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March 17 - March 30, 2023
And since the middle of the last decade, mathematicians had meant women.
Believing that civil rights were inextricably linked to economic rights, Randolph fought tirelessly for the right of Negro Americans to participate fairly in the wealth of the country they had helped build.
They would need a separate space, Melvin Butler knew. Then they would have to appoint someone to head the new group, an experienced girl—white, obviously—someone whose disposition suited the sensitivity of the assignment.
But there was no way that Randolph, or the men at the laboratory, or anyone else could have predicted that the hiring of a group of black female mathematicians at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory would end at the Moon.
Education topped her list of ideals; it was the surest hedge against a world that would require more of her children than white children, and attempt to give them less in return.
“Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world” were entitled to “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear,
How could an American Negro observe the annihilation happening in Europe without identifying it with their own four-century struggle against deprivation, disenfranchisement, slavery, and violence?
The intransigence of the forces opposed to the Negro’s drive for equality was made almost unbearably plain in a 1943 comment by Mark Etheridge, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, who had served as the first head of Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee. “There is no power in the world—not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis—which would now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation,”
“Help us to get some of the blessings of democracy here at home first before you jump on the ‘free other peoples’ bandwagon and tell us to go forth and die in a foreign land,” said P. B. Young,
Who knew American democracy more intimately than the Negro people? They knew democracy’s every virtue, vice, and shortcoming, its voice and contour, by its profound and persistent absence in their lives.
Negro life in America was a never-ending series of negotiations: when to fight and when to concede.
Their facilities might be separate, but as far as the West Computers were concerned, they would prove themselves equal or better, having internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far.
the choice was to integrate or, like its neighbor to the east, dig in and contest the ruling. Rather than fight, Holt moved to integrate the state’s public graduate schools, asking his friend Davis in a clandestine meeting to handpick three West Virginia State College graduates to desegregate the state university, starting in the summer of 1940.
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.
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?
Most blacks automatically put on a mask around whites, a veil that hid the “dead-weight of social degradation” that scholar W. E. B. Du Bois gave voice to so eloquently in The Souls of Black Folk.
Years after the end of the war, the shortage of adequate housing for the area’s Negro residents was still the reality. If the government decided to demolish Newsome Park tomorrow, there simply would be no place for the residents to go.
Or maybe it was her father’s pragmatic dictum—“You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you”—that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing.
More than a decade after the first West Computers headed to Hampton Institute for wartime ESMWT classes, Langley’s black professionals still relied on the august black college for professional training and career advancement.
Virtually every review of the situation questioned how much desperately needed brainpower was being squandered by the intentional neglect of America’s Negro schools.
She had worked too hard, her parents had worked too hard; a love of education and a belief that their country would eventually heed the better angels of its nature was one of their great bequests to their eleven children.
Throughout the South, municipalities maintained two parallel inefficient school systems, which gave the short end of the stick to the poorest whites as well as blacks. 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.
The Allen School was founded in 1887 by white United Methodist missionaries, with the goal of providing talented Negro girls from Appalachian North Carolina with the best possible start in life.
“In trying to provide leadership in world events, it is necessary for this country to indicate to the world that we practice equality for all within this country. Those countries where colored persons constitute a majority should not be able to point to a double standard existing within the United States.”
“I would rather have my children live in ignorance than have them go to school with Negroes,” one white parent told a reporter.
As white parents herded their students into the new segregation academies, the most resourceful black families scrambled to salvage their children’s educations by sending them to live with relatives around the state, some as far afield as North Carolina. Prince Edward’s schools would remain closed from 1959 through 1964, five long and bitter years.
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.
There was America before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and there was America after; King’s message would ever after remind all the citizens of the nation that the Negro dream and the American dream were one and the same.
It was serendipitous that Lovell had taken the technique for a test run on Apollo 8 and knew how to make the calculations. What seemed like a routine check on a previous mission would save the crew’s lives this time around. No one knew better than Katherine Johnson that luck favored the prepared.
