David Teal during a recent visit to Caltech and (at far left in photo) conferring with faculty colleagues on the Tougaloo campus in Jackson, Mississippi.

MISSISSIPPI CALLING

How a physics professor’s 5-year-plan became his life’s work

By Rhonda Hillbery

In the 1960s, just as the civil rights movement stepped up its fight for equal rights and turmoil rocked the South, a young physics professor made his own mark on a rapidly changing, yet still stubbornly segregated, part of the nation.

Dave Teal ’59 did not join the Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Alabama, or participate in the first lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. Yet he too heeded the call for equality. Armed with a Caltech education, fortified by classes taught by the likes of Linus Pauling and Richard Feynman, Teal embraced a quieter date with destiny, opting to teach physics at a small, historically black college in racially divided Mississippi.

“I remember saying to my wife, Nancy, ‘Let’s go to Tougaloo,’” a private school located on the 500-acre site of a former plantation in Jackson, the state capital, says Teal. “Maybe we’ll stay five years.” As it turned out, this Caltech- and Harvard-educated physicist would stay on the job for the next 37 years.

Today, as Caltech and peer institutions struggle to attract more under-represented minorities into science and engineering, they might gain some insight from the experience of teachers like Teal, who have made it their life’s work to educate minority students for productive careers in those fields. Teal estimates that since the late ’60s when he and a colleague put together Toug-aloo’s first stand-alone physics major, the college has graduated about three physics majors most years. Many went on to careers in some aspect of science or engineering, at least 10 of them earning PhDs in physics or related fields.

“So many of our students have been told their whole lives, ‘Well, you’re not going to make it so you might as well not try,’” says Richard McGinnis, a Tougaloo chemistry professor and chair of the college’s natural sciences division. Tougaloo attracted many faculty, Teal notable among them, who were committed to telling students that they could succeed, McGinnis says. “You don’t often see people with his combination of competence and commitment.”

Manifestly modest, Teal doesn’t consider himself a trailblazer. His Tougaloo students confirm that he never acted the part of the crusading educator, either. They describe him as a dedicated teacher whose easygoing demeanor went hand in hand with a love of his subject.

“He always seemed to be upbeat. He seemed to get pleasure out of his job and to really care about his students,” says his former student Antonio Oliver, who went on from Tougaloo to earn his doctorate at Cornell and is today a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. “This was a guy who seemed genuinely concerned when his students did not do well on an exam or a homework problem and took a real interest in their welfare outside the classroom.”

Oliver, who took many courses from Teal, recalls how a fellow physics student struggled to attend classes during the day while working nights at a local grocery store. The overscheduled undergrad confided to Oliver that their professor went out of his way to visit him on the job and to ask if there was anything he could do to help lighten his load.

Teal’s background, when he found out about it, came as a surprise to Oliver, who grew up in an impoverished Delta region of Mississippi without the benefit of sparkling educational opportunities. “I personally thought it was quite remarkable that someone with Caltech and Harvard on his CV would come to a small HBCU [historically black college or university] in Mississippi and make it home for an entire career. And we all knew that teaching at Tougaloo was no way to become rich, so money was definitely not the motivation.”

FORCES OF CHANGE

Teal himself is quick to say that his choices weren’t necessarily part of any grand plan. But like many students of his generation he was caught up in the great changes that swept the nation in the 1960s. In his case the catalyst was clearly the civil rights movement. Midway through his graduate studies at Harvard, a small army of activists, many of them college kids like himself, began pushing to register black voters in unprecedented numbers in the Deep South.

“When I was living in Cambridge, I read something just about every day in the New York Times about an incident in the South,” says Teal. Those reports included accounts of beatings and killings, jailings of civil rights demonstrators, and church burnings—all amid mounting demands for equal access to public services and an end to segregation. In 1964 came passage of the Civil Rights Act, followed in 1965 by the Voting Rights Act and Freedom Summer, a bold effort to expand black voter registration across the South. At the height of the turmoil, three young activists disappeared; their mutilated bodies were later discovered buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.

For Teal, quietly pursuing his doctorate in Cambridge, these events struck home in a way his physics studies never did. Entering Harvard, he hadn’t been sure what area of physics to pursue. “All the other students exuded so much more confidence—they had their research plans all laid out.” Eventually he found his niche in experimental elementary-particle physics. Latching on to one of the hot research areas of the day, he joined the bubble chamber research group in the physics department, one of several research teams conducting experiments at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator. In this joint Harvard-MIT project, researchers probed the interaction of high-energy photons with protons.

Even as Teal spent long nights measuring tracks on thousands of bubble- chamber photographs, he was drawn to the idea of working with young people. “I came upon the opportunity to get involved in tutoring young people, just 10 or 12 years old. I would hop on my motor scooter” and go work with them in Boston’s racially segregated neighborhoods. “I had really begun to feel that serving one’s fellow man in some way was something I hoped I could do.”

In retrospect, those early tutoring experiences foreshadowed Teal’s long career in Tougaloo. So did his evolving religious faith. Teal doesn’t claim to have the answers to why his belief in God came to play such a large role in his life. “I have a lot of unanswered questions but I guess I grew up going to church because of my parents, and a lot of it stuck with me. ” In Cambridge, he began attending services at University Lutheran Church, a progressive, activist-leaning congregation that drew a large portion of its membership from local colleges and universities.

Students looking for a feeling of community found it at the church, affectionately known as UnyLu. It was there that Teal first got the notion that he could make a difference in the South. He recalls listening to a harrowing story from a guest speaker from Mississippi. The pastor told how one recent Sunday, some black students from Tougaloo had come to worship at his all-white church but were barred from entering by ushers. As the shunned students left, they caught sight of a man outside in his parked car. He held a shotgun on his lap, just in case they didn’t get the message.

“Hearing that story made an impact on me I’ll never forget,” Teal says today. “Pastor Koons himself was at a loss as to how to handle the situation. We shared in his dismay.”

Soon afterward Teal met an exchange student from Tougaloo who was attending nearby Wellesley College and learned that another friend was heading south to teach political science at a historically black college. His thinking had begun to coalesce. “I felt drawn to the notion of teaching somewhere I could make a difference.”

Teal discovered that the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation helped support historically black colleges and universities by funding 25 percent of a teaching intern’s salary. The idea was to lighten a teacher’s load and free up time for developing new programs. As a prospective physics teacher, Teal applied for and was awarded one of the internships. In the end his choice came down to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, founded by George Washington Carver, or another historically black school, Tougaloo.

“Several factors made it quite clear to me where the need was greater,” he says now. A key consideration: Tougaloo had just one physicist on the faculty, and in fact only offered the field as part of a combined math-physics major. “At Tougaloo I saw an opportunity. I didn’t see it as my life’s work. It was more of a situation where I could help, I could contribute.” And the underlying statistics spoke volumes: Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation, where nearly 86 percent of nonwhite families lived below the federal poverty line.

Shortly afterward, he proposed marriage to his future wife, Nancy Hartman, whom he had met at UnyLu. To this day Teal isn’t sure which he said first: “Will you marry me?” or “Will you go to Mississippi with me?”

UNEASY NEIGHBORS

Teal remembers that Nancy’s first impression of Tougaloo was that it resembled a summer camp, with a wrought iron gateway just wide enough to let one car in or out, but not two at the same time. And despite its share of towering oaks and quintessential Southern hanging moss, the campus was far from classically picturesque. “There are campuses with well-manicured lawns and well-manicured hedges and pretty flowers in flower beds nicely trimmed. And then there’s Tougaloo, which is none of the above. Tougaloo was not one of those grand old Southern campuses.”

The former plantation did have an elegant antebellum-style mansion, which ended up serving as the administrative building for many years, as well as a historic chapel. Beyond that, the campus consisted mostly of a hodgepodge of buildings, surrounded by a combination of lawn, bare ground, and crumbling pavement.

Yet Tougaloo’s appearance didn’t faze Teal or his colleagues. “We said, that’s not the important thing. We wanted to say that what matters is the education that happens here, that the interest the faculty have in the students is more important than what the buildings look like.”

As a historically black college, Tougaloo, then as now, primarily attracted African American students, along with a smattering of white exchange students and international students. The faculty was about half African American, with the remainder made up of white and international faculty.

By the time Teal arrived to start the fall term of 1965, the forces of change had left their unmistakable mark on Jackson and other communities across the “Jim Crow” South. For many of the local whites, the presence of Tougaloo in their midst symbolized everything they hated about the civil rights movement.

As Teal ran errands around town he quickly learned just how unpopular the college had become. “Somehow the question of where I worked became an issue, because Tougaloo College was not looked upon very favorably. ‘That’s just a bunch of Communists, isn’t it?’ they were saying.”

Indeed, John Garner, Teal’s longtime Tougaloo physics colleague, recalls tense days living with his young family on the edge of campus. To protect his baby against stray bullets that occasionally peppered campus buildings on alcohol-fueled Friday and Saturday nights, he installed a quarter-inch thick steel plate on his crib.

Within a few months of Teal’s arrival, court-ordered integration swept black K–12 students past angry mobs of white parents, into formerly all-white classrooms. Teal spent a couple of nights as a sentry in the living room of a local black family whose children were among the first students to integrate the local schools. He and a Tougaloo colleague took turns staying awake, listening in the darkened living room for the sound of tires on gravel. A gun lay at the ready, which one of them would fire into the night sky, if necessary, in hopes of preventing a Molotov cocktail from crashing through the window. It never came to that, but for Teal, the experience served to underscore the risks faced by courageous
local families.

TEACHING: THE ULTIMATE TEST

In this charged climate, Teal soon found that suspicion and mistrust were not limited to white citizens. As he soon learned, not all Tougaloo students welcomed a man they saw as a Northern liberal come to help them get educated. Many were curious, if not downright skeptical, about his motivations. “Sometimes in those early days students or black faculty would raise the question, not necessarily in a mean way, ‘Why are you here, anyway? Are you a missionary on a do-gooding mission? Will you stay here for a year and then go away and write your book about us?’”

For his part, as a white Northerner thrust into the wholly new role of college professor in the Deep South, Teal didn’t know what to expect from the experience either. But he quickly came to see a large part of his mission as helping students stay in school. Some 40 percent of enrolling students stopped or interrupted their studies, due to financial, personal, or family problems.

In some cases, he and his college colleagues ended up doing more remedial work than he would have preferred. “We were trying to make up for problems that existed for all those long years, especially for the African American students who were underserved in a big way. I practically wept for those who really tried but for whom years of inferior education had taken their toll.”

He saw other students push past shortcomings. And he relished the times he could help truly promising students realize the extent of their potential. One of Teal’s students, the physicist formerly known as James Plummer, spent his childhood moving from one ghetto to another throughout the South. He spent much of his time reading. He recalls that he devoured Alex Haley’s Roots at age 9 and discovered Albert Einstein at 11.

Now known as Hakeem Oluseyi, he heads up a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory astrophysics facility where he oversees the design, development, and testing of research-grade charge-coupled devices (CCDs) and carries out research into the spectroscopic characteristics of supernovae.

His high school’s valedictorian, Oluseyi says he pulled a stint in the Navy before settling at Tougaloo in 1986 and starting classes with Professor Teal. “He was so dedicated to the students that if you didn’t show up to class he would show up at your dorm room. He did it to me once when I went an extremely long time without going to class.

“So you see, he had a very hands-on approach. In a very real sense, he would grab you by the ear.”

On another occasion, when a scheduling problem prevented Oluseyi from taking a required quantum mechanics course offered only at another college, Teal agreed to teach him one-on-one. This required his professor to pull together a curriculum tailored specially for one student, says Oluseyi. He also recalls how Teal helped him and many others navigate the unfamiliar waters of finding funding support in higher education.

At Teal’s insistence the financially strapped undergrad attended a career fair that led to his being awarded a fellowship from the National Consortium for Educational Access. “He said, ‘You have to come here and talk to these people. They can give you money.’” This financial support was critical in helping pay for graduate school at Stanford, where Oluseyi earned his PhD in 2000.

Carramah Quiett, who was one of Teal’s students during the 1990s, says that Teal’s dedication, patience, and care for his students are qualities that she has tried to emulate as a high school and college physics and math instructor. “Not only did he teach us how to study physics, he also expressed concern about our well-being,” says Quiett, who completed a master’s in physics and was working toward her PhD at Hampton University before recently moving to Idaho with her fiancé. She hopes to pursue research interests in the areas of fluid dynamics and optics.

Since Tougaloo is an undergraduate liberal arts school, Teal’s largest classes were invariably those for the uninitiated, the nonscience majors. He tried to make his Physics 101 survey course for nonmajors fun, and over the years had the satisfaction of seeing it draw 50 or more students each time it was offered.

Often, he felt that simple demonstrations and follow-up discussions illustrated basic physics concepts best. “In class, I would just ask question after question after question. ‘As this thing falls let’s name the forces acting on this.’” One of his favorite lectures involved passing an electric current between the poles of an electromagnet to demonstrate the force on a current-carrying conductor in a magnetic field.

By 1968, he and his colleague John Garner had created a “bare bones” major in physics, which they taught together until 1982, when Garner changed fields. The curriculum included a year of calculus-based general physics with lab; a year each of mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and “modern” physics; plus a semester each of electronics, junior and senior lab, and quantum mechanics. Occasionally, reading and research on selected topics were offered. On top of this, they taught physics for nonscience majors and a year of trig-based general physics.

Tougaloo students in the college physics lab.

Long hours in the classroom didn’t leave Teal much time for research. (Not known as a research school, Tougaloo was and remains a teaching-first institution.) But through the years, Teal wrestled with the idea that in order to be a physics professor he ought to be doing research. Speaking today, he sounds a little hard on himself. “If I had really wanted to do some research I could have.”

Yet he admits—and his Tougaloo colleagues and students confirm —there was little time and few facilities for demanding research projects. His teaching, augmented by many related activities outside the classroom, typically worked out to about 60 hours a week.

“Dave paid a lot of individual attention to students, including long hours puzzling over how best to evaluate and grade exams,” Garner says. “Even though physics is an exact science, when you are grading papers you have to ask yourself, are you grading on the logical thinking skills or just on the answer?” He also credits his colleague with supporting physics-related clubs and other activities, and with helping students land summer research opportunities around the country.

“Dave’s long hours and dedication were really stunning,” Garner adds. “Tougaloo, for reasons mysterious and wonderful to me, has been able to attract some very highly educated scientists, such as Dave. It’s just a marvel to me.”

Tougaloo College has changed over the years, but its mission remains substantially the same. As for its relations with Jackson, Teal says the community disdain that marked his early years on campus has turned into full-fledged support for the college. Countering those critics who claim that in today’s academic milieu, HBCUs are no longer needed, Teal maintains that they deliver a unique service to their largely black student populations. “From what I have seen, colleges like Tougaloo have played an important role,” he says. Students find a place where black culture is embraced, they are nurtured and can receive special tutoring services if they need them.

“Some students were able to come out of their shell who were extremely unsure of themselves or didn’t really know what they wanted to do when they started college,” Teal says. “If some of those same students had gone to other institutions, maybe they wouldn’t have gone on to graduate schools.”

In 2002 after his 65th birthday, Teal decided it was time to retire. “I was tired. People will ask me, ‘Do you miss being at the college?’ I say ‘I miss the students and I miss the faculty colleagues. But I don’t miss grading homework papers and exams at three o’clock in the morning.’”

RECRUITMENT CHALLENGES

Institutions like Tougaloo reside in a separate universe from the Caltechs and MITs of the nation. Nevertheless, despite their outstanding facilities and concerted efforts to diversify their student populations, the nation’s top research universities continue to post only modest gains in recruiting black, Latino, and Native American students.

Teal doesn’t believe the solution, to the extent that there is one, lies in a single approach, but rather in a time-consuming process that has less to do with funding and facilities than with building relationships. “I think a very specific, pointed, and personal effort might help.” Recruiters might work through high school counselors and undergraduate advisors to identify those who are interested in and good at math and science and then cultivate them. In his own case, Teal remembers being paid a visit by two Caltech students while he was still in high school. “That had a significant effect on my interest and decision. So do that too, with a focus on minority prospects.” He figures schools like Caltech could also participate in as many conferences and recruiting fairs as possible at target schools. Other possibilities are exchange programs akin to a successful long-running alliance that Tougaloo has with Brown University.

In some cases, minority students are admitted to top science and engineering schools, only to later leave because they feel culturally or socially isolated. “Obviously, faculty, graduate assistants, and counselors really need to make the effort to keep them,” Teal says, in addition to study groups, student organizations, and support from family and friends.

Although the efforts of Teal and teachers like him have enabled many talented minority students to embrace science and engineering careers, he clearly views his own legacy not through the lens of public policy but in terms of the personal impact he has made on individual students’ lives. He is proud of the many students he has kept in touch with over the years. Among them is Antonio Oliver, who upon arriving at his new job at Sandia Labs, discovered a fellow Tougaloo physics grad working in the next office.

Others among Teal’s former students are reaching out to spark young people’s interest in science. At the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Hakeem Oluseyi has gotten involved in area high schools, talking to students about his astrophysics research and the proposed SNAP (SuperNova/Acceleration Probe) mission to investigate “dark energy” and its possible role in accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Looking back on his own time at Tougaloo in the late 1980s, Oluseyi says his peers didn’t always appreciate what their professors hoped to help them achieve, and that their dismissive attitude was not helped by the growing conservative climate in America.

“The thinking on campus was often, these white guys are out to get us. There was a level of suspicion.” He figures maybe a handful of students a year fully appreciated what Teal was trying to do. “He was fighting the hard fight and he stuck with it.”

Oluseyi will become a physics professor himself in January at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he also will hold a NASA research appointment at the Marshall Space Flight Center. As he embarks on his own career of educating the next generation of physicists, he says he’ll keep his former professor’s commitment to his students and his science in mind. “Dave Teal?” says Oluseyi. “I think he accomplished what he set out to do.”