David Harold Blackwell, The First Black Statistician

David Harold Blackwell is the first black statistician, mathematicians admitted into National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Blackwell was born April 24, 1919 in Centralia, Illinois. He was the eldest child of five children born from his mother Mable Johnson Blackwell. He had four children outside his marriage, and four more children with his wife Ann Madison Blackwell. Interesting enough though most of the colleges he graduated from were black colleges, none of his children attended historically black colleges. He died at the age of 91, on Thursday, July 8, 2010 in the Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley, California.
Blackwell found calculation apart of his everyday life in his youth with interests such as checkers, chess, marbles, baseball, softball, and track; thus, all of those sports require some sort of design and mastery. The extracurricular activities of such games allowed the foundation of mathematics to dwell in Blackwell’s heart. Blackwell found calculation in any form very intriguing. The simple fact of understanding each math problem in all shapes and forms was interesting to him. Though math was his first love, his first college years was expected for him to become an elementary teacher as
Teaching then allowed his passion to live on. Blackwell arrived in 1954 to UC Berkeley as a visiting professor and joined the statistics department as a full professor when the department split off from the mathematics department in 1955. He succeeded Neyman as chair between 1957 and 1961 and served as Assistant Dean of the College of Letters and Science between 1964 and 1968, Blackwell was the first black professor at UC Berkeley.