When they came back, they convinced our parents to buy new books for us that were state of the art, essentially.
They received a stipend to go to school out of state. "Our teachers in Pine Bluff wanted to go to graduate school and they were not allowed to go to graduate school in the state of Arkansas. It had been using hand-me-down books from the white school that were worn and out-of-date. When she remarried and the family moved 45 miles away to Pine Bluff, she made sure to help buy new books for the African-American school. When we got off the bus, she told me that I hadn't done anything, but that was the law of the land at that time and the only way we could change that law was to be educated and to vote."Įven voting was hard: At that time in the South, African-Americans had to pay a $1 poll tax to vote, but Jordan made sure to take her only child with her to vote during each election.
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The bus driver stopped the bus and said, 'You get up and give that white woman your seat.' I thought I had done something wrong and hurt my mother so I started to cry. My mother sat down in the white section and the bus driver drove off until my mother reached down and pulled me up on her lap. This white Soldier stood up and gave my mother his seat. At that time, black people sat from a certain point on the bus to the back of the bus. It mattered very much: "My mother was very fair skinned with green eyes and red hair and she was listed as white on her driver's permit.
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Now in her 80s, Montague still remembers the day she realized that in Arkansas, the color of her skin did matter. She couldn't understand why they went to one school and she went to another. She didn't understand the color of her skin mattered. In the innocence of youth, she didn't even know she was different. Montague actually spent a lot of time playing with white children. She supported her daughter as first a teacher and then as a hairdresser. There's no such thing as women's work or men's work if you're educated.'"Įducation was everything to Jordan, a single mother for much of Montague's childhood. But you can do or be anything you want to be provided you're educated. and you have a southern, segregated school education. She said, 'First, you're female and you're black.
"My mother told me, 'Raye, you'll have three strikes against you.' Now, remember I'm a little kid. "I asked my mother to take me to find out what was required to become an engineer, and she did: the math, the science and thinking outside the box," Montague remembered, calling her mother, Flossie Graves Jordan, the wind beneath her wings. Like so many others, he didn't realize that he was challenging her, making her all the more determined to succeed. He would be one of many to tell Montague that no, she couldn't do something, that her race or her sex made her less of a person, less smart, less talented. As the tour guide had indicated, engineering was the preserve of white men. In fact, the only engineering program in the state expressly forbade African-Americans - or, "Negros" as they were called then - from enrolling. She certainly wasn't expected, or even allowed, to be an engineer. Society, especially Southern society, expected her to be a wife, a mother and a maid, or, maybe, if she was lucky, a secretary or a teacher. In 1935, Raye Jordan Montague had been born into a world of segregation, Jim Crow, poll taxes, separate lunch counters and backs of buses. "I didn't realize that I had been insulted," she said in an interview a lifetime later. "You'd have to be an engineer, but you don't ever have to worry about that," he replied. "What do you have to know to do this?" she asked the tour guide, fascinated. She looked through the periscope, and examined the dials and mechanisms. Montague climbed the ladder and went down the hatch. in 1942, and was now docked in her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. Captured off the coast of the Carolinas, it held just one sailor, it had been on a tour of the U.S.