Lesson 176:
Annie Easley
An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 03/01/2025
We open Womens' History Month 2025 with a study of the life of Annie J. Easley (neé McCrory). Born in 1933 Birmingham, Alabama, Annie showed a strong aptitude for chemistry and pharmacy and graduated from high school as valedictorian, but after she married in 1954, she took a job as a mathematics teacher in Birmingham. One of her quiet-but-determined goals in that role was to prepare members of her community for deliberately-challenging literacy tests that were part of the Black voter experience (see Lesson #166 for more on this shameful trend).
In 1954 she and her husband Theodis Easley moved to Cleveland, Ohio where she resumed her pharmacy studies, but was again pulled away by another opportunity --this time at the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory (an agency that would later be incorporated into NASA). Annie's innate math skills got her in the door and led to a 34-year career as a computer scientist. One of only four Black employees at the entire project, Easley's first significant contribution was on the computer research team that calculated the trajectory needed to get Friendship 7 to orbit in 1962. Later she joined the simulations team at Plum Brook Reactor Facility and worked on the Centaur booster rocket --a project which itself led down a path to calculating long-term damage to the ozone layer and proposing new alternative fuels (and the earliest prototypes for what are today known as hybrid vehicles). Without having ever formally earned a college degree, Easley taught herself FORTRAN (still a new programming language at the time!), and then SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).
In 1977 Easley took a bit of time away from rocket science to earn her degree in mathematics, from Cleveland State University. During this interval she worked as a tutor and encouraged young Black students --particularly girls-- to consider a path in STEM. She then promptly got right back to work and continued with NASA until 1989. Towards the end of her career she also worked as an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) counselor, addressing discrimination complaints within the agency --no stranger to discrimination herself, having once had her portrait cropped out of a formal group photograph of the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory programming team.
For further study: a rich, in-depth interview with Easley by Sandra Johnson in 2001 (this is a NASA.gov website --therefore it might not be a bad idea to copy the entire text of this article and save a version for yourselves, to share with others. Posterity is... not presently being kind to stories like these.)
Next lesson - Lesson 177: August Braxton Baker
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