Taking the Helm: Margaret Mayo Tolbert’s Three Decades of Scientific Administration.

The Virginia of 1943 was a land of deep divides, and none so stark as that which separated the Black and White populations of the state. Though the Civil War had ended some eight decades prior, and Black individuals were proudly serving and dying for their country in the fight against the Axis powers, it was still overwhelmingly the case that the quality of your life on a material, medical, educational, and social level was entirely determined by the color of your skin at birth. 

The subject of our story today, Margaret Mayo, was born on November 24 of that year in Saratoga, the neighborhood of Suffolk where the Black population was compelled to live. Her father was a military man whose alcohol-fueled rages led to physical violence against his wife and children, and her mother did the best she could to stand as the firm line of civilization and stability in the household, working herself to the nub as a housekeeper whose earnings were as often as not drunk away by her husband. Her childhood home had no indoor plumbing, or electricity, and featured upturned lard buckets in place of dining room chairs, but was full of the camaraderie and hijinks of six siblings who didn’t have enough of a frame of reference to realize what a different standard of living they had than the children from the White section of town.

Margaret’s mother moved the family out of their home after a particularly violent episode of her father’s temper, but soon after fell ill and died, leaving the six children in the care of their grandmother, who married off Margaret’s sisters at the age of fifteen in arranged marriages. Young Margaret figured that her grandmother did this to re-direct her sisters’ growing interest in boys into a stable union, and resolved not to show any interest herself until such time as her grandmother passed away. Besides, she had seen what husbands were capable of during the years observing the abuse of her mother, and resolved that she would never voluntarily submit to such a relationship herself. Instead, as her sisters left for married life, she increasingly took over the role of guardian to her younger siblings as her grandmother’s health declined.

Meanwhile, there was the matter of schooling. While her older sister did not learn to read, Margaret proved something of an academic standout, excelling in mathematics and science at East Suffolk High School, all while working during weekends to bring extra money into the household, and acting in the role of surrogate mother. One family she worked for in particular would have a marked impact on her academic future - the couple she came to know as Mama and Daddy Cook. They considered her as something of an adopted daughter, and took a material interest in her educational future which she would rely on in the years to come.

Margaret finished her high school career as valedictorian, and ultimately decided on Tuskegee Institute as her college, supported in that choice by money raised by the Cooks’ church. The Cooks drove her from Virginia to Alabama in 1963, and she settled into her studies and the whirl of extra curricular activities. She had originally intended to study medicine, both as a means of expanding the availability of medical services for the Black community in Saratoga, and of securing a steady income so she would not have to live the hard scrabble life of her parents. As she joined the honors program at Tuskegee, however, she found herself attracted more by chemistry and the pursuit of research science. By her junior year, she had been awarded the I.S. Derbigny Award for having the highest chemistry average across three years and the Luther H. Foster Award for both her academic performance and student service. She graduated in 1967 with high honors in chemistry and a minor in mathematics, the only woman chemistry graduate in her class. 

A few weeks after graduation, Margaret married a Liberian student who had not yet graduated but, true to the promise she made herself to not let marriage stand in the way of her self-development, she continued pursuing her education, moving to Detroit to attend Wayne State University while her husband stayed behind at Tuskegee. She completed her thesis, “Determination of Certain Cations by Precipitation as Double Salts with Various Amine Phosphates” within a year and a half, and returned to Tuskegee as first a lab technician in the School of Agriculture, and then an instructor at the Mathematics Department, while waiting for her husband to finish his degree. In spite of the birth of a son, their marriage would prove short lived, victim of her husband’s serial infidelity with her best friend. 

The couple were divorced before their son’s first birthday, and Mayo was left with the long task of processing her feelings of betrayal and doubts about the future. A chance encounter with a representative from Brown University led to an invitation to join their PhD program which she was inclined to reject because of how difficult it would be to move to a new area and continue raising her son while trying to complete her doctorate work, but the Cooks came to the rescue once again, insisting that she continue with her education, and offering to care for her son for as long as it would take her to complete her degree. She took them up on the offer, and in 1970 was on her way to Brown, where she joined the lab of John Fain, whose research centered around fat cells. Mayo joined together with Naomi Das to study rat liver cells and the processes of signal transduction within them that occurred through means other than the classical cAMP pathways. 

While at Brown, she met and married her second husband, a Slavic languages specialist by the name of Henry Hudson Tolbert. They married in 1972 and, though it would be a longer lasting marriage than her first, it would also prove a failure, run aground not by infidelity, but jealousy as Margaret moved from success to success in the academic world while Henry’s career largely stalled out during their time together and he began to compensate for his relative lack of success by demanding more control of Margaret’s time and money. 

All of that, however, lay in the future in 1973 when Margaret returned to Tuskegee after having completed her PhD work at Brown, and here it was that she discovered her gift for administration, displayed in particular during her time as director of the Institute’s Carver Research Foundation (1979-1988). She not only had the scientific insight to recognize valuable science worthy of support, but the organizational ability to fine-tune existing projects and launch new ones, the vision to seek out working relationships with new partners like NASA and the Department of Energy, and the interpersonal skills to reach out internationally, in particular guiding Tuskegee outreach projects in Liberia and Ghana. The word soon got out that when Tolbert was leading an organization, it secured more connections with high profile government and private groups, larger operating budgets, better facilities, more streamlined core policies, savings due to more efficient bureaucratic practices coupled with new income sources from creative outside funding, and, perhaps most importantly for Tolbert personally, significant increases in participation by women and minorities as both members of the organization, and in the outreach programs created by that organization.

Throughout the next three decades, Tolbert was rarely at a loss of offers for new administrative opportunities in the STEM world. She worked for British Petroleum as a senior planner during the years of its merger with Standard Oil, then for Howard Hughes Medical Institute as the lead of a team to determine which program proposals it should fund, and then became a division director at Argonne National Laboratory, the first Black woman appointed to such a position. Here she developed educational programs that could be picked up by colleges and outreach groups to increase minority participation in STEM, and through her efforts she saw that participation grow from ten to forty percent. In 1996, she moved next door to the New Brunswick Laboratory to become a director (again, the first Black woman to serve in such a position), where she tightened the systems by which the Lab distributed and marketed nuclear safety information and increased coordination with other global organizations doing similar work. 

Her final step on her decades-long upwards arc through the world of scientific administration was with the National Science Foundation, where she served as Senior Advisor (the highest management rank available in the federal government) at the Office of Integrative Activities, with the particular task of increasing STEM representation of women and minority groups, hoping to replicate on a national level the successes she had had at ANL. She became executive liaison for the CEOSE (Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering), cited by NSF representatives in particular for the practical effectiveness of her approach as fine-tuned through years of work in the private sector. 

Tolbert retired from the NSF in 2011, and in 2015 published her memoirs, Resilience in the Face of Adversity, detailing her youth in segregated Suffolk, and her long years of trying to find her academic path while juggling the disappointments of two dissolved marriages, ongoing responsibilities for the support of her immediate and extended family, and her own instincts to perfectionism that made her an excellent and efficient administrator, but also took from the time she had to develop relationships outside of her work. Though retired, her impact continues to this day, in the form of programs she originated or made administratively viable, and in particular in that of the two generations of minority and women students whose first real access to the world of research science came through programs and methods she innovated, and which were then replicated throughout the nation, gifting us the vibrant and diverse world of scientific talent we enjoy today, and will continue to as long as we take Tolbert’s example of service, sacrifice, and engagement to heart.

FURTHER READING:

Tolbert’s memoirs are a true gem. They are not easy to come by out in the wild, but you can get used copies online fairly easily and inexpensively, and I recommend that you do. Her account of growing up in pre-1965 Virginia is a window into a part of history not often told, and her frankness about both the joys and limitations of that life is captivating. It is also a valuable book about Tuskegee during that era as told from the point of view of an individual from the scientific, rather than humanities, community, while her stories of the world of scientific administration as it developed in the 1970s through early 2000s is well worth it for historians focused on how structures shape the course of scientific investigations. So, yeah, no matter who you are or where your interests lie, you’ll find something here for you.