Another Just As Inaccurate (and Odd) Reason?

White regiments with less machinery experience were given equipment, while Black regiments were left to do work by hand. For quite a while throughout history, engineering was almost entirely the domain of white men. Born in 1925, Grant became the first Black graduate of the University of California Berkeley College of Engineering - and that was just his first first. A California guy through and through, Howard P. Grant was the first Black graduate of UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. Northern California Council of Black Professional Engineers. He went on to become the first Black engineer for the city and county of San Francisco, where he addressed water engineering issues, and the first recorded Black member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (that's three "firsts" if you're counting). The accomplished engineer dedicated to furthering education in young people has another important credit to his name: He was a founding member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the oldest Black Greek fraternal organization. Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. For more than 10 years she was a senior deputy instrument manager for NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite program, where she worked on mapping instruments for future lunar explorations.

After his Vietnam tour, Robinson headed for the Pentagon as deputy chief of staff, becoming the first Black soldier to serve as a military aide to a president, under Lyndon Johnson in 1965. In 1978, he was promoted to brigadier general - the first African American to serve as a general officer in the Corps of Engineers. Another military man, Hugh G. Robinson, became a high-ranking general as an engineer in the Army. Nearly all of the Army Corps of Engineers were firmly entrenched in the South Pacific, serving in World War II. Let's just reiterate: Only 5 percent of the engineers in the United States are Black, whereas Black people make up about 12 percent of the total population. If we're talking trailblazers, we should probably get our vernacular right: These engineers are more likely to carefully plan and execute a well-designed trail than to light a fire to make their way through.

Collins, Aaron. "Black engineers' contributions to the world." Nebraska Blueprint. Phillips, Bruce E. "Top Black Executives in High-tech and Science." Black Engineer. College of Engineering. "1948: Howard P. Grant becomes the college's first black graduate." University of California, Berkeley. Howard University and the first American to receive her Ph.D. But Ursula Burns did just that, and became the first African American CEO of a Fortune 500 company to boot. Burns turned around a fading company mainly known for paper-copying machines into a profitable business services provider. Engineer Walt Braithwaite spent decades with the company. You know it as CAD and we have Walt Braithwaite to thank for it. Born in Jamaica, Braithwaite received a degree in engineering in 1966 and joined up with Boeing the same year. It's not just that he held 57 patents, or that he traveled to Scotland at the age of 15 for an apprenticeship and came back with a mechanical engineering degree.

He graduated in 1954 from West Point and went on to receive his master's degree in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had its first African-American graduate, Robert R. Taylor, in 1892. It was only 25 years later, in 1917, that the university gave its first civil engineering diploma to an African-American. Dr. Wanda Austin, armed with a doctorate in systems engineering from the University of Southern California, has been instrumental not only in shaping the U.S. Currently, she is a co-founder of MakingSpace, Inc, a systems engineering and leadership development consultant, and a motivational speaker. In 1908, George Biddle Kelley graduated from Cornell University's College of Civil Engineering. Kelley applied his engineering mind to the project, too. George Biddle Kelley Foundation. This was unusual for a tired reason and a novel one. Let's start with one of the early pioneers of a small feat of engineering that's arguably the most important invention of the 20th century.