Margot Lee Shetterly Quotes & Sayings

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 — Margot Lee Shetterly

She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer. — Margot Lee Shetterly

What I wanted was for them to have a grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic. — Margot Lee Shetterly

You can't leave the show," King told Nichols. "We are there because you are there." Black people have been imagined in the future, he continued, emphasizing to the actress how important and ground breaking a fact that was. Furthermore, he told her, he had studied the Starfleet's command structure and believed that it mirrored that of the US Air Force, making Uhura --- a black woman! --- fourth in command of the ship. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Future generations would take the advances for granted — Margot Lee Shetterly

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 — Margot Lee Shetterly

As a callow eighteen-year-old leaving for college, I'd seen my home town as a mere launching pad for a life in worldier locals, a pale to be from rather than a place to be. But years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city's hold on my identity and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to mean to me. — Margot Lee Shetterly

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Center. I rode shotgun in our 1970s Pontiac, — Margot Lee Shetterly

Their goal wasn't to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talents. Like the men they worked for, and the men they sent hurtling off into the atmosphere, they were just doing their jobs. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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

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

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

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

As far as segregationists were concerned, racial integration and communism were one and the same and posed the same kind of threat to traditional American values. Yet those charged with mounting the American offence in space saw strength in countering the Russian values of secrecy with its opposites - transparency, democracy, equality- and not a simulacrum. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Surely she had never traveled a greater emotional distance — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

The jobs, the housing, the relationships, the routines --- so many aspects of life that had been cut out of the whole cloth of the war emergency were now so intrinsic that it was easy to believe things had always been this way. Despite the best intentions of returning to their former lives, the come-heres tarried, realizing in small sips of awareness over the course of the war years --- or with great gulping realizations at the war's end abrupt end --- that they would not, or could not, go home again. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Black newspapers and their readers wasted no time in making the link between America's inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South. "While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools," opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its "Mississippiitis" - that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption - the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership. An editorial in the Cleveland Call and Post — Margot Lee Shetterly

Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible. — Margot Lee Shetterly

I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured. — Margot Lee Shetterly

black people frequently disqualified themselves even without the WHITES ONLY sign in view — Margot Lee Shetterly

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

Even as a professional in an integrated world, I had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took for an African American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on the Moon. — Margot Lee Shetterly

But having the independence of mind and the strength of personality to defend your work in front of the most incisive aeronautical minds --- that is what got you noticed.... That's what marked you as someone who should move ahead. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Is the kind of America I know worth defending? — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

The Byrd cronies retaliated by diverting taxpayer money to fund whites-only "segregation academies," private schools founded to circumvent integrated public schools. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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

each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us. The — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Eighty percent of the world's population is colored," the NACA's chief legal counsel Paul Dembling had written in a 1956 file memo. "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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

What she wouldn't have given for her father to see her - to see his baby girl who used to count the stars now sending men to travel among them. Joshua Coleman knew as if from second sight that Katherine, his brilliant, charismatic, inquisitive youngest child - a black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school - would somehow, someday, unite her story with the great epic of America. And — Margot Lee Shetterly

Katherine gave in to the wonder of the moment, imagining herself in the astronauts' place. What emotions welled up from the depths of their hearts as they regarded their watery blue home from the void of space? How did it feel to be separated by a nearly unimaginable gulf from the rest of humanity yet carry the hopes, dreams, and fears of their entire species there with them in their tiny, vulnerable craft? Most people she knew wouldn't have traded places with the astronauts for all of the gold in Fort Knox. The men existed all alone out their in the void of space, connected so tenuously to Earth, with the real possibility that something could go wrong. But given the chance to throw her lot in with the astronauts, Katherine Johnson would have packed her bags immediately. Even without the pressure of the space race, even without the mandate to beat the enemy. For Katherine Johnson, curiosity always bested fear. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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

But nearly three decades earlier, World War I had also been heralded as the event that would break the back of race prejudice. "With thousands of your sons in the camps and in France, out of this conflict you must expect nothing less than the enjoyment of full citizenship rights - the same as are enjoyed by every other citizen," President Woodrow Wilson, a native Virginian, vowed to American blacks — Margot Lee Shetterly

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

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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? The — Margot Lee Shetterly

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? — Margot Lee Shetterly

Insatiably curious about the world. — Margot Lee Shetterly

It wasn't northern agitators who pushed Negroes to question their country, as so many southern whites wanted to believe. It was their own pride, their patriotism, their deep and abiding belief in the possibility of democracy that inspired the Negro people. And why not? 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. The failure to secure the blessings of democracy was the feature that most defined their existence in America. Every Sunday they made their way to their sanctuaries and fervently prayed to the Lord to send them a sign that democracy would come to them. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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

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 — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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

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. My — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

For twelve school years, every morning, she had turned left out the front door to get to work. Now the taxi turned right, spiriting her off in the opposite direction. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table. — Margot Lee Shetterly

West Virgina never left Katherine's heart, but Virginia was her destiny. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

At fifty years old and many years into her second career, she reinvented herself as a computer programmer. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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 — Margot Lee Shetterly

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

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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 — Margot Lee Shetterly

Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

a lifetime of stories — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. "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, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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 things encounters something else: the unexpected. — Margot Lee Shetterly

...internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Now, at just thirty-eight years old, she found herself a widow and a mother, but also a professional still in the early days of realizing her long-held dream. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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 — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly

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. — Margot Lee Shetterly