Robert Henry Bragg, Jr.'s Obituary
Robert Henry Bragg, Jr.
1919 – 2017
On August 11, 1919, Robert (Pete) Henry Bragg was born in Jacksonville, Florida to Lilly Camille McFarland and Robert Henry Bragg, Sr. He was 2nd after Alberta (deceased), and before Nadine (deceased), and McFarland (Johnny). Pete’s parents separated, and his mother and he moved to Memphis, TN. His mother was not making enough money to support him and his siblings, so she sent them to live with different relatives. Pete was sent to Chicago to live with his Uncle Teddy and Aunt Edna. While in Chicago, he was exposed to African American organizations such as NAACP and UNIA, of which he was unaware until moving to the city.
Pete attended elementary school, first at Carnes, then St. Anthony’s. Later, he attended Woodstock Training School, a boarding school near Lucy, Tennessee, where he remained until 1933. He attended Tilden Technical High School and then studied pre-engineering at Wilson Junior College for two years. After that, Pete went to serve in the Army Air Corps, where he completed basic training and was sent to Seymour Fields, North Carolina. He later applied and was accepted to the Army Specialized Training Program, where he was able to continue his studies at Rhode Island State College. After the army shut down the ASTP, Pete was sent to Fort Lee, Virginia.
Pete was assigned to Camp Lee, Virginia, where he became a technical sergeant and taught in the school for the laundry master. Upon his deployment, he was consistently assigned to field hospitals and general hospitals where he was in charge of his laundry unit. After a panel review, he was promoted to lieutenant, after which his unit was sent to the Philippines and Japan. After his discharge, he used funding from the G.I. Bill to attend Illinois Institute of Technology. There, he took evening classes and changed his major to physics. He earned his B.A. degree in physics with a minor in mathematics from IIT in 1949 with.
Upon earning his B.S. degree, Pete returned to IIT to work with Professor Francis Yost in quantum mechanical scattering theories. He graduated with a M.S. degree in 1951, and worked at Dover Electroplating Company where he worked as a laborer before going on to work at Portland Cement Association Research Laboratory. His first project was a study of desiccant materials, which had been put to use in untested laboratory procedures. Pete also discovered two hydrates of magnesium perchlorate. In 1952, he attended a summer session at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and he continued his education with courses at IIT. His professor encouraged him to pursue his Ph.D. degree. In 1956, following a confrontation at work, he decided to leave Portland Cement Association and began to search for another position elsewhere, with the hopes of earning his Ph.D. degree.
Pete earned his Ph.D. degree in 1960, going on to work for Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in the Bay Area, California. He became the manager of the Metallurgy Department and worked with graduate students from Stanford University. He remained at Lockheed for five years. During his time with Lockheed, he worked with the Re-Entry Materials Program and carbon materials and traveled to the Tokai Chemical Company in Japan. While living in Palo Alto, California, he became the president of the Palo Alto chapter of the NAACP.
While working for Lockheed, Pete visited a military friend living in Argentina. While there, he was given the opportunity to speak on Argentine radio about race relations in the United States. Upon his return, he was offered a full professorship and joint appointment in the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California Berkeley. Pete was on the Berkeley faculty from 1969 to 1987, and during that time was the only African American in the department. He served as Department Chair from 1978 to 1981, and his two major areas of research during his tenure were carbon materials as semiconductors, and eutectic solidification.
While at University of California Berkeley, he concurrently worked for a year as a detailee for the Department of Energy, where he surveyed HBCUs to see which were qualified for research funding. In addition, he was also the first sponsor of BESSA (Black Engineering and Science Students Association) at University of California, Berkeley, and on the Northern California Council of Black Professional Engineers. While on faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, Pete served on the policy advisory board of the Black Studies program. When asked if he would have done anything differently, he states that he would have stayed at the Central YMCA and that he could have been better off when going into the U.S. Army.
As the faculty assistant, Pete had to fight against departments that were reluctant to hire minorities during the late 1980s. He credits the creation of the many programs he oversees to Bill Shack and Olly Wilson. One of these programs was the Chancellor Minority Fellowship, which allowed minority faculty to get some experience in academia by providing them a place to work. He cared deeply about scientific legacies and had hopes and concerns for the African American community.
Dr. Bragg made major contributions in the areas of materials characterization using x-ray diffraction and small angle x-ray scattering, and their use as a tool in studying heat-activated processes in materials. Early in his career, he developed methods of quantitative x-ray diffractions of compounds; e.g., Ca(OH)2 in hydrous silicates. Pete originated the now-standard practice of using the data as self-calibrating in the quantitative determination of preferred orientation in polycrystalline aggregates. His work provides clear guidance in the analysis of the diffraction patterns of materials of high transparency to x-rays, e.g. Be, B, and C. His novel studies of the coarsening of the microstructure of glassy carbon using small angle x-ray scattering have provided the accepted value for the activation energy for a-direction vacancy migration in graphite. Perhaps his most important work is the recent demonstration that all apparently unordered carbon materials are mixtures of metastable carbon self-interstitial compounds, and his first principles derivation of the equations governing the phase transformations at high temperatures as these materials are converted to graphite.
He served as an adviser to the U.S. Department of Energy, the Naval Research Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He was a visiting scientist at the University of Bordeaux (France), and the Mushasi Institute of Technology (Japan). In the early 1990s he was at the University of Nigeria as a Fulbright scholar; and in 1995 he was a fellow of the National Society of Black Physicists. He retired from UC Berkeley in 1987. In 2006, at age 86, he was a member of Oakland, California’s Museum of African American Technology and, with the assistance of UC Berkeley’s Black Studies department, developed an exhibit at the museum titled “The Black Revolution in Science and Technology.”
Upon retiring from the University of California at Berkeley, he remained passionate about research. Pete actively pursued the research and identity of his ancestry. He began his research and through diligent efforts traced his lineage to Africa. He spent countless hours, researching, chronicling the family history, and traveling to investigate his findings so as to leave a legacy for his family.
Pete’s son, Robert (Bobby), died in 2008 and had worked in electronics with Hewlett-Packard and went on the road as a rock musician. He worked the last few years as a media specialist at Skyline College in the Bay Area, California. His daughter lives with her mother Violet in the Bay Area, who was a supervisor with Santa Clara County.
Pete leaves many in the shadows of his ancestral legacy. To cherish his memory he leaves his former wife Violet Bragg; his daughter, Pamela Bragg; sibling McFarland Bragg (Elma, deceased) of Phoenix, nephew (like a son) Jamal Abdul-Kabir (wife Joyce), and a host of nieces and nephews. Pete just wanted to be remembered as a nice guy who tried to be helpful.
Sources:
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/physics/bragg_roberth.html
To the family: A full interview of Uncle Pete can be found on the History Makers website below.
http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/robert-bragg-41
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