Bettye Washington Greene

By James A. Barham, PhD

Bettye Washington Greene was born Bettye Washington in Fort Worth, Texas. She spent her entire career as a research chemist with Dow Chemical Company and is best remembered as a pioneering black woman scientist.

Bettye Washington (as she was then known) attended segregated public schools in Fort Worth, graduating from all-black I.M. Terrell High School. She then attended Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1955. The same year, Washington married William Miller Greene, a former Air Force Captain. The couple had three children.

Bettye Washington Greene then entered a doctoral program in chemistry at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where she worked under the German-born physical chemist, Wilfried Heller (1903–1982). She obtained her PhD degree in physical chemistry in 1962.

Greene’s doctoral dissertation, Determination of Particle Size Distributions in Emulsions by Light Scattering, was published as a book in 1965.

In 1965, Greene also joined Dow Chemical Company, working in the firm’s E.C. Britton Research Laboratory in Midland, Michigan. She was the first African-American to work for Dow Chemical in a professional capacity. Greene’s research was focused on colloidal chemistry, more specifically, the chemistry of latex, including the interaction between latex and paper. In 1975, Greene was promoted to the position of Senior Research Specialist.

During her career with Dow Chemical, Greene obtained several patents for various modifications of latex, including novel adhesives in the form of composite latex polymer sheets with phosphorus surface groups—the basis for latex-coated adhesive tape. Greene retired from Dow Chemical in 1990.

Bettye Washington Greene has recently been listed as one of the most influential Black chemists over the last 30 years.