Mixed Race Studies

Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA

The New York Times
2020-02-24

Margalit Fox

Katherine Johnson, part of a small group of African-American women mathematicians who did crucial work at NASA, in 1966. NASA/Donaldson Collection, via Getty Images

She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures.”

They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.

Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, whose death at 101 was announced on Monday by NASA, calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.

A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961.

The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth.

Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division — the office from which the American space program sprang — and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name…

Read the entire obituary here.

Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, 92, Dies; Redefined Beauty

The New York Times
2014-03-13

Margalit Fox

Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell Credit MARBL/Emory University, via Associated Press

Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, a former model, agent, charm-school director and newspaper publisher who almost single-handedly opened the modeling profession to African-Americans, and in so doing expanded public understanding of what American beauty looks like, died on Feb. 28 in Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death was announced on March 6 on the floor of the House of Representatives by Sanford D. Bishop Jr., Democrat of Georgia. At her death, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell was the publisher emeritus of The Columbus Times, a black newspaper in Columbus, Ga., which she ran from the 1970s until her retirement about five years ago.

Long before the phrase “Black is beautiful” gained currency in the 1960s, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell was preaching that ethos by example.

In New York in the 1940s — an age when modeling schools, and modeling jobs, were overwhelmingly closed to blacks — she helped start the Grace del Marco Modeling Agency and later founded the Ophelia DeVore School of Self-Development and Modeling. The enterprises, which served minorities, endured for six decades…

…“Black has always been beautiful,” Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell once said. “But you had to hide it to be a model.”

In the late 1930s, when Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell began her career as one of the first black models in the United States, she found work partly by hiding her own heritage. But in her case, the hiding was done entirely through inadvertence.

Emma Ophelia DeVore was born on Aug. 12, 1921, in Edgefield, S.C., one of 10 children of John Walter DeVore, a building contractor, and the former Mary Emma Strother, a schoolteacher.

As a girl, Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell, whose family was of African, Cherokee, French and German descent, was educated in segregated Southern schools; she received additional instruction “in dancing, piano and all the other things in the arts that parents gave you to make you a lady,” as she told Ebony magazine in 2012…

…A beauty with wide-set eyes, Ophelia DeVore had begun modeling casually as a teenager. A few years later, seeking professional training, she enrolled in the Vogue School of Modeling in New York.

It was only toward the end of her studies there, when the school refused admission to another black candidate, that she realized it had mistaken her, with her light skin, for white.

“I didn’t know that they didn’t know,” Mrs. DeVore-Mitchell said in the Ebony interview. “I thought they knew what I was.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Tom Christian, Descendant of Bounty Mutineer, Dies at 77

The New York Times
2013-08-23

Margalit Fox

Tom Christian, known as the Voice of Pitcairn for his half-century-long role in keeping his tiny South Pacific island, famed as the refuge of the Bounty mutineers, connected to the world, died at his home there on July 7. Mr. Christian, Pitcairn’s chief radio officer and a great-great-great-grandson of Fletcher Christian, the mutiny’s leader, was 77.

With his death, Pitcairn’s permanent population stands at 51.

The cause was complications of a recent stroke, his daughter Jacqueline Christian said.

Though Mr. Christian was the world’s best-known contemporary Pitcairner, word of his death — reported in the July issue of The Pitcairn Miscellany, the island’s monthly newsletter — reached a broad audience only this week, when it appeared in newspapers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

“It takes awhile for news to get out,” Ms. Christian said by telephone from Pitcairn on Thursday…

…Britain’s only remaining territory in the Pacific, the Pitcairn archipelago lies roughly equidistant between Peru and New Zealand, about 3,300 miles from each. It comprises four small islands: Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno. Only Pitcairn Island, named for the sailor who sighted it from a British ship in 1767, is inhabited.

Pitcairn, settled by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts in 1790, is a rocky speck of about two square miles. (Manhattan, by comparison, is about 24 square miles.) Most of its inhabitants are descended from the mutineers and the Tahitian women they brought with them…

…Though Pitcairn today has some trappings of 21st-century technology — electricity 14 hours a day and a country code, .pn, on the Internet — it still maintains a striking degree of isolation. The island has no airstrip: it can be reached by flying to Tahiti and taking a once-a-week plane from there to Mangareva Island, in the Gambier Islands, followed by a two- to three-day sea voyage.

There are no automobiles on Pitcairn, and the island’s rocks and cliffs bear names redolent of long-ago tragedies: “Where Dan Fall,” “Where Minnie Off,” “Oh Dear.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Han Suyin Dies; Wrote Sweeping Fiction

The New York Times
2012-11-05

Margalit Fox

Han Suyin, a physician and author known for writing the sweeping novel that became the Hollywood film “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and for her outspoken championing of China under Mao Zedong, died on Friday at her home in Lausanne, Switzerland.

As with many aspects of Dr. Han’s life, the precise year of her birth is uncertain, but she was believed to have been 96. Her granddaughter, Karen Shepard, confirmed the death.

The daughter of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, Dr. Han was born and reared in China but wrote primarily in English and French. In more than two dozen books, including novels, a multivolume memoir and laudatory biographies of Mao and Zhou Enlai, she had the singular task, during the 1950s and afterward, of simultaneously explaining China to the West and the West to China…

…Dr. Han was born on Sept. 12, most likely in 1916, her granddaughter said — not in 1917, as has been reported over the years. The city of her birth is uncertain: it may have been Xinyang, in the Henan Province. Her parents eventually settled in Beijing, where she grew up.

At birth, Dr. Han was given the Chinese name Kuang-Hu Chou; she was also known early on by a Western name believed to have been Rosalie Matilda Chou, though she preferred to call herself Elizabeth. (At the start of her writing career she took the pen name Han Suyin, which she liked to translate as “a common little voice.”)

Growing up as a mixed-race child, Dr. Han later said, she felt she had a foot in each of two words but a secure footing in neither. Her mother, she told The New York Times in 1985, caustically referred to her as “the yellowish object.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Ai, a Steadfast Poetic Channel of Hard Lives, Dies at 62

The New York Times
2010-03-27

Margalit Fox

The prominent American poet Ai, whose work — known for its raw power, jagged edges and unflinching examination of violence and despair — stood as a damning indictment of American society, died on March 20 in Stillwater, Okla. She was 62 and lived in Stillwater.

The cause was pneumonia, a complication of previously undiagnosed cancer, said Carol Moder, head of the English department at Oklahoma State University, where Ai had taught since 1999.

Born Florence Anthony, the poet legally changed her name to Ai, which means love in Japanese, as a young woman. She received a National Book Award in 1999 for “Vice: New and Selected Poems,” published that year by W. W. Norton & Company.

Her other books include “Sin” (1986), “Fate” (1991), “Greed” (1993) and “Dread” (2003). A posthumous volume, “No Surrender,” is to be published by Norton in September…

…Though Ai’s work was determinedly not autobiographical, its concern with disenfranchised people was informed, she often said, by her own fractional heritage. Many poems could be read as biting dissertations “On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black, and 1/16 Irish,” as the title of a 1978 essay she wrote in Ms. magazine put it. (The proportions are telling, too, for not quite adding up to a complete person.)…

…Florence Anthony was born in 1947 in Albany, Tex., and reared mostly in Arizona by her mother and stepfather. For years her biological father’s identity was kept from her. She later learned, as she wrote in an autobiographical essay in the reference work Contemporary Poets, that “I am the child of a scandalous affair my mother had with a Japanese man she met at a streetcar stop.”…

Read the entire obituary here.