The Einstein we celebrate is a towering figure in science, but Albert Einstein also had a rich and complex passion for racial healing.

This was catalyzed during his time in the U.S., when he witnessed injustice towards African Americans that contradicted the American commitment to liberty and human equality that so drew him.

The more I feel an American,

he wrote, in a still-trenched 1946 essay called The Negro Question, the more this situation pains me.

I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out. Even before he fled Nazi Germany and settled for the rest of his career at Princeton,

Einstein had a lively and supportive correspondence with American black leaders and organizers,

including W.E.B. Du Bois. He joined his name to an international campaign to save the Scottsboro Boys.

He founded an anti-lynching initiative with Paul Robeson.

And when the renowned opera singer Marian Anderson came to sing in Princeton,

that township's deep segregation barred her from staying in the best hotels,

and so Einstein invited her to stay in his home.

This is Becoming Wise, an inquiry into the mystery and art of living.

I'm Krista Tippett.

S. James Gates is a successor to Einstein's social and scientific legacy.

He's a string theorist and the first African American to hold an endowed chair in physics at a major American research university.

And he traces Einstein's racial sensibility to a sense of empathy manifest even in his approach to science.

Essentially, whenever his great moments of insight occurred, he cast them in the form of parables.

So, for example, the great breakthrough of special relativity, which occurred in 1905.

If you listen to him, he'll tell you that it all began with him wondering what the world would look like if he could ride along on a beam of light.

That's a story.

That's a parable.

Here's someone who looks at the world, ask very simple questions about the world, and recognizes in asking the questions that they contain an essentially deep and fundamental fact, one which, curious enough, when he asks, he does not understand, but he knows the question is right.

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