The Dream Maker

How One Man Created More Black Engineers Than Anyone in History.
 

- Lango Deen

Once a bootstrapping startup, Morgan State University’s School of Engineering has grown into a top producer of engineers for the American workforce. That success is due in no small part to the work of one man: Eugene M. DeLoatch.

Dr. DeLoatch is founding dean of the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. School of Engineering at Morgan State University, a position he assumed in July 1984. Clarence Mitchell (March 8, 1911– March 19, 1984) was a civil rights activist and chief lobbyist for the NAACP for nearly 30 years.

In the summer of 1990, when the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. School of Engineering building was still being built—with sixteen teaching laboratories and five research laboratories— Dr. DeLoatch told the Baltimore Sun about the other challenges facing his program’s future.

Among them: Regional employers that were cool to form relationships with Maryland’s public urban university engineering program or even hire its graduates.

Dr. DeLoatch also acknowledged in July of 1990 that although corporate response had been under whelming, there were “notable exceptions,” such as Whiting-Turner Contracting Co., Westinghouse Electric Corp., and Martin Marietta Corp., which merged with Lockheed Corporation in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin Corporation.

DRIVERS AND MOTIVATION

Since 1960 Dr. DeLoatch has helped stretch the boundaries for engineering students.

He holds Bachelor of Science degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering earned at Tougaloo College (1959) and Lafayette College (1959) respectively. His advanced degrees are a Master of Science in electrical engineering (1966) and a Ph.D. in bioengineering (1972), which were both received from the Polytechnic University of Brooklyn. He served as faculty at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, City College of New York, and the State University of New York.