Roger Arliner Young

Roger Arliner Young was born around 1899 — the precise date is contested by her biographers — at Clifton Forge, Virginia, the daughter of a mother who suffered from a debilitating chronic illness and a father whose name does not appear in the surviving public record. She moved with her mother to Burgettstown, Pennsylvania, in her childhood. She completed the bachelor's degree at Howard University in 1923 — supporting her ailing mother throughout her undergraduate studies — and was retained at Howard as an instructor of zoology in 1923 by Ernest Everett Just (placed in this archive), then chair of the Howard zoology department.

She spent the summer of 1924 at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, conducting research with Just on the cytology of marine invertebrates. Her single-author paper published the following year in Science under the title "On the Excretory Apparatus in Paramecium" was the first paper by a Black woman ever published in the journal. She continued her summer research at Woods Hole through the late 1920s while pursuing the master's degree at the University of Chicago, which she completed in 1926.

She was the principal collaborator on Just's research programme in the cytology of Paramecium fertilisation across the years 1927 through 1929 and co-authored with him three of the four papers issued from the Howard laboratory in those years. She failed her doctoral qualifying examination at Chicago in 1930 — under circumstances Just's biographers have attributed to the pressures of her mother's chronic illness and to the substantial body of departmental and home-care work she carried — and returned to Howard. She left Howard in 1936 following a complex sequence of personal and institutional conflicts with the Just laboratory.

She transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and resumed doctoral work in zoology under L. V. Heilbrunn, completing the dissertation Indirect Effects of Roentgen Rays on Sea Urchin Eggs and receiving the Ph.D. in 1940 — the first African American woman to receive a doctorate in zoology in the United States.

She taught thereafter at the North Carolina College for Negroes, at Shaw University, at the Bennett College for Women, and at the Southern University at New Orleans, where she lived in modest circumstances at the New Orleans Sanitarium and continued teaching as her health permitted. She died at New Orleans on the ninth of November 1964, at approximately sixty-five.

She is honored here as the first African American woman doctor of zoology.