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Walter Cooper | |
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| Born | July 18, 1928 Clairton, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Chemist, research scientist Regent of the State of New York |
| Spouse | Helen Cooper (died 2005) |
| Children | 2 |
| Parent(s) | Luda and Alonzo Cooper |
Walter Cooper (born July 18, 1928, in Clairton, Pennsylvania) is an American scientist, humanitarian, activist, and educator. Primarily a research scientist, he was also heavily involved in civil rights work both in Rochester, New York and in Mali.
Cooper's parents, Alonzo and Luda Cooper, were strong proponents of education, and Cooper often said "Not to educate a child is the worst form of child abuse." [1] He graduated from Clairton High School in 1946, where he was a star football player; he was named All Monongahela Valley. [2] His friend Dan Towler, who had played high school football at nearby Donora, Pennsylvania, convinced Cooper to join him at Washington & Jefferson College. [2] He earned a scholarship and played for the Washington & Jefferson Presidents football team. [3] While there, he majored in chemistry and minored in physics and math, graduating in with a degree in Bachelor of Science from Washington and Jefferson College in 1950. [2] [4]
He originally attempted to enter industry, but he soon realized that the corporate world was demanding more of black professionals, and he decided to pursue a higher degree. He briefly attended Howard University. In 1956, he became the first African-American to earn a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Rochester. Cooper often said "I became a scientist because I did not see any black scientists. I looked around and I saw black doctors, black lawyers, but no black scientists. I chose that as a challenge." [1]
Cooper was hired by Eastman Kodak as a research scientist in 1956. Starting out as a research chemist, he was promoted successively to senior research chemist, research associate and technical associate. In 1985, he was named manager of the office of technical communications, overseeing the publications and technical reports of 2,300 scientific and research personnel. In addition, he managed the Office of Research Innovation. [3] During his career, Cooper published a wide array of scholarly papers in the fields of chemistry and physical chemistry and became the holder of three patents. [3] [5] He retired from Eastman Kodak in 1986.
In 1988, he was appointed to the board of regents of the New York State. In 2003, he left the board and became a regent emeritus.
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A man of the times, Cooper was heavily involved in community development and civil rights issues, especially educational opportunities and motivation. There was a great deal of social turmoil present in Rochester, as shown by the 1964 Rochester Race Riots. Cooper served the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as their Rochester branch president. He co-founded the Rochester branch of the Urban League in 1965, continuing to serve on the board of directors into the 1970s. He was also a board member of the Baden Street Settlement, a non-profit organization working with northeast Rochester residents to improve their quality of life.
When the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 was passed, Cooper took a leave of absence from Eastman Kodak to help form an anti-poverty agency in Rochester called Action for a Better Community, Inc or ABC. [6] He served as the associate director for two years, then as executive director. The organization established a local version of the national Head Start Program, along with other aid programs.
Cooper established Rochester's Sister City program with Bamako, Mali in 1975. As part of the program he worked with Rochester Institute of Technology to establish scholarships for students from Bamako. Due to his work, he was named a Knight of the National Order of Mali [7] in 1981.
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His wife, Helen, who was also a scientist and worked for Kodak prior to Cooper joining, passed away in January 2005. They had two adult sons.
In 1975, Cooper was elected to the board of trustees of Washington & Jefferson College. [4]
In 2005, SUNY Geneseo granted Cooper an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. [8]
In 2008, Cooper received the Frederick Douglass Medal from the University of Rochester in recognition of his lifetime involvement in civil rights. [9]
His papers are archived at the University of Rochester. [10]
In 2010, Rochester City School number 10 was named the Dr. Walter Cooper Academy School #10 in his honor. [11] The school emphasizes research and interactive learning, the methodology Cooper promoted during his time as a Regent of the State of New York and as the education committee chair of the Urban League of Rochester.
In 2020, Washington & Jefferson College renamed first-year dormitory Beau Hall to Cooper Hall in Cooper's honor. [12]
The Eastman Kodak Company is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated in New Jersey. It is best known for photographic film products, which it brought to a mass market for the first time.
George Eastman was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time. Working as the treasurer and later president of Kodak, he oversaw the expansion of the company and the film industry.
Rochester is a city in the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, and Yonkers, with a population of 211,328 at the 2020 United States census. Located in Western New York, the city of Rochester forms the core of a larger metropolitan area with a population of 1 million people, across six counties. The city was one of the United States' first boomtowns, initially due to the fertile Genesee River Valley, which gave rise to numerous flour mills, and then as a manufacturing center, which spurred further rapid population growth.
The State University of New York College at Geneseo is a public liberal arts college in Geneseo, New York. It is part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system. The college was founded in 1867 as the Wadsworth Normal and Training School before it became part of the new State University of New York system as a state liberal arts college in 1948.
Monroe Community College is a public community college in Monroe County, New York. It is part of the State University of New York. The college has two campuses; the main campus in the town of Brighton, and the Downtown Campus in the City of Rochester. The college also has off-site learning at the Applied Technologies Center, Monroe County Public Safety Training Facility and online.
The George Eastman Museum, also referred to as George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, is the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in Rochester, New York.
Charles Edward Kenneth Mees FRS was a British scientist and photographic researcher.
Walter Harding (1917–1996) was a distinguished professor of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo and internationally recognized scholar of the life and work of Henry David Thoreau. Harding was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, and received his B.S. from Bridgewater State College in 1939, M.A. from the University of North Carolina in 1947 and a Ph. D. from Rutgers University in 1950.
Rita Kaplan Gollin (1928–2022) was a professor of English and a scholar of American literature.
Gerald B. Zornow was an American business executive and former president and chairman of the board of Eastman Kodak Company. He was also a professional baseball player and a hall of fame college football player.
The University of the State of New York (USNY), its policy-setting Board of Regents, and its administrative arm, the New York State Education Department, oversee all public primary, middle-level, and secondary education in the state. The New York City Department of Education, which manages the public school system in New York City, is the largest school district in the United States, with more students than the combined population of eight U.S. states. Over 1 million students are taught in more than 1,200 separate schools.
The Rochester City School District is a public school district that serves approximately 24,900 students in the city of Rochester, New York. It is currently operating with a budget of $983 million, which comes out to approximately $39,500 per student. This is, according to Census Bureau data, $14,000 more than the New York State average of $25,500 per student, and two and a half times the national average of $14,500 per student.
Hans Thacher Clarke was a prominent biochemist during the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in England where he received his university training, but also studied in Germany and Ireland. He spent the remainder of his life in the United States.
Jeffrey J. Clarke is the current Executive Chairman at Florists' Transworld Delivery.
The Rochester metropolitan area, denoted the Rochester, NY Metropolitan Statistical Area by the United States Census Bureau, is a metropolitan statistical area consisting of six counties in Western New York, anchored by the city of Rochester, New York. Many counties are mainly rural with various farming communities scattered throughout the metropolitan area. As of the 2020 census, the MSA had a population of 1,090,135. The Rochester MSA is the 3rd largest MSA in New York state.
Ralph Cooper Hutchison was president of Washington & Jefferson College and Lafayette College.
Loyd Ancile Jones was an American scientist who worked for Eastman Kodak Company, where he was head of its physics department for many years. During World War I, he was also a major contributor to the development of naval camouflage.
Ching Wan Tang is a Hong Kong–American physical chemist. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2018 for inventing OLED, and was awarded the 2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. Tang is the IAS Bank of East Asia Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and previously served as the Doris Johns Cherry Professor at the University of Rochester.
William S. Vaughn (1903–1996) was an American businessman and philanthropist. He served as the President of Eastman Kodak from 1960 to 1967, and as its Chairman from 1967 to 1970.
William Jacob Knox Jr. was an American chemist at Columbia University in New York City and one of the African American scientists and technicians on the Manhattan Project. Knox held an unprecedented position, serving as the only African American supervisor for the Manhattan Project. Knox is credited for nuclear research of gaseous diffusion techniques used for the separation of uranium isotopes. Knox's efforts in the development of uranium contributed to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.
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