Best 19 quotes of Margot Lee Shetterly on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Evolution occurred in scientific progress as it happened in nature: a positive trait was passed along, then proliferated; obsolete characteristics withered away, and the technology and the organization evolved into something new.

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.

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.

Negroes joined their countrymen in recoiling at the horrors Germany Visited upon its Jewish citizens by restricting the type of jobs they were allowed to hold and the businesses they could start, imprisoning them wantonly and depriving them of due process and all citizenship rights, subjecting them to state-sanctioned humiliation and violence, segregating them into ghettos, and ultimately working them to death in slave camps and marking them for extermination. 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?

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.

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.

The black female mathematicians who walked into Langley in 1943 would find themselves at the intersection of these great transformations, their sharp minds and ambitions contributing to what the United States would consider one of its greatest victories.

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

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

They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons, warding off the presumption of inferiority because they were Negro or female.

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?

West Virgina never left Katherine's heart, but Virginia was her destiny.

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.

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

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.