Meet the woman who broke barriers as a 'hidden figure' at the US Navy us navy women

[Stellar]

Published on Feb 20, 2017
Meet the woman who broke barriers as a hidden figure at the US Navy | us navy women

The Oscar-nominated film "Hidden Figures" celebrates the true story of three African-American women who helped propel the U.S. space program to new heights.

While Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson were breaking barriers at NASA, another hidden figure, Raye Montague, was making history at the U.S. Navy. "I faced a lot of the same barriers that those ladies faced," Montague said today on "Good Morning America," recalling a time when a fellow employee asked her for a cup of coffee and she replied that she'd like one too, adding, "Be sure mine has cream and sugar."

Meet the woman who broke barriers as a hidden figure at the US Navy | us navy women


Montague, a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, grew up in the segregated South. She never saw an engineer who looked like her but she would go on to shatter glass ceilings as a female, African-American civilian employee at the then-male-dominated Navy.

"I'm known as the first person to design a ship using the computer," Montague, now 82, said in an interview that aired today on "Good Morning America." "And I was the first female program manager of ships in the history of the Navy, which was the equivalent of being a CEO of a company."

Montague credited her mother with providing the confidence to know she could achieve anything she wanted. She earned a bachelor of science degree in business at a historically black college, the Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal School, which now goes by the name the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. The school she wanted to attend, the engineering school at the University of Arkansas, did not accept minorities at the time.