Jasper Brown Jeffries was an American physicist.
Jeffries was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on April 15, 1912. He received a B.S. from West Virginia State College and an M.S. in physical sciences from the University of Chicago. From 1943 to 1946, Jeffries worked as a physicist on the Manhattan Project at the Met Lab at the University of Chicago. He was one of the only African-American scientists to work on the project.
Jeffries was one of seventy scientists and workers at the Met Lab to sign the Szilard Petition, a document written by Leo Szilard petitioning President Truman to avoid dropping the atomic bombs on Japan.
After the war, Jeffries taught as a professor of physics at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He also worked as an engineer for the Control Instrument Company. Jeffries later taught as a professor of mathematics at Westchester Community College.
At the age of eighty-two, Jeffries died on July 16, 1994, in White Plains, NY.
If you would like to learn more about Jeffries, there are two episodes of the RADIO(active) Waves podcast about him that are available here:
Black History Month 2021: Jasper B. Jeffries
Black History Month 2022: Jasper Jeffries Revisited