6/26/2023 0 Comments Raye taskrShe told Good Morning America that she was surrounded by male staff who thought she was “the help.” She recalled one instance when she walked into a meeting room, and a male co-worker said, “I’d like a cup of coffee.” Montague was promoted, but her struggles did not end there. If she left her house at 10 p.m., she would make it into the office by midnight. Determined to push forward, she bought herself a 1949 Pontiac and taught herself to drive-slowly. He told her that if she wanted the job, she would have to work nights-a problem for Montague because the buses did not run late and she did not know how to drive. After one year, she asked her boss for another promotion. She studied computer programming at night, and was eventually promoted to a digital computer systems operator and a computer systems analyst. All along, her plan was to rise in the ranks. So Montague obtained a business degree from the Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College, and then moved to Washington, D.C. Montague had hoped to study engineering at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, but at that time, the school did not award engineering degrees to African American students. “I didn’t realize I had been insulted,” she added. “You’d have to be an engineer, but you don’t have to worry about that,” he said, as Montague remembered while speaking to Good Morning America. Montague asked someone working at the exhibit what she would have to do to work on a similar ship. During WWII, when she was seven years old, her grandfather had taken her to see a German submarine that had been captured off the coast of South Carolina. What Montague wanted was to be an engineer. “But you can do anything you want to do and be anything you want to be.” “You’re female, you’re black and you’re going to have a segregated school education-so you’re going to have three strikes against you,” Montague recalled her mother saying in a 2012 interview with Rhonda Owen of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Though Montague’s mother encouraged her daughter to aspire to greatness in spite of this climate of racial tension, she made it clear that the road ahead would not be easy. She graduated from high school in 1956, one year after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, and one year before the Little Rock Nine caused a firestorm when they enrolled at a traditionally white school. In 2017, the Navy referred to her as its own “hidden figure,” a reference to the book and movie about three little-known black women who played a vital role in NASA’s accomplishments during the Space Race.īorn in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1935, Montague came of age in a deeply segregated South. Her often overlooked contributions to America’s military history, which she made in the face of explicit racism and sexim, have started to gain new recognition in recent years. Seelye reports for the New York Times, Montague died of congestive heart failure earlier this month at the age of 83. It was the beginning of a new, pioneering chapter in Naval ship design, and Montague was at its center.Īs Katharine Q. Eighteen hours and 26 minutes later, the computer’s printer churned out the complete specifications for the design of a frigate. Montague, the Navy’s first female program manager of ships, called in her staff on a Saturday morning and started up a computer program that she had created. The process had, up to that point, typically taken two years. In the early 1970s at the height of the Vietnam War, Navy engineer Raye Montague was given the daunting task of designing a U.S.
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