Baby monitors, satellites and the moon: Telling history of Jersey Shore's Black scientists

USA Today

13-02-2025

Baby monitors, satellites and the moon: Telling history of Jersey Shore's Black scientists Seven-minute read
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Here's why Black History Month is celebrated in February
Black History Month is celebrated in February to commemorate the rich history and achievements of African-Americans.
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Tyrone Laws is speaking to educators, students and community members about the innovations that came from Black scientists, including his neighbors in what once was South Belmar, now Lake Como.
They include Walter McAfee, a physicist who helped calculate how to bounce a radar signal from Wall off the moon.
Others include James West, a Bell Labs scientist who helped develop an inexpensive and compact microphone now used in everything from hearing aids to baby monitors.
WALL -- Tyrone Laws stood in a room at the InfoAge Science and History Museums on the site of Camp Evans, gazed at the year-old exhibit featuring the contributions of Black scientists at the Jersey Shore, and, as he has done hundreds of times over the years, recited their stories.
Laws knew them personally. There is Walter McAfee, the legendary physicist who helped calculate how to bounce a radar signal off the moon. And Thomas Daniels, an engineer who designed electrical equipment for navigation and satellite systems. And William Townes, a Tuskegee Airman who worked as a physicist at Camp Evans.
They "made this type of significant and essential contribution to the science of the world," said Laws, 69, of Lake Como. "They did it out of pride, and they did it also with the understanding that they had an obligation to make this world better."
After a lifetime of social justice advocacy, Laws is trying to amplify his message, speaking to educators, students and community members about the innovations that came from Black scientists, including his neighbors in what once was South Belmar, now Lake Como.
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It's a lesson that is running into backlash. The Trump administration has quickly moved to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government with executive orders saying they amount to illegal discrimination. Corporations, threatened with civil rights investigations, are following suit.
Laws worries that the stories he's been telling for decades could be erased. But he has help ensuring they won't. The InfoAge exhibit, sponsored by Monmouth University and Manasquan Bank, is spotlighting dozens of Black scientists who have left a deep legacy at the Shore.
"It's an important story to show how much they contributed to our country, in defense of our country," said Michael T. Ruane, chief executive officer of InfoAge.
Laws grew up in Plainfield during the Civil Rights era, watching has his mother, a nurse, got passed over for supervisory jobs because of her race. And he remembers his first foray into activism when he joined classmates in the sixth grade in 1966 asking why there weren't more people of color included in their lessons.
The simple change paid off. In science class, he learned there were plenty of African Americans who made groundbreaking discoveries, many of whom lived in New Jersey. Among them, James West, a Bell Labs scientist who helped develop an inexpensive and compact microphone now used in everything from hearing aids to baby monitors.
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The lessons taught Laws that he had a voice and his contributions could be valuable, too.
"We can pass people every day and never see the brilliance, never see the contribution that they're able to make," Laws said.
After Laws graduated from Rutgers University with a journalism degree, he went to work for social services organizations, acted in plays, and began speaking at schools and community groups. And he moved to Lake Como wife Valerie in 1989, settling into a middle-class neighborhood that had a vibrant Black community filled with scientists and teachers.
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They took Laws under their wings. He met McAfee, who lived around the block and served on the town's planning board. He met Daniels at a community activists meeting in Freehold. And he and his friends were struck by their humility and their sense of duty.
If their contributions were diminished or ignored, the scientists were unlikely to correct it themselves. Paul Tillman, 76, a West Orange resident who grew up in both Belmar and South Belmar, said he wasn't aware of their accomplishments until he went to college at Seton Hall University.
"Well, see, here's the thing about that," Tillman said. "They worked for the government and everything was classified. Even their own kids didn't know what they did, other than they worked at Fort Monmouth."
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The scientists' stories mirrored the country's. They moved to New Jersey as part of the Great Migration of African Americans who found employers more willing to hire them. The Texas-born McAfee, for example, had a master's degree from Ohio State University and found a job at Fort Monmouth during World War II. His applications to other employers were rejected in part because he needed to include a photo of himself.
McAfee joined Project Diana, an experiment at Camp Evans to bounce radar signals off the moon and receive them back. But it took months for his work to be recognized; when the New York Times reported on the feat in 1946, it named the project's principal participants but didn't include McAfee.
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Other Black scientists found some towns had protective covenants that forbade them from buying homes. And still others encountered virulent racism. Leroy Hutson, a 29-year-old radio engineer who moved to Wall with his wife and 8-month-old son in 1948 to work at Camp Evans, had been in his new home for two nights when the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in his front yard.
"Things start to mesh together over the years and there are these amazing opportunities created for the personnel at Fort Monmouth," said Melissa Ziobro, a Monmouth University history professor and trustee at InfoAge. "But that is not to suggest that everything was all rosy in the local community."
Ziobro, who was a historian at Fort Monmouth, said the scientists managed to find recognition. The Army noted their contributions in newsletters. President Dwight Eisenhower personally presented McAfee a fellowship to study at Harvard University. And Robert Johnson, a professor, began collecting oral histories from more than a dozen scientists for a documentary called "No Short Climb: 'Race Workers' and America's Defense Technology."
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The scientists, Johnson said, were grateful to talk to him, worried that they would become "a footnote to a footnote."
Their stories were eye-opening. Mary Tate, for example, was a mathematician who moved from North Carolina with her husband Harold to work at Fort Monmouth. She researched seismic activity to track Russia's underground nuclear tests during the Cold War, even though few others in her office would talk to her, Johnson said.
When she spoke to Johnson, she wasn't sure if her work was still classified. "But she says here, 'We had to compute the orbit of the satellite.' I remember once it took me two weeks, two weeks to do the hand calculations, to test it and to double test it,'" Johnson said. "'After you wrote the program and got the answers, you had to verify it. I remember I had to work overtime to verify that.'"
Sometimes, it seems like the stories of Black scientists are at risk of fading away. Mary Tate and many of the other scientists have died. Fort Monmouth has been closed for more than a decade, and Netflix is preparing to build a giant production studio on the site. And Lake Como's Black population has dwindled from 7.8% in 2000 to 2.6% in 2020, according to U.S. Census data.
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But the exhibit at InfoAge, featuring Johnson's documentary, biographies and artifacts, was enough to jog Laws' memories of the long conversations he had with the scientists. He said he would continue to reach out and tell their stories to schools and community groups for as long as he could.
"Just the people gracing this wall right here, this is significant," Laws said. "I'm glad to see it."
Michael L. Diamond is a business reporter at the Asbury Park Press. He has been writing about the New Jersey economy and health care industry since 1999. He can be reached at [e-mail].