INTRODUCTION Black girls and femmes love math We love the intricacy and geometry of our braids cornrows curls and coils We like playing with building blocks calculating how to make structures that will stay up and look good Not too long ago ancestors such as Harriet Tubman studied the location of the Drinking Gourd constellation the Big Dipper to lead black slaves to freedom Math and astronomy have always been part of our story Far too often American society has not known how to make room for this interest and ability in math as black girls and femmes grow into adulthood Stories are told about whether we are smart enough whether math is for us whether we need to focus on homemaking or clothing as if we have to choose between being fashion mavens and mathematicians For this reason many have turned away from any kind of love for mathematics I was lucky to be encouraged at an early age and allowed to play with my blocks until I was ten at which point I began a journey that would lead me to the heart of the universe As a particle physicist who uses math to describe the universe when it was less than a second old math is my everything This dance of loving numbers and representations of numbers has helped me make a life for myself and taken me around the world from my birthplace in Los Angeles California to New York Germany South Korea and Taiwan But I did not get here purely through love of mathematics There were black women who came before me in the field of space science They were part of a group of computers human calculators who did computations before machines could do them This was a job women were uniquely allowed to do in science even
though they were excluded elsewhere A lot of this had to do with the fact that the job was hard Doing the kind of calculations a modern machine does required periods of long intense focus It was considered beneath the dignity of smart men But without this work there would be no successful human space missions Our satellites would crash and go off course Even though the work these black women computers did was devalued it was essential to this scientific enterprise Their work was also hard in another way As black women who lived in a segregated United States they like so many of us today had to overcome the belief that by virtue of their gender sex and race they were not qualified to participate in science The women described in this book are proof that people like me are possible It is a joy to inherit the mantle of their great mission a love of mathematics and a belief that all of us are entitled to love it With this book we hand the torch to the next generation of black girls and femmes the mathematicians and astrophysicists of the future Chanda Rosalyn Sojourner Prescod Weinstein Chanda Rosalyn Sojourner Prescod Weinstein is one of fewer than 100 black American women to earn a PhD in physics A former NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow Dr Prescod Weinstein subsequently held a Martin Luther King Postdoctoral Fellowship in physics at MIT As a researcher at the University of Washington she studies where particles come from and worries about the dark matter problem
CHAPTER ONE NASA'S SECRET Annie Easley and the other five women computers hurried through the building eager to see the photograph that had been taken for an upcoming open house The photograph of all six women at work was enlarged so visitors could get a view of what they did each day As computers they performed mathematical calculations for the engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland Ohio When the women saw the photo one of the other computers turned to Easley and apologized Oh Annie they cut you out of the picture The fact that something was cut from the photograph wasn't surprising Photographers crop anything that looks out of place or might Annie Easley played an important part at NASA as a computer but the agency treated her as lesser because of her skin color
