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Category: Margot Lee Shetterly

Margot Lee Shetterly

Our next-door neighbour taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother’s sorority, and electrical engineers sat on the board of my parents’ college alumni associations.

Mother, Parents, College

Margot Lee Shetterly

You can’t change history. These things happened the way they did. What you can change is how you look at it and how you understand that it takes the good moments and it takes the difficult moments to move forward.

Change, Good, Moments

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.

career, engineering, expertise

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

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.

racism, space-race

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.

change, change-your-life

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.

math, space, space-race, trigonometry, war

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.

amazing, besting-fear, curiosity, fear, fearless, inspirational-attitude, separation, space, void, wonder

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.

engineering, feminism, science, women

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.

black-history, black-women, feminism, nasa, us-history

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.

eager, job, passion

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.

american-history, black-history, history, women-s-history