95 Quotes by Margot Lee Shetterly

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

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.

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

Their goal wasn't to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talents. Like the men they worked for, and the men they sent hurtling off into the atmosphere, they were just doing their jobs.

The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. "Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world" were entitled to "Four Freedoms": freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address.

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.

Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.

Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status – none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.

She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. But.