5 Black Public Servants and Technologists You Should Know
Our work at the U.S. Digital Service is firmly planted at the rich intersection of public service and modern technology. For Black History Month, we’re honoring extraordinary Black Americans who broke barriers in public service, technology, or both.
Learn more about these five Black Americans you should know:
Patricia Roberts Harris, First Black woman to serve as U.S. Ambassador, First Black woman Cabinet Secretary
When Patricia Roberts Harris, then 41 years old, was chosen by President Lyndon B. Johnson to become U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg in 1965, she had mixed feelings. She was the first Black woman named as an American envoy and she said, “I feel deeply proud and grateful this President chose me to knock down this barrier, but also a little sad about being the ‘first Negro woman’ because it implies we were not considered before.”
Harris, who died in 1985, was used to succeeding. As an Illinois high school student, she fielded scholarship offers from five colleges before selecting Howard, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C. Graduating summa cum laude, she went on to graduate at the top of her class from George Washington University Law School before President John F. Kennedy selected her to co-chair the National Women’s Committee for Human Rights.
After her ambassadorship, Harris mentored Black law students as the first Black woman dean of Howard University’s School of Law until President Jimmy Carter appointed her Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 1977, making her the first Black woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. Her last appointment was in 1980 when President Carter selected her to be the first secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Dr. Shirley Jackson, First Black woman to earn a doctorate at MIT
A prolific public servant who continues to advocate for diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), Dr. Shirley Jackson made history in 1973. That year, Dr. Jackson, a physicist, became the first Black woman to earn a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Jackson is currently president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a decorated, accomplished scientist. Her theoretical physics experiments led to many telecommunications breakthroughs, including caller ID, call waiting, and the fiber-optic cable. She has also advised American presidents, including an appointment by President Bill Clinton to serve as chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and as co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
“There’s a unique role that scientists and engineers can play in making a difference in people’s lives,” Dr. Jackson told MIT about her public service. “Because of that, if I could do it, at the levels that I’ve been asked to do it, it’s important to serve.”
For her contributions to the field, Dr. Jackson was inducted into the U.S. News STEM Leadership Hall of Fame and won the inaugural America Competes Award for Public Service. She has been honored by the Association for Women in Science, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among many other accomplishments.
Ralph Bunche, First Black man awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Born in segregated Detroit, orphaned at a young age, and raised by his grandmother in California, Ralph Bunche, who would go on to be the first Black Nobel laureate for Peace, had a rough start. By the time he graduated high school and college — he was valedictorian of both classes — it was obvious that whatever obstacles presented to the young Bunche would have to make themselves scarce in the face of his intelligence and diligence.
Bunche furthered his education at Harvard University, toggling between his studies, teaching at Howard University, and researching colonialism in French West Africa, before eventually obtaining both a master’s and a doctorate in political science.
Bunche began his career as a public servant as an advisor to the military and State Department during World War II. In 1947, he began the project that would etch his name in history when he was appointed assistant to the United Nations’ Special Committee on Palestine, working to prevent conflict between the Islamic and Jewish populations of the region.
Following 11 months of non-stop negotiations, Bunche succeeded in the signing of armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab States. For this achievement, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, the NAACP’s Spingarn Prize, and more than 30 honorary degrees.
Lonnie G. Johnson, Inventor of the Super-Soaker; Former Air Force and NASA thermodynamic engineer
Lonnie G. Johnson spent his childhood tinkering with appliances, even winning a national prize in high school for his invention of a remote-controlled robot. Engineering degrees from Tuskegee University, a historically Black school in Alabama that had also nurtured the inventions of George Washington Carver, were natural next steps for Johnson. Before creating his most famous invention, Johnson worked on advanced space systems for the United States Air Force.
He left the service a highly decorated officer and joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop thermodynamic systems, for which he won awards with the Galileo Jupiter probe in 1989 and the Mars Observer project in 1992. During this time, Johnson worked on inventions at home, too.
The Super-Soaker, a pressurized water squirt toy gun, began in 1982 with a homemade nozzle at his bathroom sink. A prototype came seven years later. Johnson was able to patent his invention in 1992 and find a manufacturer for the toy that would become incredibly popular, selling more than 40 million units.
Johnson holds more than 40 patents and has invented more toys, in addition to thermodynamic and fluid dynamic engineering developments.
Katherine Johnson, NASA mathematician; Trajectory analyst for America’s first human spaceflight
If the Space Race of the mid-20th century showcased America’s constellation of brilliance, then Katherine Johnson, the mathematician who is credited with calculating the trajectory for Freedom 7, was surely one of the brightest stars. An honored public servant and mathematician who retired from NASA in 1986, Johnson’s accomplishments weren’t widely known until the 2016 publication of the book Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race and the subsequent film of the same name.
Johnson showed a genius in math at a young age, whizzing through primary school before beginning university studies at just 13. She graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia State College, a historically Black institution, before the state’s governor hand-picked Johnson to become one of the first three Black graduate students at West Virginia University in 1939.
After a lengthy teaching career, Johnson was hired to NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ all-Black West Area Computing department in 1952. It was here that Johnson made history again, calculating space trajectories that enabled America’s first human spaceflight in 1961, Freedom 7, and as the first woman in the Flight Research Division to coauthor a research report in 1960. The report was the first of 26 that she would go on to author or co-author in her 33-year career at NASA.
John Glenn’s historic Earth orbit in 1962 was first calculated by IBM computers around the world, but the famed astronaut requested that Johnson, who had previously worked with Glenn, re-calculate and check all of the computations by hand on a desktop mechanical calculating machine before he took flight.
At 97 years old, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in 2015.
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