Annie Jean Easley (1933-2011) was one of the first computer programmers at NASA, the US government’s space agency. She worked on the Centaur rocket, ozone studies and batteries for electric cars, among other things.
The Centaur rocket is still in use. It has put up many of the communication and weather satellites in orbit. It has sent unmanned spacecrafts – the Surveyors, Vikings, Voyagers, Cassini-Huygens and New Horizons – to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and beyond.
In 1955 she started work at a US government research lab near Cleveland, Ohio, at what is now known as the John Glenn Research Center. It became part of NASA in 1958.
She started work not as a computer programmer but as a computer in the Computer Services Division.
A computer used to be a person. She – computers were almost always a she – did calculations for engineers and scientists. When machine computers started to become common, they became the first programmers. Notice how that runs counter to current ideas of women as being bad with numbers and machines.
Easley programmed in SOAP (an assembly language) and FORTRAN. Among the computers she programmed were the IBM 650, IBM 704 and IBM System/360.
She loved working at NASA: there was so much talent, they all pulled together to get things done and they took pride in doing something great for the nation.
But it was not all was sweetness and light:
- After 34 years she never rose above the level of a worker bee, almost certainly because the White men who ran things came to certain unfounded conclusions about her because she was a Black woman.
- They would not pay for her work-related education at first, something they did as a matter of course for White men.
- She once found herself cut out of a picture of a machine she had helped to make!
The day she started there, the number of Black workers increased 33%: from three to four – out of 2,500 workers!
In time she became an Equal Employment Opportunity officer, looking into complaints of NASA being unfair to workers because of race, sex or age.
Something her mother told her over and over again back in Jim Crow Birmingham, Alabama where she grew up:
“You can be anything you want to. It doesn’t matter what you look like, what your size is, what your color is. You can be anything you want to, but you do have to work at it.”
Easley lived by that. From age 15 onwards she never let her sex, race or age limit her ideas of what she could do. If people stood in her way, she worked around them instead of giving up.
She retired in 1989 and became president of the Greater Cleveland Ski Council for three years. She did not learn to ski till her 40s. Later she became a Century 21 real estate agent. She was also a tutor, something she had been doing since her Birmingham days when she helped Blacks to pass the “literacy” test needed to register to vote.
– Abagond, 2016.
Sources: Engadget (2015), Cleveland.com (2011), Contemporary Black Biography (2007), NASA (2001).
See also:
- Welcome to Black Women’s History Month 2016!
- computer
- NASA spacecraft:
- Voyager – The Golden Record
- New Horizons
- Jim Crow
- Birmingham, Alabama
- The “twice as good” speech
- Bessie Coleman
582
What am amazing and accomplished woman i am not surprised that NASA did the dirt to her that they did. She is a wonderful inspiration and puts and end to the fallacy that women can’t be successful at math and science.
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“She once found herself cut out of a picture of a machine she had helped to make!”
cosign what Mary Burrell said ,and It angers me how we hqve been exclude in image if not in fact.
And this helps to prepetuate the negative lies and our cooperation with them. – the exclusions that is.
But is it natural interspecies compitition and gender dominace or insecurity of a population that inevitalably developed subordinate phenotypic traits due to northern migration and settlement?
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oh and this is some of the kinda posts I was complaining about ,not just the negative but the postive as well ,balance – a eternal truth.
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[…] Source: Annie Easley […]
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In many companies and organizations, appointing a person to be an EEOC officer is a way of sidelining them. It is a way to take them out of a line job with a promotion track and place them in a stagnant staff job where they are out of the way of the White males (and females) who want the higher salaries and glory.
It is maddening that the brainpower of a brilliant woman like Ms. Easley was squandered at NASA. A waste of human capital….
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Looking at the times 60’s and 70’s sexism and racism were obstacles for her being devalued.
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“It is maddening that the brainpower of a brilliant woman like Ms. Easley was squandered at NASA. A waste of human capital….”
How can you make that claim when she did the following while in their employ?
“Easley programmed in SOAP (an assembly language) and FORTRAN. Among the computers she programmed were the IBM 650, IBM 704 and IBM System/360.”
Where’s the evidence that she had the talent to contribute more? You seem to ignore that there’s such thing as individual talent. Based on the information given here, she was a decent, but not outstanding, technologist.
The claim that racism was the reason for her modest achievement is unconvincing.
Jan Matzeliger invented a shoe last machine in 1883 that revolutionized the shoe manufacturing industry by allowing one worker to do as much work as three to fourteen prior to his invention. His machine was colloquially called the ni**erhead Last, in “honor” of his ethnicity!
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@ gro jo
I think you are being wilfully obtuse. Any fair reading of the post would show that NASA clearly undervalued her talent.
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My dear Abagond, you are the obtuse one. I failed to find any indication that this lady was anything other than an adequate technician.
Please point out to me where you showed she had the talent to contribute more than she did?
A number of black technologists, working during the same period, contributed more than she did. How many patents did she hold?
Your penchant for finding black victims is in evidence here. Marc Hannah the man whose innovations made possible the computers that created the special effects for Jurassic Park would have been a better example.
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Dr. Patricia Bath, Dr Layla Zakaria Abdel Rahman, Alphonse Gerard, Thomas Mensah and others have hundreds of patents to their names.
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Alphonse Gerard should read Gerard Alphonse above.
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Gro jo,
“The claim that racism was the reason for her modest achievement is unconvincing.”
Why? Because there are other black people who achieved more?
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Yes.
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Nothing like working for a company built on dreams and ideas and getting stuck in a windowless basement cube.
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“In time she became an Equal Employment Opportunity officer, looking into complaints of NASA being unfair to workers because of race, sex or age.”
These positions are offered to employees deemed trustworthy by management. Their job is to monitor and squelch complaints by the lower order. The fact that she served in that capacity and spent 34 years on the job tells me she was happy there. Afrofem’s claim that she was thwarted by management just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Not every black person is a victim, sometimes, they are the tools used to victimize others.
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Gro jo,
Your logic does not compute. Some black people escaped slavery. Slavery was still racist.
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Something we must all remind ourselves prior to reading of Grojo JoJo’s comments. She’s not quite there when it comes to trolling, unlike some people.
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Shat on force, Thanks for the “like”. Relax, this isn’t Jamaica, so nobody will lynch you for being queer. The word “logic”, and the pretense to care about millions of Black slaves, coming from the childish Asian fascist is a sick joke.
Solesearch, what are you on about? We were discussing the modest achievements of Ms. Easley, not slavery. Do you or do you not have an opinion on that subject? Even during slavery you had blacks who were inventors. A law was passed preventing the patent office from issuing patents to slave owners who wanted to patent the inventions of their slaves. One such owner was no less a personage than the president of the confederate states, Jefferson Davis. To reiterate, Ms. Easley was a competent, but not outstanding computer scientist. She held no patents, nor did she publish any papers anyone cares to remember. As for management thwarting her talent, there’s no indication of that. She was a trusted employee, who policed the others on behalf of management as EEOC officer. Abagond and Afrofem are extrapolating way past what the facts can support when they claim that NASA held her back.
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@gro jo
LOL! Your comments can be intelligent, probative and occasionally brilliant.
I like the fact that you rarely accept anything written on its face. That is a quality I strive to emulate.
Your comments can also be incredibly garrulous and inflammatory. (chuckle)
They say it takes all types to make a world. Your online persona certainly proves that. It’s all just entertainment, isn’t it? On to Ms. Easley…
To you, Ms. Easley may just have been a “competent” technician. To me, she was brilliant woman who deserved to fly higher than NASA was willing to allow.
I have a gaggle of relatives who work for the Feds. To them (and to me) working as an EEOC officer is sidelining. A mid-level staff administrator with no real power or authority. No vertical movement to greater heights, only horizontal movement to a comparable position if she asks really nicely (“pretty please with sugar on top”).
Meanwhile, scores of truly mediocre workers with the right equipment (male plumbing) and paint job (white) fail upward past Ms. Easley. As far as I’m concerned she never got to stretch her wings and show her stuff.
That is my opinion based entirely on my knowledge and experience in public and private sector employment. No citations or links, just burnished credentials from Hard Knock University.
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@v8driver
workplace haiku
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@satanforce
Like (chuckle)
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Gro jo,
It is an analogy. Following your logic, slavery couldn’t be considered racist since not all black people were slaves. As long as you can show one black person who achieved a thing, then that means that person nor anyone else faced racism. The existence of black people holding patents doesn’t mean that they or Annie Easley did not experience racism.
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@Grojo Jojo
You’re Welcome. Oh, and could I have your e-mail address? I need someone like you to talk to.You, know, about THAT…… I’m sure you would make a great fairy godmother.
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Well i worked for at&t for 5 years. And to say anyone programming, or more specifically to have had a job description as, a computer in the 60s and say they’re a ‘competent technician’ is disingenuous at best.
And sidelining her into a paper pushing role, ah the days of middle management, they are long gone. Excepting i reckon in the federal agencies.
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At T anything you came up with ‘on company time’ was their property, patent wise. And i was oncall 24×7 most of that time go figure but no i have patents.
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Shat on, I can’t help you, try searching for a support group that understands your plight. I hope you don’t mind the informality, I feel we are growing close. If that trend continues, I’ll be calling you shat soon enough.
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v8driver, old buddy, you’re not making sense. What’s disingenuous about calling Easley a competent technocrat but not a great one, say, like Matzeliger, who revolutionized the industry he contributed to?
“At T anything you came up with ‘on company time’ was their property, patent wise. And i was oncall 24×7 most of that time go figure but no i have patents.”
It is their property, but you would have gotten the credit by being named the inventor, as a friend of mine was on two patents when he worked for Bell Labs.
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Solesearch wrote: ”
Gro jo,
It is an analogy. Following your logic, slavery couldn’t be considered racist since not all black people were slaves. As long as you can show one black person who achieved a thing, then that means that person nor anyone else faced racism. The existence of black people holding patents doesn’t mean that they or Annie Easley did not experience racism.”
What’s an analogy? Where have I denied that black people didn’t experience racism? I showed that Jan Matzeliger’s invention was denigrated despite its revolutionary impact on the shoe manufacturing industry. It was commonly referred to as the ni**gerhead last, and advertised as such by the people who were made millionaires by it. Your problem is reading comprehension.
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Afrofem, thank you for your kind words. They were unexpected, coming from you! We’ve disagreed before, and no doubt, will do so again. we are entitled to our opinions, of course, but not our facts. Claiming that Easley’s talents were wasted by NASA cannot be supported by the facts as recounted here by our genial host. To my knowledge, nobody is forced to take the job of EEOC officer, the fact that she volunteered to do the job and was assigned it, says she was cozy with NASA management. She was their poster girl. Make of that fact what you will. Sorry for the ‘garrulity’ of this comment.
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Dr. Marian R. Croak is black and female, she also holds 350 patents and managed thousands of engineers. Why? Because of her individual talent.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5I7AzGBLYbw)
Horace King was born a slave and became the greatest bridge builder in racist 19th century Georgia, USA. Why? Because he was talented. (https://archinect.com/features/article/150142291/the-story-of-horace-king-slave-turned-architect).
One of the grievances of the South, as a cause for the Civil War, was the fact that a slave owner couldn’t take out a patent on his slave’s invention. The Black race has, is and will produce such talents like any other race.
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A fit subject for a post similar to this one, minus unsourced “…waste of human capital” claims.
(https://www.eureporter.co/world/africa/2021/03/10/brilliant-african-maths-professor-is-youngest-to-be-chosen-to-join-clarivates-top-one-per-cent-of-science-group/)
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