Gloria Long Anderson: An Arkansas Chemist’s Enduring Career

Gloria Long was born on November 5, 1938, in Altheimer. At the time, the town didn’t even have one stoplight. Although this wasn’t unusual for small towns in Arkansas, Long remembers being teased about this later. Throughout her life, as she pursued a career in organic chemistry as a Black woman, Long faced down doubt and teasing to become a highly accomplished chemist.

Gloria Long grew up as the only girl in her family, a distinction she barely registered while playing with her five brothers. Her parents, Charlies and Elsie Lee, were farmers at the time. All the children helped with farm chores, but Gloria also remembers playing sports alongside her brothers.

Gloria Long Anderson in 1957. Photo courtesy of  the University Museum and Cultural Center at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

Her parents placed a high priority on education for all of their children. Gloria enrolled in kindergarten at just four years old and was already able to read. She continued to be an advanced student at Altheimer Training School, the local public school for Black students during segregation. Even though Long doesn’t remember a lot of emphasis on science and math in her high school classes, she was pushed to excel at school by her teachers. She graduated at sixteen, the valedictorian of the class of 1954.

Long didn’t have far to go to start a college education. Pine Bluff was twelve miles down the road. Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College (Arkansas AM&N) was renamed in 1927 after a long history as Branch Normal College, which had offered college education to Black students since 1875. Long’s teachers at Altheimer Training School were from Pine Bluff and encouraged the students to go to college there. Long admitted later that she didn’t know how to look for other options. However, she received a small scholarship from her high school, so the first year Long rode the bus to Pine Bluff each day to attend classes, then rode the bus home. Her high GPA at the end of her freshman year was rewarded with a full scholarship—room, board, and tuition. Long moved onto campus in her sophomore year and enrolled in a chemistry class on a dare.

Upperclassmen had warned Long and her friends not to take chemistry because of how difficult it was; instead, they enrolled. Long had received very little science education in high school, and the class was as challenging as the upperclassmen had promised. She wasn’t the only one struggling. “At mid-term, all of us had F’s,” she recalled in an interview for the Science History Institute in 2009. By the end of the semester, Long had a B in the class, and it was the highest grade. She had already decided she wanted to major in chemistry, even before such a challenging class. The next year, she became a teaching assistant for chemistry classes. Long graduated as valedictorian of her class in 1968, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the commencement speaker.

Dr. Martin Luther King in 1958 with Arkansas AM&N students. Photo courtesy of the University Museum and Cultural Center at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

Long spent the summer in Chicago, where several of her older brothers had pursued work, and lived with her aunt. While there, she found out her application to Stanford was rejected because the school had no scholarships to offer her, and a job application to a chemical company in St. Louis, which initially looked promising, was also rejected. Long had been adamant at the end of her college education that she didn’t want to teach, but at the end of the summer, she still didn’t have a job, the only one in her college graduating class still searching for work.

Her former high school principal offered her a job teaching seventh grade, so Long took it and taught 7B that year, with subjects ranging from geography to reading. She said in her interview, “If I said I didn’t want to teach, I know I don’t want to teach now.” Fortunately, her former professor at AM&N recommended her for a master’s degree through a new program with the National Science Foundation at Atlanta University. The NSF Chemistry Teachers Program aimed to raise the level of STEM teaching in the United States in the wake of Russia’s success sending Sputnik into space. It was part of a broader initiative through the NSF to update teacher training in profound ways, mainly through summer academies and one-year funding for degree programs.

When Long’s funding ran out at the end of the year, she initially had decided not to return for the second year of the master’s program. She’d become engaged to Leonard Anderson and would soon marry, and she knew she didn’t have the funding to continue with the advanced degree, anyway. Then her professor, Dr. Huggins, made her a teaching assistant, which gave Long the money she needed to continue her master’s degree. That year, she married and became Gloria Long Anderson, and she focused on organic chemistry. Once she had her degree, she accepted an offer to teach general chemistry at South Carolina State, even though she had vowed not to teach again. She discovered teaching college students was different from her former pupils. “You teach what you have to teach, and they should get it. You can try to help them and all of that, but if they don’t get it, you give them an F, and they have to repeat it.”

Anderson then returned to Atlanta University, where she got to teach organic chemistry and do research. She loved researching and, up to this point, had focused on butadiene, an organic compound that is a precursor to synthetic rubber. However, as she realized she enjoyed teaching, Anderson said to herself, “If I’m going to stay in this teaching business, I’ve got to go back to school and get a doctorate.” She applied to the University of Chicago and Howard University and was quickly accepted to both programs with offers for teaching, but Chicago offered more. Anderson headed north.

Chicago wasn’t altogether unfamiliar, as Anderson had already visited her brothers there and worked her first summer out of college. Her husband pursued a master’s in teaching at the Chicago Conservatory of Music. Meanwhile, Anderson was the only Black woman in organic chemistry at the time. One other woman was studying part-time. “I was so naive that I didn’t know that I, as a Black woman, I was not supposed to get a Ph.D. in chemistry,” Anderson said. She helped a few other students her first semester, but when she received a C in the course while they made Bs, Anderson knew she had to focus on her own studies.

Martin Luther Jr. gives the commencement address to the class of 1958 at Arkansas AM&M. Photo courtesy of the University Museum and Cultural Center at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

Anderson then failed an important test meant to determine the direction of the chemistry students’ careers. She was devastated. She had never failed before, and the university recommended she not retake the test, which would effectively end her doctoral studies. Anderson later found out from her advisor that she had actually scored the second-highest on an exam that most fail the first time around. Without that information, though, she started looking for a job. In one interview with a chemical company, the woman interviewer, who had graduated from the University of Chicago, said, “I would love to give you this job. But I would be doing you a disservice.” She said, “I want you to study and go back to the University and take that test over again.” Also, she probably knew that almost everybody failed the test in the first place…”

Anderson stopped looking for a job. Then she was offered a job working for a former professor, Dr. Stock, at Atlanta University. Over that summer, she managed to synthetically produce a compound many other chemists had been laboring over, Fluorine-19, but hadn’t succeeded. Anderson produced it on her first try. Fluorine-19 is an isotope used in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy. Using Fluorine-19, chemists can observe how quickly a drug breaks down inside a cell.

Credit: Jcwf – Wikimedia Commons.

Anderson returned from that summer of research and sailed through the exam that had given her so much heartbreak. She went to work with Dr. Stock while she did research for her Ph.D and earned the degree in 1968. Shortly after Anderson got her Ph.D., Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. At that moment, Anderson decided she wanted to teach and work at an HBCU. “That would be my offer to the Civil Rights Movement…I wanted to go to a black college to allow the students to have the opportunity to get the kind of education that I had gotten; because I felt coming from where I came from that it was almost impossible for me to get the kind of training that I had gotten.”

Anderson had many job offers because of her groundbreaking work, but she accepted a position at Morris Brown College, an HBCU in Atlanta. Anderson stayed at Morris Brown College her entire career. She loved the school’s teaching philosophy, which accepted students from various backgrounds, allowing lower-income students the chance to earn a degree. However, she found it difficult to get funding for her research, and Anderson wasn’t content just to teach. She was a trained scientist too. “It became clear to me that if I was at Morris Brown College, a college which did not have any history of research in chemistry or biology like that, that nobody was going to give me any money for research.”

Anderson decided to fund her own research by paying graduate students to assist her. She worked nights and weekends and charged her credit card when she needed supplies. Anderson worked on antiviral drugs and a chemical compound for breast cancer drugs as well. Her early research into Fluorine-19 advanced the field of solid rocket propellants as well as pharmaceutical drugs.

She served as the Dean of Academic Affairs at Morris Brown for five years, as a National Science Foundation research fellow, and as interim president of Morris Brown College three times. She has held the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Chemistry Chair, an endowed position from the Callaway Foundation that supports outstanding professors in Georgia, for over forty years. She served on many boards, including the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, particularly championing women and minorities in science and education.

The University of Arkansas Pine Bluff, formerly Arkansas AM&N, awarded Anderson the  Alumni All-Star Excellence Award in Education in 1987. In 2002, she was honored again with the Scroll of Honor award recognizing her outstanding achievements in chemistry. Dr. Gloria Long Anderson still holds the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Chemistry chair and is Vice President for Academic Affairs. In 2025, the college renamed the administration building the Dr. Gloria L. Anderson Multi-Purpose Complex.

 

All quotes in this article were drawn from the Science History Institute’s digital archive of Gloria L. Anderson’s interview by Jeannette E. Brown at Morris Brown College, Atlanta, Georgia, 21 August 2009 (Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, Oral History Transcript #0673), accessible at https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/gloria-anderson-42, and used courtesy of the Science History Institute.