St. Elmo Brady was the first African American to receive the Ph.D. degree in chemistry. He taught general and organic chemistry to a great number of scientists and health professionals at four historically black colleges in a long and distinguished career. Primarily a teacher, he followed the example of George Washington Carver and carried out research on plants native to the southern United States, searching for useful chemical products.

Brady was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1884. He attended elementary and high school there and graduated from high school with honors. He began Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in 1904, where he studied under Thomas W. Talley , one of the early teachers of modern chemistry in black colleges. When he graduated from Fisk in 1908, he accepted a position at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama. At Tuskegee he became the friend of educator and Tuskegee founder Booker T...