Margot Lee Shetterly Quotes

Surely she had never traveled a greater emotional distance

In the fall of 1958, Virginia's governor Lindsay Almond chained the doors of the schools in localities that attempted to comply with the Supreme Court's Brown decision. Thirteen thousand students in the three cities that had moved forward with integration - Front Royal, Charlottesville, and Norfolk - found themselves sitting at home in the fall of 1958.

Early in her career at Langley, Dorthy Lee was interviewed for the Daily Press, in all probability by Virginia Biggins, the female reporter assigned to Langley beat. "Do you believe," she was asked, "that women working with men have to think like a man, work like a dog, and act like a lady?" "Yes, I do," Lee said, who was mildly mortified to read her words in the Sunday paper.

There were those within NASA who believed, and would continue to believe for decades into the future, that the government's decision to put all its chips on a short-term strategy to beat the Soviets came at the cost of the opportunity to turn humans into a truly spacefaring species.

Insatiably curious about the world.

Most of all, she went out of her way to provide them with the kinds of experiences that would expand their understanding of what was possible in their lives.

That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother's age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine. My

For Mary Jackson, life was a long process of raising one's expectations.

She trained the girls in her Girl Scout troop to believe that they could be anything, and she went to lengths to prevent negative stereotypes of their race from shaping their internal views of themselves and other Negroes. It was difficult enough to rise above the silent reminders of Colored signs on the bathroom doors and cafeteria tables. But to be confronted with the prejudice so blatantly, there in that temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought, by something so mundane, so ridiculous, so universal as having to go to the bathroom...In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn't good enough for the white pot.

Eastman Jacob's legendary attempt to launch a car attached to a glider plane using Hampton's Tony Chesapeake Avenue as a runway only confirmed the Hamptonian's feelings that the Good Lord didn't always see fit to give book sense and common sense to the same individual.

As with the legal case of Irene Morgan, the woman arrested in Virginia's Gloucester County in 1946 for the same infraction, the battle over integration on Montgomery buses eventually won a hearing in front of the Supreme Court. Once again America's highest court ruled segregation illegal. The controversy over the bus boycott vaulted the young Dr. King into the national headlines as the leader of the civil rights movement. Langley

Like craftsmen in a medieval guild, NASA engineers hoped that one day their children would decide to take up the mantle of the profession they held so dear.

She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer.

Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth.

There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.

In 1951, Air Scoop published a long list of organizations that the government had labeled totalitarian, Communist, or subversive, the clear message that affiliation with any of them might jeopardize one's job.

Many times, when children enter school they shun mathematics and science during the years when they should be learning the basics.

War, technology, and social progress; it seemed that the second two always came with the first. The NACA's work - more intense and

They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.

Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status--none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.

James Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker, eloquently articulated the Negro dilemma in a letter he wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier: "Being an American of dark complexion," wrote Thompson, "these questions flash through my mind: 'Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?' ... 'Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?' These and other questions need answering; I want to know, and I believed every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know.

black people frequently disqualified themselves even without the WHITES ONLY sign in view

Because of the overwhelmingly white public face of the space program, the black engineers, scientists, and mathematicians who were deeply involved with the space race nevertheless lived in its shadows, even within the black community. Katherine

she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions. It

Sometimes, she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions.

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley's West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female.

Of course, while Katherine took the accolades in stride, she never took the work for granted. Not a morning dawned that she didn't wake up eager to get to the office. The passion that she had for her job was a gift, one that few people ever experienced.

I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured.

She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. But

At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible.

Women occupied many of the cubicles; they answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but they also made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and conferred with my father and other men in the office on the stacks of documents that littered their desks. That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother's age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.

The cruelty of racial prejudice was so often accompanied by absurdity, a tangle of arbitrary rules and distinctions that subverted the shared interests of people who had been taught to see themselves as irreconcilably different.

From the fissure of their ever-present double consciousness sprang the idea of the double victory, articulated by James Thompson in his letter to the Pittsburgh Courier: "Let colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory; the first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies within.

And while the black women are the most hidden of the mathematicians who worked at the NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later at NASA, they were not sitting alone in the shadows: the white women who made up the majority of Langley's computing workforce over the years have hardly been recognized for their contributions to the agency's long-term success. Virginia Biggins worked the Langley beat for the Daily Press newspaper, covering the space program starting in 1958. "Everyone said, 'This is a scientist, this is an engineer,' and it was always a man," she said in a 1990 panel on Langley's human computers. She never got to meet any of the women. "I just assumed they were all secretaries," she said. Five

a lifetime of stories

As fantastical as America's space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.

Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well.

Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal.
Newly independent countries around the world, eager for alliances that would support their emerging identities and set them on their path to long-term prosperity, were confronted with a version of the same question black Americans had asked during World War II. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America's model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them?

Future generations would take the advances for granted

No longer just "a dull bunch of grey buildings with grey people who worked with slide rules and wrote long equations on blackboards," NASA, the public now believed, was all that stood between them and a Red sky.

The community certainly included black English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors, and contractors, black cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents, and undertakers, several black lawyers, and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did.

So many ways to screw the pooch, and just one staggeringly complex, scrupulously modeled, endlessly rehearsed, indefatigably tested way to succeed.

But simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance.

She seemed to absorb the short-term oscillations of life without being dislodged by them, as though she were actually standing back observing that both travail and elation were merely part of a much larger, much smoother curve.

If Mary had applied for a job as janitor, the doors to the school would swing wide open. As a professional engineer-in-training with a plan to occupy the building for the nefarious purpose of advancing her education, she needed to petition the city of Hampton for "special permission" to attend classes in the whites-only school. Mary

Not even Pearl Young, the NACA's first female engineer and the founder of the agency's rigorous editorial review process, left behind research with her name on it. From