Edmund Bussey, the first Black Bachelor of Science graduate of Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley

In honor of Black History Month, we wish to recognize the first Black student to study and receive a degree in electrical engineering at UC Berkeley. This profile is taken from a longer essay on the first African American students in science and engineering at UC Berkeley and part of an ongoing EECS Departmental effort to report that history.

Edmund Bussey (1922–2016) was the first African American, according to available records, to graduate with a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1949. Edmund Bussey was born in Bakersfield in the Central Valley, and he never expected to go to college. As a boy, he and his brothers helped his farming family by picking hops and cotton. “I had hoped I wouldn’t have to do menial work like picking cotton all my life, but I couldn’t really see anything out there that I would be doing,” he recalled ¹. Like Joseph Gier ² and Archie Williams ³, African American engineering students before him, Bussey traveled a long road to earn his degree. He did not enter UC Berkeley as a freshman. He took courses in mathematics at Los Angeles City College and then worked at Douglas Aircraft, designing machine tools. Towards the end of WWII, he served one year in the military and then transferred to the University of Southern California (USC). After a period there, he gained admission to UC Berkeley in 1946 and earned his Bachelor of Science in 1949. His engineering classes were crowded with veterans on the GI Bill. He reported that it was hard to speak with faculty; usually, only teaching assistants were available, he said, and “even then, you didn’t have many people to talk to or ask questions.” Initially, Bussey faced academic challenges, but his persistence paid off as he gradually found his footing and excelled in electrical engineering. By then, he had discovered the value of studying with his peers: “And this time, I started working and studying with others rather than trying to do it alone.” After graduation in 1949, he worked for eight years on designing a system of canals for the US Bureau of Reclamation. Bussey also spent ten years as a successful realtor in Sacramento. He was motivated to sell real estate because local realtors “just simply would not sell to Black people.”

Bussey was later employed for twenty years as a senior engineer with Bechtel Corporation on various construction projects in the United States and overseas. In retirement, Bussey tutored and counseled Black youth through Downs Memorial Methodist Church in Oakland⁴. I personally remember Dr. Bussey enthusiastically reaching out to the staff of UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Undergraduate Matters Office in 2002 to recruit student affairs staff to mentor young people in his church. In retirement, Bussey and his wife volunteered in a reading program for children at Longfellow Elementary School in Berkeley. Edmund Bussey was extremely proud of his degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

1. “Oral History with Edmund ‘Ed’ Bussey,” interviewed by Amy Holloway, California State University, Sacramento, 1998, 13. ↩︎
2. Joseph Gier earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1933. https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/history/gier/ ↩︎
3. Archie Williams, an Olympic track star, earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1939. https://engineering.berkeley.edu/archie-williams/ ↩︎
4. Downs Memorial Methodist Church was established in 1890. ↩︎