triumph of excellence, The

Through math, management, and music, this trio of African-American women gave something new to the world

Dr.Evelyn Boyd Granville

In 1949 when Dr. Evelyn Boyd Granville received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University, she was 25. That same year, Dr. Marjorie Lee Brown also earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Michigan, making Boyd and Brown the first African-American women to receive doctorates in mathematics. This distinction made Boyd a pioneer.

"I never heard the theory that females aren't equipped mentally to succeed in mathematics," Granville wrote in SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women. "My generation did not hear terms such as `permanent underclass,' 'disadvantaged,' `underprivileged."' By today's standard she would have qualified: female, black and, when her parents separated, raised by a single mother in a segregated community. But there was always hope. "Our parents and teachers preached over and over again that education is the vehicle to a productive life, and through diligent study and application we could succeed at whatever we attempted to do."

Dr. Granville, now 75, pursued excellence all of her life. It irks her that other African Americans who do the same are pilloried for "trying to be white." Granville says, "I was trying to be like my teachers," who in segregated Washington, D.C., were black. The young Evelyn Boyd was one of five valedictorians (all of them women) in her graduating class at Washington's prestigious Dunbar High School. She applied to Smith College and to Mt. Holyoke. Both schools accepted her but offered no financial aid.

"My mother's sister, who was determined that I attend a northern college, offered to pay half my fees for the first year," Granville explains. Phi Delta Kappa, a sorority of black teachers, gave her additional financial assistance. So, in 1941 off she went to Smith College. With such family sacrifice and community support, it never occurred to Boyd that she would fail or do anything else that would shame her family.

She majored in mathematics, graduating summa cum laude in 1945, but she enjoyed astronomy so much she had once considered changing her major. Years later, Boyd's love for mathematics and astronomy came together. As part of a team of IBM mathematicians and scientists, she helped compute the launch trajectories and orbit placement of space satellites. She did related computer calculations for NASA's Project Vanguard rocket program and later Project Mercury, America's first manned-space program.

When she married in November 1960, she left IBM and moved to Los Angeles where she worked for several companies before accepting a position with Northern American Aviation Company in 1962. Her group provided technical support in the areas of celestial mechanics, trajectory and orbit computations, numerical analysis and digital computer techniques to companies working on Project Apollo, America's second manned-space program. She later moved back to IBM but continued to work on trajectory analysis and orbit computation using numerical analysis techniques.

Ascent was the trajectory of her own career, but for a time her personal life was wobbling out of orbit. In 1967 she faced two major decisions: "The company was cutting its Los Angeles staff, and my marriage was breaking up." She resigned from IBM, filed for a divorce, and took a teaching position at California State University at Los Angeles. While there, in 1975 she and colleague Jason Frand developed a "new-math" textbook for college students that 50 colleges adopted.

Her personal life, too, began to take an upward turn. In 1970, she married Edward V Granville, a Los Angeles real-estate broker. Although Granville had lived in Los Angeles for many years and had a successful business there, he planned to retire to his native East Texas. With this in mind, the couple purchased a 16-acre parcel of land with a house and a four-acre lake near Tyler, Texas. In 1983, they moved to Texas.

After a three-year stint teaching computer science at Texas College, a small Christian Methodist Episcopal school in Tyler, Evelyn Boyd Granville stopped working for a few years until September 1990 when the University of Texas at Tyler offered her the Sam A. Lindsey Chair in mathematics. She taught al UT/Tyler until 1997 when she retired.

The lady who plotted celestial orbits for space ships "to boldly go where no one has gone before," now plans to enjoy her retirement and this fall will "get to Europe."

Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson

Last Sept. 24 when Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) inaugurated Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson as its 18th president, there were seismic rumblings--or should have been. In joining the school in Troy, N.Y , Dr. Jackson found herself at the epicenter of a marvelous shift in the academic world. A theoretical physicist, she had become the first woman and the first African American to head a major technological research institution.

"I think it's an interesting challenge," Dr. Jackson told Crisis. "I didn't get here through a time-in-grade approach, you know, being a professor, department head, dean, provost and then the president. Being a professor is different than cultivating relationships, structuring things organizationally, things I did at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I'm a change agent. I take what is good and make it better."

Jackson started making things better for herself at Washington, D.C.'s Roosevelt High school where she was valedictorian of her graduating class. "I thought I wanted to do something in math, but in the end, I chose physics," Jackson said, noting the close relationship between the two.

After graduating, Jackson received scholarships from Martin Marietta Corp., Prince Hall Grand Masons and Washington's Vermont Avenue Baptist Church. In 1964 she entered prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"There were four other African Americans in my freshman class," Dr. Jackson recalled. "Three of us graduated. During most of my time at MIT, there were only about ten African Americans in the school. As an undergraduate, I was shot at and spit on. There was social isolation and ostracism."

Still, Jackson graduated with high honors in 1968 and pursued her doctorate at MIT. By then, things were different: "I did volunteer work, tutored at the Roxbury YMCA and had a life outside of the classroom. I pledged Delta Sigma Theta sorority, Iota chapter, which was the New England chapter. That was a social outlet--there were Alphas and other black fraternities. It was also a community service outlet. Was my college experience one that you would want to repeat?"

"Perhaps not," she demurs. But the benefits of a first-class education at a first-rate institution were sufficient enough to keep Shirley Ann Jackson at MIT until 1973, when she earned her Ph.D in physics in elementary particle theory.

"I accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and intended to become an academic," Dr. Jackson said. "I had a fellowship and went to Europe for a year, came back and went to Bell Labs where I did research for 15 years."

At Bell Labs she became interested in science, technology and public policy, which broadened her experience. She was a founding member of the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, which was created to foster university-industry partnerships in science that could be important to the New Jersey economy. Dr. Jackson has served on professional and corporate boards, including those of some of the largest utility companies in the nation.

Although she maintained her relationship with Bell Labs, in 1991 Dr. Jackson took a position at Rutgers University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy While working there in 1995, she received a call from the White House. "They wanted to nominate me to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I went in May 1995 and became chairman in July I was chairman of the commission and responsible for policy I was the one to whom the regulatory staff reported. In effect, I was the CEO of the NRC."

It was the coalescence of researcher, professor, and chairman that prompted Rensselaer's board of trustees to contact her in December 1998. When asked if her appointment as Rensselaer's president last July I indicates that sexism and racism are waning in America, Dr. Jackson's response is cautious.

"The very fact that I am where I am indicates change. At the same time, it is a very narrow group that gets in these positions. If you look at the bulk of African Americans, their plight is worse. Major companies and universities now think African Americans can run their organizations, and that does speak to a change. The real question is how to leverage that change into broader progress for more African Americans."

Audra McDonald

Like Drs. Granville and Jackson, Audra McDonald has had a career of high honors. Over just five years as a singer and actress, she has received three Tony Awards, Broadway's equivalent of Hollywood's Oscar. She accomplished this feat by the time she was 28 years old, a first. Critics say McDonald is "the most important musical-theater star of her generation." Heady stuff for an actress and singer who just turned 30.

Although an ingenue, McDonald has been singing since she was nine years old. Five of her aunts toured the gospel circuit as the McDonald Sisters, and her childhood home in Fresno, Cal., had both an electric organ and a piano. It is not surprising that McDonald began singing. She and her sister auditioned for and joined Roger Rocka's Good Company Players, a dinner theater in Fresno.

"It was an incredible education," McDonald says. "They did ten musicals a year, and we kids would do cabarets before each, things like Irving Berlin songs. I was singing White Cliffs of Dover at ten. Before I was out of my teens, I'd basically absorbed the Broadway songbook."

It was one thing for a black child to sing songs as part of a cabaret troupe, quite another for her to appear in roles traditionally reserved for whites. The New York Times quotes McDonald as saying: "When they [Rocka's Players] did the Sound of Music, all the kids in the junior company auditioned for it, but it was clear there was no chance in hell for me and my sister." When McDonald was cast in The Miracle Worker as "the one little dim-wilted black girl," her parents forbade her to play the role. Nor did they let her audition for Showboat.

"I was so upset with them, but they said: `Those parts are demeaning. You will thank us later.' And I do. Even now, things are not as different as they might seem."

After graduating from high school, McDonald knew she had to attend college somewhere. Her father was a high school principal in Fresno and her mother an affirmative action officer. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Hardy E. Jones, had received his doctorate and worked for 45 years as dean and treasurer at St. Paul College, a black Episcopalian school in Lawrenceville, Va.

At 17, McDonald reversed Horace Greeley's advice and headed east to study at New York City's prestigious bastion of training in classical music, the Julliard School of Music. It wasn't a perfect it.

"You have to focus in a conservatory," she explains. "And ' although I had a certain idea of what I wanted to do, I didn't want to perform opera. So for me, it was difficult to be in this world and focus on the one thing I didn't want to do."

Still, she was graduated from Julliard with a bachelor's degree in music in 1993. Fresh out of school, she was cast in the second female lead role in the Lincoln Center's revival of Rogers and Hammerstein's Carousel. She was featured on the cast album, and in 1994 won her first Tony Award for her performance in the show.

Two years later, she took home a second Tony for her portrayal of Maria Callas's student in the play, Master Class. McDonald then joined the cast of Ragtime in its premiere production in Toronto and stayed with the show when it opened on Broadway. For her performance, she won her third Tony in five years. She was featured on both the initial studio cast album of the show and on the original Broadway cast album.

In December 1999, McDonald opened in a play expressly written for her, Marie-Christine. It is the first Broadway play she has appeared in as the lead. Some critics say that McDonald is the only reason to see the play, a Creole-flavored musical based on the story of Medea. Although the musical closed in January, Broadway cognoscenti speculate on a fourth Tony for McDonald.

While continuing to work in the theater, McDonald also began to appear on television and in films, to make recordings, and to appear as a guest artist with symphony orchestras. In September 1998, Nonesuch Records released her debut solo CD, Way Back to Paradise, in which she sings songs by young theater composers. Her second CD, How Glory Goes, was released this April.

Phil Petrie is an editorial consultant and freelance writer who lives in Clarksville, Tenn.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Mar/Apr 2000
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