Feb 2 2021
Lafayette Frederick (1923-2018) was exposed to plant diversity as a young child growing up on a variety of sharecropper farms. Through learning different tree barks and looking closely at flowers and their parts, the seeds were sown for a lifetime of discovery. Frederick followed his skills in the observation of the natural world to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a historically Black land-grant college, where he was a student during the last three years of George Washington Carver's life.
Frederick was drafted into the US Navy during World War II, which took Frederick to Hawai'i, where he stayed on as a civilian and spent two years as a graduate student, collecting and identifying native Hawai'ian plants. It was then that he first met a mycologist, and developed a keen interest in fungal systematics and fungal plant pathology, which set him in the direction for the rest of his career.
His academic accolades include advanced degrees from Rhode Island and Washington State Universities; postdoctoral positions at Cornell University, the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan; and teaching positions at Southern University (where he created a botany major) Atlanta University (where he also developed a botany concentration) and Howard University (where he chaired the Botany Department). After retirement, he returned to the Tuskegee University as a guest lecturer. He also organized the integration of the Association of Southeastern Biologists in 1958, from which Black scientists had previously been barred.
His distinguished career was characterized by progress: supporting and mentoring students, progressing the values of equality and integration, and furthering the progress of scientific discovery. His research was focused on fungal systematics, fungal plant pathology and understanding development and systematics of slime molds. Here we feature a duplicate of a type specimen that Frederick cultured off of soil from Pakistan as part of an agricultural study.
