Namandjé Bumpus was an undergraduate student when she delivered her first national conference lecture. In the audience were those she hoped someday to call her peers in science and research. When she concluded, hearty applause followed, but later came a moment of shock.
“After my talk, a very established, White senior faculty member came up to me and said it was good, but you sound like you’re from a slum.”
Although stunned, Bumpus recovered in time to politely retort: “It seems like you’re basically saying I’m Black.” With that, the faculty member turned and walked away.
Bumpus, then a young, aspiring scholar and future pharmacologist, did what she learned as a child — to give voice to injustice and not shrink. That encounter would be the first of many that Bumpus would recognize as overtly racist or subtle signs of disrespect. Over the years, says Bumpus, they have become common threads in the “millions of stories that she and most Black people in science can tell” — despite how far they climb.
Undeterred, Bumpus, now 39, has blazed a career path that’s taken her to the top of her field. In May, Bumpus made history when she was named director of the nearly 130-year-old Department of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The appointment makes Bumpus the first African American woman to lead a department at the School of Medicine and the only African American woman currently chairing a pharmacology department at any medical school in the United States.
When Bumpus’ promotion was announced publicly on May 13, the COVID-19 pandemic had already shuttered the medical school and her lab. Still, calls and well wishes from some colleagues and even neighbors showered her on that day. But hate rained down, too, she said, in the form of “racist Tweets and emails” from those who balked at and questioned her appointment. For Bumpus, though, the moment was bittersweet for other reasons.
“It was hard to be as joyful as I should have been because of the emotion of everything that I saw happening in the world.” The shooting deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor were among them. Then, just days after her appointment, Bumpus says, came the killing of George Floyd and, on its heels, a national uprising. “I definitely felt a heaviness.” In those moments, Bumpus was reminded of another weight that she’s known.
