An element is a chemical substance made up of a particular kind of atom and hence cannot be broken down or transformed by a chemical reaction into a different element, though it can be transmuted into another element through a nuclear reaction.
Almost 40 years separate Shirley Ann Jackson's achievement, as the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Jedidah Isler, the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Yale.
Alain Locke, the first African American to win a Rhodes scholarship, became a philosophy professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Without his backing, many black artists of the 1920s and 1930s might never have achieved the degree of success they did.