![]() This was an unexpected blessing, as Merrill boasted a vigorous lineup of teachers committed to inspiring their students to overcome the limitations of life in the Deep South, including having to use the cast-off out-of-date textbooks from the nearby white high school. Unable to attend the Pine Bluff High School because of its whites-only status, she enrolled instead in Merrill High School, a primarily Black school that had existed since 1886. Here, they lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, and Raye distinctly felt the sudden shift from being surrounded by people who looked like and welcomed her, to a sea of people who, by and large, considered her family’s presence a blot on the community. In 1945, Jordan and her mother relocated from their familiar if restricted Little Rock environs to a town called Pine Bluff when her mother, who had divorced Jordan’s father during the Little Rock years, married a postal clerk with a steady income. Her grandfather paid for Raye to take a tour and once there the lights all went on inside her young mind – all of the consoles and ducting and wiring, perfectly organized to allow this vessel to sink beneath the waves and carry out its tasks struck her like a symphony of design, and she knew that, somehow, creating something like this was what she wanted to do with her life. One day, her grandfather decided to take her to see a small Japanese submarine that had been captured at Pearl Harbor and which was touring the United States, giving people a chance to crawl inside in exchange for the purchase of war bonds. Surrounded by a supportive family network, and deeply attentive to the importance of the education she was being offered, Jordan was in a prime position to be impacted by an event that changed the course of her life in November 1943. ![]() Flossie wanted to ensure that this child had the best education that the restrictions of the Southern schooling system would allow, and enrolled her in St. Raye showed from a young age a curiosity with how things worked, and enjoyed taking apart and reassembling toy trains and cars, which long-time readers of this column will recognize as a common theme running through the childhood of many engineers and physicists throughout history. Jordan’s mother, Flossie, had gone to college and earned a degree in education, and she was a fierce believer in the value of good schooling. Within the confines of the Ninth Street corridor there existed a vibrant Black community that looked after its own, but beyond those borders the social expectations of the Deep South took firm hold, limiting where you could shop, where you could sit, and most importantly for Jordan, what you could learn. It was a segregated city, with strictly demarcated zones of where it was and was not safe for a Black girl to be. Thanks largely to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the crushing 25% national unemployment rate of 1933 had been reduced to a merely unbearable 14.2% by that point, but recovery was slow to come to Little Rock, Arkansas, where Jordan lived her first ten years. Raye Montague was born Raye Jean Jordan in 1935 into a world that had carefully and willfully attempted to place accomplishment out of her reach. Her life to that point, and indeed ever after, was a string of daunting obstacles overcome by a combination of raw talent and pure determination, and the small matter of creating the world’s first integrated naval design program, on a restricted time schedule, with no support, was just another hurdle in her path. Failure, however, was simply not in the vocabulary of Raye Montague.
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