BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : AFRICAN AMERICAN " WILLIAM LESTER, Jr " ONE OF THE GREATEST SCIENTIST OF OUR TIME, A MAN WHO FROM HIS BACKGROUND HAVE SHOWN THE LIGHT TO OTHERS THAT IT CAN BE DONE IRRESPECTIVE OF YOUR COLOR : GOES INTO THE " HALL OF BLACK GENIUS "

BLACK          SOCIAL          HISTORY                                                                                                                                        William Lester, Jr. 

1937 -

Favorite Color: Black

Favorite Food: Red Beans and Rice; Steak; Mexican food

Favorite Time of Year: Spring

Favorite Vacation Spot: Caribbean, Maui, Barbados

Interview Length: 200 minutes

Interview Date(s): April 7, 2004; October 13, 2005

Interview Location(s): San Francisco, California

Abstract

William A. Lester, Jr. slates the interview and shares his favorites. Lester was born on April 24, 1937, in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Elizabeth Francis Lester, was born in Chicago and worked as a seamstress and a doctor's assistant. His father, William Alexander Lester, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, but moved to Chicago with his family when he was a child. He worked as a carrier for the United States Postal Service. Lester's maternal grandparents are Willie Belle and Oliver Alphonso Clark. Oliver Alphonso was a lawyer, practicing law in Chicago for fifty years. Lester's paternal grandparents are Debora and [William Mason] Lester. Lester describes his relationship with his sisters: Florence, Judith Belle and Karen. Lester grew up in different all-black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He went to James McCosh Elementary School and attended church services with his parents, who were of different denominations.

William Lester recalls his family's history in the city of Chicago. Lester's father remembered the Chicago Race Riots of 1919. Lester's maternal grandmother, Willie Belle Clark, bought properties and rented them out as apartments. Lester then discusses his high school years, attending Calumet High School and graduating at the age of sixteen in 1953. During high school, Lester became skilled in basketball and worked as a typist in the laboratory of Robert Mulliken, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1966. To attend college, Lester earned a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago. Lester describes his first year of college and his participation on the basketball team, where he would break a number of school records. He continued to work in laboratories and earned his B.S. degree in 1958 and his M.S. degree in 1959.

William Lester continues to discuss his college years at the University of Chicago. He became interested in physical chemistry during his undergraduate studies and eventually worked with Stuart Rice studying argon. After a mishap with his acceptance letters to graduate schools, Lester decided to pursue graduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, but switched to The Catholic University of America after one year. He moved to Washington, D.C. with his wife [Rochelle Lester] in 1960, and completed his Ph.D. thesis on correlated molecular orbitals in 1964. While in Washington, D.C., Lester worked with the National Bureau of Standards and worked under Morris Krauss. He recalls events of the Civil Rights Movement, including the March on Washington and the Million Man March. In 1964, Lester was offered a position at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, where he was offered an administrative position because of the push for affirmative action.

William Lester discusses his research at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, where Lester worked in the laboratory of Richard Bernstein. He explains his research in understanding the close-coupling problem in quantum mechanics. Although Madison is a fairly liberal area, Lester recalls an incident in which racial epithets were painted on their home one Thanksgiving. In 1968, Lester visited International Business Machines (IBM) in San Jose, California, and he was offered a position by Enrico Clementi to do computational work. Lester describes San Jose, California, and recalls his decision to stay in research rather than rise through management positions at IBM. [In 1978], Lester was selected to direct the National Resource for Computation in Chemistry. Although the group had to close three years later due to pressure from other chemistry departments who wanted the funding, Lester was hired at the University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor of chemistry.

William Lester remembers an incident while he was serving as director of the National Resource for Computation in Chemistry when David Ceperley presented him with data to correlate energy for the electron gas. Lester hired Peter Reynolds, a research professor at Boston University, to work with the NRCC. At this time, Lester decided to shift his focus to Quantum Monte Carlo molecules, which he explains in their connection to fermions. After describing the operations of his research group, Lester discusses his affiliations with the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE), and the PAC-10 Conference, amongst other professional associations. He closes by discussing the opportunities he has had to travel to the University of Trento in Italy; the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists meeting in South Africa; and the Max Planck Institut for Wave Motion in Germany.

William Lester discusses the application of his work to as diverse topics as spectroscopy of the inter-stellar medium and the understanding the energy transfer and energy-level separations of molecules involved in photosynthesis in plants. He notes that access to high speed computers and knowledge of computer programming languages has helped advance the field. In his spare time, Lester enjoys watching movies, playing golf, and body-building. Lester then talks about his family. He and his wife, Rochelle, married [in 1959], and had two children, William A. Lester III and Alison Lester [Ramsey]. Lester's son took a job at Hewlett Packard Company after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, and later became a skilled racecar driver. His daughter, Alison is a former stockbroker. Lester is the cousin of Joseph Davis, a dentist in Phoenix, Arizona, and the first black captain of a submarine in the United States Navy.

William Lester provides a brief summary of his family history. He then recalls meeting Price Cobbs while working at International Business Machines (IBM) in San Jose, California. They, along with Nettie Goddard, member of the San Jose school system, formed the Black Liaison Committee. Lester is also a member of the fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, and he is a member of Sigma Pi Phi Boule. With regards to his concerns for education in the African American community, Lester has worked with various groups, including Upward Bound and the Museum of African American Technology (MAAT), a small museum in Oakland, California that highlights the contributions of Africans and African Americans to the fields of science and technology. He notes that [Robert] "Pete" Bragg served on MAAT's advisory board with him. Lester concludes the interview by discussing the generation of pseudo-random numbers in Monte Carlo computations.