95 Quotes by Margot Lee Shetterly

Restaurants that refused to serve Dorothy Vaughan had no problem waiting on Germans from the prisoner-of-war camp housed in a detention facility under the James River Bridge in Newport News.

She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer.

Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth.

First in space means first, period,” declared Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. “Second in space is second in everything.

But simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance.

Nationally, Virginia’s white teachers ranked in the bottom quarter in public school salaries, and their black counterparts might earn almost 50 percent less.

The community certainly included black English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors, and contractors, black cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents, and undertakers, several black lawyers, and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that’s just what black folks did.

War, technology, and social progress; it seemed that the second two always came with the first.

No longer just “a dull bunch of grey buildings with grey people who worked with slide rules and wrote long equations on blackboards,” NASA, the public now believed, was all that stood between them and a Red sky.