Black Techies

Hidden Human Computers

Dozens of African American women worked for NASA as expert mathematicians from the 1940s to the 1960s and almost no one knows about it. Segregated within NASA facilities in Hampton, Va., well-educated Black women used slide rules and pencils to do the calculations for flights by astronauts John Glenn and Alan Shepherd.

Image: Melba Roy, NASA Mathematician, at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1964. Credit: NASA/Corbis

That this history is little known makes it ripe for research by collaborators Lucy Short ’15 (St. Louis) and American studies professor Duchess Harris, whose grandmother, Miriam Daniel Mann, was one of these extraordinary women.

Their collaboration began when Professor Harris invited Short, an American studies major, to join her in researching the human “computers,” as these women and their White women counterparts were known.

Professor Harris found this project compelling not solely because of her grandmother’s work, but because, “I am the descendant of enslaved Africans who became the first free Blacks in America. Because of them, I am here.”

They applied for and received a student-faculty research grant that supported travel to Hampton, home of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, now known as NASA’s Langley Research Center. There they met with local collaborator Margot Lee Shetterly (a Black descendant of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and daughter of retired NASA engineer Robert B. Lee) as well as historians at the Hampton History Museum and at NASA. They also visited the archaeological site of the Great Contraband Camp, a community of freed Blacks.

In 1831, Virginia enacted anti-literacy legislation to prevent the education of slaves and freedmen. But in the 1860s, thanks to the efforts of educator Mary Smith Peake and sympathetic generals at nearby Fort Monroe, former slaves had their first opportunities to obtain an education, culminating in the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University), which became the alma mater of Booker T. Washington and scores of other Black educators and leaders. The Black women who became the computers at NASA were required to first take a course at Hampton.

“While we were touring NASA, Mary Gainer, the center’s historic preservation officer, pointed out a building used by the computers,” says Short.  Professor Harris asked, ‘Is that where my grandmother would have worked?’

“‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s where the White women worked. The Black women were in another building about a mile away, on the other side of the gate.’” These were women calculating the trajectories for America’s first manned space flights—segregated in a building with few amenities at a research center built on the site of the former Chesterville plantation.

The interconnections of the computers, the plantation, pioneering educational efforts, and a community of freedmen interested the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, which provided a grant for Shetterly, Short, and Harris to expand their study. This grant was followed by a sustainability grant from Macalester, which allows further exploration of this unsustainable, segregated way of life.

Short is continuing the research as part of her senior honors project, which focuses on Black feminism. Another product of this work is a digital archive, Human Computers at NASA, developed in collaboration with the Macalester Library.

Maryam Mirzakhani (Persian: مریم میرزاخانی ‎; born May 1977) is an Iranian mathematician, Professor of Mathematics (since September 1, 2008) at Stanford University. Her research interests include Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. On August 12, 2014, Mirzakhani became the first woman as well as the first Iranian to have ever been awarded the Fields Medal.

Lupita Nyong’o is on the cover of People as the most beautiful person for 2014 in their annual “50 Most Beautiful” issue. This is the first time that anyone of her complexion has made the cover and she’s only the third Black woman to make the cover, other than Halle Berry (2003) and Beyoncé (2012). 

She shared some insights on beauty in a behind the scenes video for the shoot for this cover. She made some really wonderful statements, some of which I included below:

The first person to tell me that I was beautiful was definitely my mother. She said that a lot, especially when I felt the least bit beautiful which is, you know, as an adolescent you go through times when you feel ugly in general. But my mother always said I was beautiful and I finally believed her at some point.

She’s regularly cited her mother as one of her main supporters in terms of fostering her self-esteem in her beauty, inside and out. She mentioned the importance of being content and I truly believe a part of her allure is her joy. It comes through in her every action and it’s beautiful where it just compliments her glorious dark skin, emotive hopeful eyes, adorable nose, incredible smile, and edges of the gawds, all on a remarkable symmetrical face. 

I feel most beautiful when I am content. That for me is more important than my physical presentation because it’s through inner contentment and happiness that I care about my presentation.

In the behind the scenes video, she also mentioned the role of laughter in her adult life and this definitely connects to the previous quote in terms of internal contentment being the origin for feeling beautiful.

I think the older I get, the more I laugh. I think I’ve laughed a lot in ways; I wish I remembered to laugh like that when I was a teenager.

This made me think of the carefree Black girl conception that many Black women talk about and it made me happy to hear her discuss the role of laughter. An internal source of joy and confidence in appearance are radical acts for Black women in a society that regularly denies us joy and beauty. I am acutely aware of how people hate Black women and also want us to hate ourselves. This dehumanization isn’t just emotional and interpersonal but is a foundation on which oppressions such as misogynoir and colourism rest on. There are people invested—deeply in fact—in not only Lupita being invisible but that no one find her beautiful. They’re terrified that the status quo may shift even a little. And it wouldn’t be a complete shift. Lupita is still very well educated, from a Black immigrant middle class two-parent family and is thin in accordance with most Hollywood standards, so there are elements of privilege as well.

Even so, that beautiful dark skin on the cover will be a problem for many. There have been Black men heavily invested in making sure no one believes she’s beautiful. This isn’t completely about the cishet Black male gaze in a sexual context, though a factor, but also about how it shifts some cishet Black men’s worldview where they may have nothing but “at least” they aren’t Black women. If Black women are to be loathed, Black men can justify their misogynoir as simply being what everyone else feels about us, and it is what everyone else feels about us. Black men did not invent the hatred of Black women nor do they enact it alone. However, if Black women are not to be loathed and some are even deemed beautiful and valuable—even the ones who don’t meet every Eurocentric bullet point in terms of what “beauty” is—then it shifts the ground for many Black men whose choices and gaze are shaped by misogynoir that remains unchecked. This presents a conflict for them and some have lashed out because of it.

There’s also the issue of the White Gaze where even suggesting that a Black woman is beautiful upsets Whites who think that then means White women are being called “ugly.” They purposely ignore the structural power and privilege difference and even the exposure scale differences in the mainstream for White women versus Black women. When I wrote Yeah, Black Women Are Great. Fin., I made it clear that Black women need the space to celebrate our beauty (and not just aesthetically, though yes, that matters as well when our exterior and interior qualities are degraded on the hour) without the White supremacist notion that not reifying Eurocentric beauty standards at every moment means Black women are somehow “harming” White women or any non-Black women. (The latter can be anti-Black at times and placed “above” Black women, as non-Black women of colour, in terms of beauty, but placed “below” White women. Then there’s the intraracial manifestation of colourism where some light skinned Black women may also reject this cover or dark Black women being considered beautiful as well.)

I’m also aware of those among us Black people who think this cover is as simple as “White approval” yet do not understand how visibility as fully human and recognition matters in the mainstream even as Black people create our own media. This is not an “either/or” situation but a “both/and” one. Representation among the mainstream—as it shapes media, politics and culture, which means it has a great deal of power—is not the desire for interpersonal White favor. It’s the desire for the affirmation of humanity so that we are not punished for not being viewed as human. We may not need Whites’ “approval” of us in the mainstream but we most certainly cannot afford Whites’ dehumanization of us in the mainstream. 

While I am not a fan of People and I most certainly don’t read it regularly, I’m also aware of what representation means. Lupita mentioned the importance of representation for Black girls, especially, in a previous speech at Essence Magazine’s 7th Annual Black Women In Hollywood luncheon:

And so I hope that my presence on your screens and in the magazines may lead you, young girl, on a similar journey. That you will feel the validation of your external beauty but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside. There is no shame in Black beauty.

Representation as human, as beautiful and as relevant matters for Black women, especially dark Black women (in this case; in other cases Black trans women, fat Black women etc.). Lupita can have this moment without the suggestion that it somehow “harms” Black men (as if their gaze has to matter to Black women at all times) or White women (as if they cannot love themselves unless Black women hate ourselves; well…hmm), without the suggestion that it means Black people no longer care about the media and content that we create ourselves (because let’s be crystal clear here, the mainstream pilfers Black creativity and culture anyway) or any other nonsensical or cruel suggestion meant to harm Black women that everyone was taught to hate. Lupita is clearly at a point of a great deal of self-love. A lot of Black women are. And we deserve to be. 

I hope Lupita continues to thrive in her career (the acting one); I look forward to seeing her in any visual media (even as small as her Instagram). This People announcement as “Most Beautiful” made Lupita happy, as she tweeted, so I am (and many people are) happy for her. Congrats to Lupita Nyong’o. 

Related Essay Compilation: On Beauty Politics

March 20th Should Be International Shoe Day. 

I pronounce March 20th to be International Shoe Day because I love shoes, and it’s my birthday, and making pronouncements is the kind of thing one can do on their birthday…

Really though, in addition to being my birthday, March 20th should be International Shoe Day because it is the day that Jan E. Matzeliger received a patent for his shoe lasting machine in 1883 and soon completely revolutionized the shoe industry.

Jan Matzeliger was a black immigrant to the United States from the Dutch colony of Suriname. He arrived at age 19 speaking no English and having very little education. He settled in Lynn, Massachusetts and got a job doing maintenance work in a shoe factory. By age 30, Matzeliger had invented and patented the machine that allowed for the rapid production of high quality shoes - the shoe lasting machine.

Prior to the mid 1880s, most shoes were made entirely by hand. A shoe “last” was a model of a particular person’s foot, and these lasts were made so that shoes could be made to fit well. Shoe lasters were individuals who shaped the shoe and put the upper and lower parts of the shoe together. Such detailed and tedious work was commonly thought to be the toughest part of shoe making, and, of course, such work could only be done with human hands. Before the introduction of Matzeliger’s innovation, shoe making was a specialized skill, and expert shoe makers produced approximately 50 pairs of shoes per day.

Matzeliger’s shoe lasting machine held a shoe on a last, pulled the leather down around the shoe’s heel, set and drove in the nails, and then pushed out the finished shoes. With this new machine, 700 could be produced in a day. 700. That’s a 1300% increase. Forget incremental change, that’s a game-changer. In addition to drastically increasing high quality shoe production, the shoe lasting machine cut shoe prices in half, and it created tremendous opportunities for the employment of more unskilled workers.

This Week in NYC Tech is a NYCEDC weekly series that features interesting happenings in the New York tech community. Events are curated from what we see around the Internet. Get plugged in!

Tuesday, March 18

NYC Tech Breakfast, 8 am

At this monthly breakfast get-together techies, developers, designers, and entrepreneurs share learn from their peers through show and tell / show-case style presentations.

Getting Started with Wordpress, 6:30 - 8 pm

Beginner to intermediate course for those seeking an easy, user-friendly way to set up and maintain a website. Held at the Made in NY Media Center, this class will walk through the basics of getting your site live quickly.

NYEdTechStartup Showcase 2014, 7 - 9 pm

Come and hear what New York Ed Tech startups are working on. See the community demonstrate how they’re solving some of education’s challenges with innovative and scalable technologies. Presenting companies include Credly, MakerState, MarcoPolo, Mediathread, and Pear Deck. 

Brooklyn iOS Developer Meetup, 7 pm

Join Etsy, TENDIGI, and Ultravisual for a night of iOS tools and tips. 

Wednesday, March 19

2014 New York City Clean Tech Open Northeast Kickoff Party, 5:30 pm

Entrepreneurs, students, savvy technologists, investors, professions, and other interested parties welcome! Join for an amazing night of clean tech community networking with a special focus on the upcoming Cleantech Open 2014 Accelerator program. 

Hardwired NYC #8, 5:45 pm

Join the Hardwired NYC Meetup group at Digital for this month’s speakers including Raymond Velez, the global CTO of Razorfish and Bein Einstein, creator of 3Doodler, the world’s first 3D-printing pen. 

NYC Pyladies Coding Potluck, 7 pm

Tipping Point Partners has invited PyLadies to hang out and code. Female python coders can bring their laptop. Everyone who comes will be working on a tutorial or their personal projects. 

Building a Brooklyn Network: Resources for Every BK Entrepreneur, 7 pm

The Brooklyn Entrepreneurs group invites entrepreneurs to join them at the Huge offices in Dumbo for a chance to Build Your Brooklyn Network. The event will consist of high-energy short presentations and free drinks. This time, they’ll be showcasing the best of BK networking resources: a handpicked group of the best co-working spaces and city-wide resource centers from across the borough. 

Thursday, March 20

Silicon Harlem Tech Talk, 5:30 pm

For Women’s History Month, Silicon Harlem is celebrating Women in Tech. Featured guest is Andrea Taylor of Microsoft.  Tech Talk will hosted by The Honorable Charles B. Rangel, who will be on hand to support the efforts of Silicon Harlem and help transform the community into a Tech and Innovation hub. March 20, 2014.

March Demo Night- NYC Media Startups, 6:30 pm

Join CUNY for March Demo Night, featuring exciting new media startups: 29th Street Publishing, The Howler, BKLYNR, RebelMouse, and Camayak

Startup Strategies - Asian Women on the Forefront, 6 pm

Asian Women In Business will be focusing on Asian women entrepreneurs who are at various stages of business development, some are self-funded and others have received multiple rounds of funding. Join us at Google to meet and listen to a panel of startups, women with undeniable passion and fortitude, who are in the midst of it all.

Friday, March 21

DUMBO Tech Breakfast Meetup, 8:30 am

Grab some food and talk tech.

Techstravaganza NYC 2014, 8:00 - 5:00 pm

The Treasures of Accra’s Growing Art Scene

In Accra there is a perception that art is only for the moneyed classes or people from abroad, but Swaniker hopes that having the cafe in Bubiashie, a community of working people, will inspire and change mindsets.

“I think what is happening in Accra right now is incredibly exciting,” says Nana Oforiatta Ayim, founder of the cultural research platform ANO.