J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. had a small role in Oppenheimer. But he was a standout in the Manhattan Project, achieving greatness in an era of rampant discrimination.
Soon, Wilkins began working in the university’s Metallurgical Laboratory, where much more was afoot than mundane studies of metals. Researchers there were helping design nuclear reactors to produce the plutonium needed to create an atomic bomb. With physicist Eugene Wigner, Wilkins began laying the theoretical physics groundwork for nuclear reactors.
But in 1944, when Wilkins’ colleagues were scheduled to move to a Manhattan Project site in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Wilkins stayed behind. The state’s racist laws enforcing segregation in businesses, schools and workplaces would have meant unbearable indignities for the young man. “It’s not that he couldn’t go. He refused to go,” says Ronald Mickens, a scientist and colleague of Wilkins during his later years at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia.
Wilkins remained a prominent figure in the nuclear physics community throughout his career, serving as president of the American Nuclear Society in 1974–75. According to a 1974 profile in, Wilkins was known for “his quick intelligence, … his directness and good nature.
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