YouSaid · the spoken record

Walter Massey

lines on the record: 59
first: 2023-11-23
most recent: 2023-11-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Just going back with his film crew in Mississippi and began to reflect probably more than I have in years on how far it's come and how fortunate how lucky I am.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in Hattesburg last year. Now, this earlier this summer, there's an entity at the university here that's making a film about me, about how one becomes a scientist. And we went to Hattesburg to film some shots. And I went and visited with my oldest friend, the one who started with me in the Blue Gardeners in the seventh grade, the Blue Gardenias. So yes, Ralph and I”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Planets, planets that around stars that look like they might be close enough that what we see on the relation between ours. Star and Earth that they might have conditions for life like we understand life. So we'll be able to look at that. That's one of the main things. We have that first instrument. To look at and other things like people have heard of dark matter and dark energy be able to get more information to be able to try to understand those entities.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you've seen the James Web, if you're in awe and fascinated by that, first of all, those images you see on the James Webb, we will have a resolution about four times better than that. With you would be much sharper. We can see them closely. Also, we will have instruments, many more instruments, to analyze the light that comes from those images. The universe, how did it begin? How did the first stars, galaxies form? Those are fascinating things I've learned. And now at the web, we see that some of the theories about that are now being upset because they're learning that things Galaxy is, I think one of the things began to form much earlier than astronomers had thought. So that's one. How did the universe, not how the universe began, but how did it develop? How did it grow? How did we get from nothing from a big bang to galaxies to stars, planets, life? Then we're going to look at what are called exoplanets.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the giant Magellan telescope is a telescope being built. It will be the largest ground-based telescope in the world. The mirror surface would be about twenty five meters, a little over eighty feet in diameter for the mirror. And it's been built by a consortium of universities and countries. And the University of Chicago is one of those. Harvard, Smithsonia, and Arizona, I won't name them all. Korea, Australia, Brazil.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are not in it, who are not involved in it to the depth that you were, don't realize how scary it was and how close I think we came to that possibly happening.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had been on Bank of America a number of years. And so in 2009, when we were in the middle of this crisis, that's when they asked me to be chair of the board. But I had been there while I said I was one of the longest serving directors, but still was a major shock to me when I was asked because I'm not a banker. And we had many bankers on the board. So it was a big surprise, and I didn't know none of us knew how much of a crisis it would be until I became cherubim. And it's a long story, and I've written about it, but I was informed by the Federal Reserve in Washington to go to Richmond and meet with the head of the Regional Affairs Reserve that oversaw Bank of America. And at that meeting, he pointed out to me the head of the Fed all of the problems.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well not really. I'd been on the board, asked to join corporate boards when I was director of Argonne here in Chicago. So I began to move in circles of corporate leaders. And I was asked to join boards. And one of the boards I was asked to join was the First National Bank of Chicag It was bought by J.P. Morgan in the end. I had to resign from all boards when I went to the National Science Foundation Side. But when I went to California, my colleagues here at First Chicago told his counterpart, the CEO of Bank of America, and who was based in San Francisco that I was moving there and I had been the good director here. And they were looking for a director, he should meet me. And I did. And I joined the Bank of America board in California. Then we merged with Nations Bank. North Carolina, and we kept the name for the”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who they are, and they don't feel inferior because they are of a different race and ethnic background. So they're able to enter arena's feeling as unequal in their minds, and therefore they're more willing to accept people who have other races and barriers.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are many students now sucking a generation removed from their parents who went to historically black college want to go back and have that experience to be in an environment where you're not a minority. And unlike what people might think, the schools are not racist, they're not closed. They've always accepted and been open to white students. Not a lot have gone over the years. But if you look at the graduates of these schools, there are people who go out and thrive in every area of life who are quite capable and competent of dealing with people of various social and ethnic, different ethnic backgrounds. And I have a theory about that is that people who are most successful in dealing with people of different backgrounds are people who are confident in themselves, who have full an understanding.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“HBCUs. I think they're more needed now than probably since they began and when there were no other opportunities, the very few for blacks to get a higher education. And over the years, as other places have opened up, many of the schools have really suffered, but they've survived, and some have still managed to prosper. But now, given this affirmative action decision about the Supreme Court, I think it's going to be very necessary to have excellent, thriving, prosperous HBCUs students to attend.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Run large corporations. Many of them have these undergraduate liberal degrees. I was thinking last time we talked or maybe before that I mentioned how concerned I was when President Obama made some disparaging remark about art historians. Remember that the hard history, what's the value of art history degree? Well, art history is probably one of the most valuable fields or areas you can study if you want to have a broad understanding of human society.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something is uninformed and no experience about brought issues or directions and they learn so much there that they're exposed to so many things in the liberal arts and they learn about themselves. How do you know you are not interested in history? How do you know you don't want to be a philosopher? How do you know what philosophy is? And people decide. They take a course. You know, decide this is something I want to do. And if you actually look, and there have been a number of surveys, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences does these a lot, look at the people who successful in many fields, business people.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A philosophy. My first philosophy course was eye-opening and history. So Moorehouse really gave me a broad liberal arts education. I would have gone in the history if I hadn't gone into physics because I just fell in love with that when I was at Moorehouse. And I've seen throughout my career how that broad background has helped me, but it's not my appreciation of the liberal arts and seeing their value is not just personal experience. I've seen it on so many students over the years that have had it brown, especially when I was at Brown and Dean there, Dean of the Undergraduate College, and I was there when we put in a new curriculum. And then at Moorehouse, which is all undergraduate. And you just see how these students who come in, especially in a place like Moorehouse, not so much Brown, where students come in almost as”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For one of the reasons I really felt I should go back to more houses is because without that education I'm pretty sure I would not have been able to do what I could do and it was not just a physic. It was the liberal arts. I mean I left Hattesburg, Mississippi out of the tenth grade and when I took my first course in religion I was almost shocked to find out not everybody was Christian and not everybody was Baptist. That Buddhist Jain is Zoroastus.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said, what about June? June is his wife, and we were all in school together. She was dean of the social sciences at Boston College. She said, June agreed. So that made me think, you know, I need to really take this seriously. That's when I started. So I went back to Morehouse, yes.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my wife As our two sons to travel out there for us to discuss it, one lived in Boulder and the other lived here in Chicago. And when I came home from work, they were there. So we talked about it, and they thought that I should go to Moorehouse, and I made a difference. The other thing, a lot of things in life are human related, not policy, was my freshman roommate, a guy named John Hops. John went on to get a PhD in physics also, went to MIT, and he was deputy director of a major lab associated with MIT, the Draper Lab. They do defense research. And John flew out to California to have dinner with me. And he said, you know, you really should go back. If you do, you go back, I'll go back with you to help in any position.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could do to advance issues of black advancement than I could at California. But what tipped at two things. Surely one night I came home from Travis.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I went for both those reasons job itself, but that I thought well if I do well here I was shot becoming president of the largest. That's public university system in the country. But I was there about a year, a little over a year, and Moorehouse alumni began to call. And because the president of Moorehouse had resigned very suddenly, there were issues there with the board, and they were looking for a new president. And a lot of the alumni faculty and others wanted me to come back. I did not at first. I had not been to a small college since I graduated from Morehouse. My career was in major research universities. I was in the big science. That was my field. But they prevailed and convinced me that I should come back and I convince myself, really, that I owed it to Mohausen, really, and that I could probably do more there than.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Even more, I had the weapons layoffs. I had to learn. I was like jobs where you learn new things. I had to learn all about the weapons research and understood Los Alamos and Livermore. And the president at the time, Jack Pelterson, who interestingly enough, was Chancellor at Urbana when I was at Urbana. And I got to know Jack because I got so involved working on issues with black students that I met with the president a lot. So Jack was president of the system. And he said, I'm 70 years old. This is the number two position in the system. You love it. I really want you to come. And I'm not going to be around much longer. And I can't guarantee you be president. But, you know, if you're number two here, and I'll be pushing for you.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I left NSF, I was off at the position of provost of University of California. And as you hinted at, everyone agrees it's the best public university in California.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me just say, I'm not an expert. No, I'm just saying I've been following it. It scares me. Actually, I'm very frightened. Why? Because I don't think the people who are experts fully understand the implications of where this might take us. And not every actor in the game of promoting AI has the best intentions for benefiting humankind. If you think people could exploit fossil fuel development and natural resources, the way people will be able to exploit AI seems to me goes steps way beyond that. And we won't even know what's happening. So it scares me.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you believe in climate change? Believe like it's a faith. Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the Holy Trinity? And so the science doesn't seem to, it's gone beyond the science. It's just become a political and cultural divide, which is, of course, we know is not helped by people who see that as a way to advance their own political futures and careers by capitalizing on that fear that people have and distrust.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's true. And I don't think we've handled it well. I don't think we bought enough humility. I would use the word to. Proposed and policy based on science results in areas where the proof can simply not be shown as it can be, and of course mathematical way and even some of the physical sciences. You can never prove. Climate change is happening because it's happening. You're looking at it as it happened. But beyond that, it's now become just a litmus test of where you stand politically or culturally.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Live jobs, lives and livelihoods, right? And the things you weren't always correct because they were developing These vaccines and treatments and trying to understand as they were moving along. But you couldn't wait would have been irresponsible. Wait, and we see, I mean, our lives we save, right? So people don't look back and say, God, there's a miracle. It really was a miracle that we are sitting here now, no mask. Two years that they did this. However, they weren't correct all the time at the right time. So I think that's when he began this distrust spillover into beyond the social science and down to the biological sciences, the biomedical sciences. People still trust astronomers. So when you say distrust in science. You know, they love the James Well. But it is that, but”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you're not imagining it. And yes, it is frightened by it, very concerned. I think most scientists, especially people who've been in the field a long time, as I have. And there is a growing, there's been an increased skepticism in some places, lack of trust. In some fields, in science, people would say science. But I think it started, like I was saying earlier in the fields where people see that the science is affecting them or could affect them and where policymakers see that it could make a difference in their politics. And so COVID was like a perfect storm for this, dealing with human lives. And you had to make policy on what looked like to a layperson on a scientific results that were not quite proven. You also were making policy.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I had support. The Democrats in control then, and nobody really with a lot of caution. But we didn't get pushback, but I learned a lot about the social sciences. I made a lot of friends. And for a while, you know, I was kind of the darling of social sciences. Even the oldest people in the social sciences who will come up to me and thank me for doing that.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Area and Congress is very skeptical they've always been of that kind of research and of course certain parties I think most of the Republicans are even more skeptical of it So we were very cautious and very concerned about whether to do this because some people thought, well, keep it buried, you know, don't make a big deal out of it. Don't shine light on it because you're just going to attract controversy. But I travel around the country, and that was social scientists. That was one of the most fascinating parts of my being there. I learned a lot.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We will support and we, the National Flying Foundation, had always supported the social sciences, but they were a small part of the portfolio. So the social science community felt they were not getting the funding they needed to do their research, but also the visibility they needed to attract more people into the field to be able to demonstrate the results of research. They thought they could really, if they had their own director, they could do these things. So why was that a big deal? The social sciences have always been controversial. The National Science Foundation and any other place where they Oversight because by their very nature you're dealing not just with pure science quantitative results you're dealing with results about human behavior policy and those kinds of things which spills over into the political associates.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I inherited the initiative started by my predecessor at the block. To have the Science Foundation invest in pre-college education and to work with urban school systems, I really started that one with my colleague Luther Williams. But it was something the foundation hadn't been doing to a large scale because the foundation's role was to support universities in the main literature. So yeah, we put a lot of effort and energy and education and human resources directorate, as it was called. So that was really wonderful for me because here now, instead of trying to start a small program at Brown, I think we had the director maybe had 800 million dollars a year. You can do a little things with 800 million dollars. To make a difference there.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and also to convince the financial community to invest because all the venture funds were on the west coast of you on the Boston areas. So we didn't have what now everybody calls an ecosystem. We didn't have the That's coming out of the universities and labs. We didn't have the early stage venture capital to support it, and we didn't have the government, the state that would invest in kind of infrastructure you might need. And all of that has changed. This is amazing to me.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Democrat and Republican. And the Bidole Act permitted federal contractors and universities to receive federal funds underpin their research to actually commercialize that research. And that sort of coincided with the same time when there was great concern about us becoming part of the Russ belt, you know, the automobile industries were leaving the Midwest and we would follow Detroit and we formed something called the Argonne University of Chicago Development Corporation, or Arch, ARCH, to do that and created a fund, the Arch Venture Fund. And what we were trying to do is what's happening now to a large degree is to incentivize university faculty members to not necessarily direct their research towards the practical applications now they're doing that, but to at least be aware of the possibilities of those.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But interestingly, a lot of the things that myself and others were pushing for then finally becoming Beginning to take place, so this is 8283, but there was something passed called the Bidol Act. That was Senator Birch Bai from Indiana.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if there's, in my opinion, if there's no nuclear energy in the portfolio, we're not going to seriously do anything about climate change. I don't think I'm alone in that. I'm not, you know, I've been away from the field a long time, so I'm not an expert on the details. But there are many kinds of new forms of nuclear reactors which are much safer. And then the whole issue about radioactive waste is one that's still debated. But there are ways now that one believes you can deal with that. But I think it's a kind of a trade-off. And also, you had Chernobyl and... The Japanese fukiyama, who's due to the storm that came down, the reactor didn't naturally fail. There have not really been any serious nuclear reactive accidents in the world and not in this country, the three mile island near Meltdown. So yeah, I feel very bullish about it.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the lab then its major program, it did research on a number of fields, as you pointed out. But its major program then, and it had been historically nuclear energy, reactor physics. And the month before I became, I came in June, I think. And in May, there was something called a near meltdown of a nuclear reactant, three Mile Island, Pennsylvania. And nuclear energy had already been controversial because people's concern about what do you do with waste and about meltdowns. And so that really made the whole feel even more politically fraught in the United States. And Argonne, we were so much involved in that. We were kind of a descendant of a lot of debates about the funding of nuclear energy and reactor research. So I had to learn a lot about energy research and policy.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. The University of Chicago operates Ar Under a contract with the Department of Energy. Which owns the lab, they own all the national lab. But I met Hannah when she was acting president, an interim president of Yale at a Yale Brown football game. Which we lost in the last, and she'll never let me forget that. And then Brown gave her an honorary degree, and my wife and I were her hosts, so we got another telling. But she recruited me to come back to Chicago to be director of Aragon in 1979. And that Jimmy Carter was present.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. That's a standard phrase. We're not where we ought to be. And whatnot, but oh God's sakes, we've made tremendous advance. I mean, two of our newest faculty members are black women. One's gone to head the Principal School of Engineering. Physicist and other is a prominent astronomer. You know, I didn't think I'd live to see this, actually. So we've made tremendous progress. So now I got my PhD. I knew every other black PhD in physics in the country. Only about 10 of us.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After the students on campus. So that's when I became interested. I said, well, maybe the issue is in the high school. If we have better science courses in high school So that's what led me to be. This is something I can do, I think, you know, I'm a scientist, so I should be able to figure out how to teach science. And I can continue to do physics while also being able to do something that makes a contribution to racial advance.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to do something that went beyond just doing my research. Remember, this is 60s, and I just, I really felt that I wasn't contributing anything to the civil rights movement or to racial advancement. You know, I was doing obscure physics, a mini-body theory, version of sound and liquid helium. What does that have to do with the civil rights movement? That was the reason I left Argonne to go to a campus in the first place. The other thing that prompted me was when I taught a freshman physics course at About, and I had many of these students in the course and it was just clear they weren't prepared. I mean, it wasn't their fault, and we had remedial courses, tutorials, but my thinking was that that's not going to solve the problem, you know, by trying to take.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or if we do not give them the support they need, you know, once they're. And this would apply to students, any race or background. The specific thing that made me convince me that this would be something I should do. One”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Six days. And like many historically white schools, University of Illinois was trying to recruit black students. What wasn't even called diversity, affirmative action. So the black students came and the week before school opened so they could go through preparatory classes and counseling. And they lived in upper class dorms. When school opened, they moved into dorms, which they thought were much inferior. That was one of the immediate causes. The ongoing issues with Illinois, the best of intentions like men of school simply was not prepared to handle this many black students, who many of whom were not themselves academically prepared. coming from inferior schools, and so the things they thought they could accomplish, they just could not without a lot more effort.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I just arrived on campus. I didn't have any furniture. I was singled in, and I was sleeping on the floor waiting for my furniture to come the next day. I really didn't know people. I knew the physicists who recruited me. And the phone rang, that a landline, of course, and this boy said, Professor Massy. That's what threw me. I'd never been a professor. Said, this is David Addison, and he was president of the Black Student Association. And he said, it was almost midnight. They arrested 200 or something or so in the number, I think exactly was 264, black students who were protesting in the student union and they're in jail and were trying to round up faculty members to come help get them released. And that's when I met Dave out of soul.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“1966. I worked with a group of experimentalists who were trying to understand another interesting property of helium. That is, if you put sound waves into it, sound wave with travel, but like any wave, they deteriorate, they'll disperse, attenuate. And that was an anomalous dispersion. They didn't behave as you would think it would. And we couldn't understand theoretically why that happened. When I went to Brown, a fellow colleague Humphrey Marris and I developed a theory that explained that.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now we're way out of that. I know. But some people will do it. But what you're referring to after that, when I came to Argonne, my first job here.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was doing theoretical physics, the work for Nasdaq's advisor, Eugene Fieenberg, who became another mentor like Chris in my life. And he had a group of students studying with it. And we were trying to understand the properties of liquid helium. Helium, when it's cooled down to close to absolute zero, becomes what's called a superfluid. And it flows without friction. You've heard superconductors. electricity flows about resistance almost parallel to that in liquid. So in this superfluid state, it has a lot of other interesting properties that are unlike matter in its normal state. And so there are theories that underpin the understanding of that.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this before the internet, before social media and all that, you actually written paper you sent off to be reviewed and your picture wasn't on the paper or anything. And so the peer reviews have to review the results. And so the way I thought about physics, this is the way in addition to liking it that you can bypass a lot of the racial barriers.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when I you have to remember, I finished college in 1958, then I taught at Morehouse a year, which is... But then I went to Washington for graduate school. We had other black in my graduate school class, but there were no blacks in it. I'd like to do things I was not a very outgoing person really. I mean, I wasn't all that shy, but I really liked doing things kind of solitary way. Physics or the field you can do that in, especially theoretical physics. And your results were not dependent on your having to convince people that you could do it because you were not white. You know, if you published a paper, this was the way I thought about it.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did Sabinus Hobach Christensen, we call him Chris afterwards when I was old, the Danish background believed that Harvard PhD, and he was one of many whites who went south to teach in HBCU United Mission and really took teaching really seriously and saw themselves there to help young people, young African Americans, move over in life. So I took this freshman course and I really liked it. I guess he saw something in me and he urged me to take the next course. I only got a C in the first year for this course, but I passed, which was, you know, amazing to me.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to be a jazz musician specifically We had friends of mine. We'd started a group in the seventh grade, so the Blue Gardenias. And we played rhythm and blues mostly, but we wanted to be jazz musicians.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I almost started at the bottom But I turned out was number five. And I was shocked. I really was. I think back as the first time in my life, I realized that I might be smart.”
2023-11-23 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 558 — Walter Massey · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source