The character arc of Annie Easley

Who was Annie Easley?

She read it in the paper. Thirty four years later she retired from NASA.

She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised by a single mother alongside an older brother. Before the civil rights movement, educational and career opportunities for African American children were very limited, schools were segregated and the Black schools were often inferior. Her mother told her that she could be anything, but that she would have to work at it, and pushed her towards a good education. She went to Holy Family High School from the fifth grade and was valedictorian of her year.

She wanted to be a nurse and then, at about sixteen, decided on pharmacy, and in 1950 enrolled at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. She studied pharmacy for about two years and her interest waned. She left to get married and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she found there was very little pharmacy work to be had. At one point she went to vote and was met with the poll tax, and she used that experience afterwards to help other women get past the voting restrictions put in front of them.

Then she read an article in the newspaper about an opportunity for a mathematician. Her career began in 1955 as a human computer, doing calculations for researchers by hand, on simulations for a newly built reactor facility. At the time of hiring she was one of only four African Americans there.

When digital systems arrived she did not get left behind by them, which is the thing that decided the rest of her life. She learned the new languages quickly, Fortran among them, and her code went into analysing energy-conversion and power-technology systems for early hybrid vehicles and for rockets. She worked on Centaur, the high-energy upper stage that was the first to use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as propellants, technology that launched Cassini and Voyager and is still foundational to rocket design. She also worked on damage to the ozone layer in the 1970s, on the life of storage batteries of the kind used in electric utility vehicles, and on the economics of co-generating power plants after the energy crisis.

She took a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Cleveland State University in 1977, while working. She served as an Equal Employment Opportunity counsellor, mediating workplace discrimination cases, pushed for inclusive hiring, and went out to colleges to recruit women and minorities into science and engineering. Through the 1970s she encouraged students at career days and tutored school children and young adults who had dropped out. She founded the NASA Lewis Ski Club and was its first president. And despite thirty four years of it she was cut out of NASA promotional photographs; asked about one such occasion she said that she was out there to do a job, that she knew she had the ability to do it, that getting the job done was where her focus was, and that she was not intentionally trying to be a pioneer.

The moments

Annie Easley's timeline.

Annie Easley: frequently asked questions

What people ask about her line.

Sources

• Annie Easley, English Wikipedia biography.
• Her own words on being left out of the promotional photographs, as quoted there.
• The NASA record of the Centaur upper stage programme.
• Her Equal Employment Opportunity counselling and outreach work, as recorded there.