Alpha Phi Alpha’s John Slaughter Was the First Black Director of the National Science Foundation

Did you know that groundbreaking engineer and educator Dr. John Brooks Slaughter was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.? Slaughter was an active member who served as president of the fraternity’s Zeta Sigma Lambda Chapter from 1956 to 1960.

John Brooks Slaughter was born on March 16, 1934, in segregated Topeka, Kansas, the son of a laborer and a domestic worker. He knew by the eighth grade that he wanted to be an engineer, even though, as he later recalled, few people had ever seen a Black engineer. Despite strong grades, a high school counselor steered him toward trade school; undeterred, he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Kansas State University in 1956, a master’s from UCLA, and a doctorate in engineering science from the University of California, San Diego.

Slaughter spent his early career as an engineer for the U.S. Navy in San Diego, where he became a pioneer in using digital computers to control complex systems. In 1975, he was named director of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington, and two years later he joined the National Science Foundation as an assistant director.

His defining moment came in 1980, when President Jimmy Carter personally called to ask him to lead the National Science Foundation. Slaughter accepted, becoming the first African American director of the agency that funds much of the nation’s scientific research. During his tenure, he established the NSF’s Directorate for Engineering and fought to protect funding for science education and for researchers at historically Black colleges and universities.

Slaughter’s leadership continued in higher education, where he broke barrier after barrier. He served as the first Black chancellor of the University of Maryland, College Park, and then as the first Black president of Occidental College. He later led the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering and joined the faculty at the University of Southern California, which in 2023 named its Center for Engineering Diversity in his honor.

Among his many honors, Slaughter was the first recipient of the U.S. Black Engineer of the Year Award and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. John Brooks Slaughter died on December 6, 2023, at the age of 89, remembered as a trailblazer whose life embodied Alpha Phi Alpha’s aims of scholarship and service to all mankind.

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