That's the first time I knew that serious mathematics was for me. It became clear that it was not simply a few things that I liked. The whole subject was just beautiful. The list of black mathematicians is short and it doesn't seem to be growing very rapidly. Blackwell thinks that many people are just more ambitious than he is.
Black people go in other directions.
There's more certainty of having a fair income in those areas than there is in mathematics. At 16 he enrolled at the University of Illinois and expected to be an elementary school teacher. There were no black faculty members on that campus. He spent the next ten years at Howard University, building a national reputation as a creative researcher and a talented teacher. By the 1950's the employment situation for blacks had begun to change.