Otha Richard Sullivan

Educator Otha Richard Sullivan was born December 28, 1941, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was educated at the University of Kansas, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965, and Wayne State University, where he received a master’s in 1969 and a doctorate in education in 1973. Since then, he has worked as a teacher, counselor, and professor at schools and institutions in Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Mississippi. It was as a middle school science teacher that the seeds for his first book, African-American Inventors (1998) were sown: when he asked his students to name two black inventors, most could not. He has since followed up his first book with a second, African-American Women Scientists and Inventors (2001).

(Article first posted April 2003)