…offer him a full-time professorship because of his race. He was also declined employment at the chemical company DuPont for the same reason.
In 1936, Percy Julian left DePauw to work as the director of research at Glidden, a company that supplied soybean oil products. A contributing factor in this was his command over German, as Glidden had just purchased a German plant to extract vegetable oil from soybeans to create paints and other products. At Glidden, he extracted a type of soy protein that was used by the U.S. Navy to produce Aero-Foam. This was a foam-like substance that was used to put out oil and gas fires and was popularly used during World War II.
Julian also continued his own research and contributed vastly to the process of synthesizing steroids such as progesterone, testosterone and cortisone. He left Glidden n 1953 to establish his own company by the name of Julian Laboratories. He sold this company in 1961 which made him a millionaire, a feat few African Americans had achieved before then. He then established a non-profit organization by the name of “Julian Research Institute” which he ran until his death due to liver cancer in 1975.