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Reatha King

Reatha King
Reatha King 2009.jpg
Born April 11, 1938
Pavo, Georgia
Alma mater
Occupation chemist and businesswoman
Employer General Mills, Inc.

Reatha Clark King (born April 11, 1938) is an African-American chemist, the former Vice President of the General Mills Corporation; and the former President, Executive Director, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the General Mills Foundation, the philanthropic foundation of General Mills, Inc.

King was born in Pavo, Georgia, United States on April 11, 1938. Her father, Willie B. Clark, was a sharecropper, and her mother, Ola Mae Watts Campbell, had only a third-grade education. Reatha Clark began elementary school in a one-room school for grades 1–7, at Mt. Zion Baptist, a colored church, where she was taught by Florence Frazier. Later, she attended school in Coolidge, Georgia, and high school in Moultrie, Georgia. When she graduated from Moultrie in 1954, she was the valedictorian of her class.

She was recruited to attend Clark College in Atlanta, where she initially enrolled as a home economics major. She was encouraged to become a research chemist by the head of the chemistry department there, Alfred Spriggs. King earned a bachelor of science degree in chemistry and mathematics from Clark College. Spriggs also encouraged her to apply for a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which she received from 1958-1960. The fellowship supported her work at the University of Chicago, from which she obtained a master of science degree in chemistry in 1960. She went on to study with advisor Ole J. Kleppa, receiving her Ph.D. degree in thermochemistry from the University of Chicago in 1963. The title of her Ph.D. thesis was "Contributions to the Thermochemistry of the Laves Phases." While in Chicago she also met and married N. Judge King. She later earned a Master’s in Business Administration in finance management from Columbia University while on sabbatical.

King was employed for five years as a Research Chemist for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. She was the first African American female chemist to work at the agency. Her work there involved measuring the accurate heats of formation of gaseous fluorine compounds, and she received a Meritorious Publication Award for her paper on fluoride flame calorimetry. This research was important to the NASA space program. Her two children were born during this time.


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