#blackinastro

[hagleyvault]

Today’s #WorkerWednesday guest is a young Miss Georgiana Yvonne Young (1929-2019). In 1951, Young became the first woman to graduate from Howard University’s engineering school with a degree in mechanical engineering. In 1952, she was hired by the RCA-Victor Division of the Radio Corporation of America at the age of twenty-three, where she was the first Black woman to be hired as an engineer by the company. Prior to her career at RCA-Victor, she worked as a design engineer at the Frankford Arsenal-Gage Laboratory in Philadelphia.

After her 1955 marriage to William Freeman Clark, Jr., a biochemist, Young began identifying as Yvonne Young Clark, and the couple relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, where Clark began teaching at Tennessee State University’s engineering school. Over the course of her career that included many firsts, she would also go on to become the first woman graduate of Vanderbilt University’s Graduate School of Engineering Management , the first woman engineer at Tennessee’s Ford Motor glass plant, and spent a 1963 summer working at NASA’s Huntsville, Alabama George C. Marshall Space Flight Center on the Saturn rocket engine project.

This photograph is from a December 15, 1952 issue of Inside Brown America, which announced the launch of her career at RCA. Inside Brown America was a newsletter published by the Institute of Industrial Race Relations and Joseph V. Baker Associates, a public relations firm founded by Joseph V. Baker (1908-1993).

The newsletter was one of a number of publications issued through his firm, which provided services to various large corporations and educational institutions. The publication ran from February 1952 to November 1953, provided Joseph V. Baker Associates' clients updates on political and economic developments related to Black America. The newsletter also offered news related to Black trade associations and of notable additions of Black professional staff to various corporate entities and government bodies. To view our digital collection, which consists of a small number of issues of this newsletter in Hagley Library's collections, click here.

[zespaceblog]

#BlackInAstro

Ashley Walker knew what she wanted from a young age, she wanted a star of course ! At the age of 5, her uncle decided he could give the next best thing, a Telescope. The story resonates deeply with my own experiences, and no doubt many more reading this.

Ashley was inspired, not just by her uncle, but by a passion for Science and Astronomy that led her to a BS in Chemistry and now works for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center as a part of the Undergraduate Research Associates in Astrobiology program.

Ashley created the #BlackInAstro tag after being inspired by #BlackBirdersWeek and all that had been happening in the US. 

In the words of the late Carl Sagan, 

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.“

Astronomy opens our eyes not just to how insignificant we are in comparison to the Universe’s vastness and age, but equally, how special we all are, how unique and individual, and it opens your eyes to a perspective few are just too busy reading headlines to notice. 

So here’s to Ashley, and to those she inspires ! May your life be filled with wonder .. 

Source : 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/black-astronomers-highlight-achievements-and-obstacles/