair for the remaining thirty-four years of his life.

He took the summer 1909 research position at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts under the principal American invertebrate-zoologist Frank Rattray Lillie — having met Lillie at the 1908 Howard University Convocation. Just held the Woods Hole summer research position for the following twenty consecutive summers from 1909 to 1929 — the only Black biologist at the Laboratory during the period.

He completed at Woods Hole in 1916 the doctoral research on the egg-cytology of the marine sandworm Nereis limbata — the dissertation entitled The Determinations of the Cleavage Planes in the Egg of Nereis — under Frank Rattray Lillie at the University of Chicago, which conferred on him the Ph.D. magna cum laude on the seventeenth of June 1916 — the principal Black biology doctoral graduate of the period.

He published in 1939 his principal research monograph — The Biology of the Cell Surface at the University of Pennsylvania Press — the first comprehensive cell-membrane biology monograph in English. The book argued that the cell surface — and not the nucleus alone — was the principal structural and functional locus of the developmental processes of the cell. The thesis was at the time of publication a minority view and would not be widely accepted until the second half of the twentieth century.

He took the close-period European research residencies at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Biologie at Berlin-Dahlem from 1929 to 1933 — under Max Hartmann and Otto Mangold — at the Stazione Zoologica at Naples in 1929 and 1934, and at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1938 to 1940.

He was awarded in 1915 the first Spingarn Medal of the NAACP — the principal annual award of the NAACP for outstanding African American achievement — for the Woods Hole and Howard research.

He died at Howard University Hospital on the twenty-seventh of October 1941 of complications of pancreatic cancer, at fifty-eight.

He is honored here as the principal Black research biologist of the inter-war period.