Yvonne Y. Clark had a lifetime of groundbreaking achievements as a Black female mechanical engineer. Season 3 of LostWomenofSci begins at the start of her story, during her unconventional childhood in the segregated South. 🎧 Listen to Episode 1: prx
With her knack for fixing household appliances in early childhood, YY was practically born an engineer. And fortunately, she had a family that nurtured her atypical interest—even when the segregated South made pursuing it almost impossible.
Our producer Sophie McNulty found YY in a book titled Black Women Scientists in the United States, by Wini Warren. The chapter was about a mechanical engineer named Yvonne Young Clark, whose passion for tinkering led to a brilliant career in both industry and academia. Around that time we'd gotten interested in this idea of “chains of knowledge” and the importance—to this day—of female mentors for young women in science.
And most of this work she did over summer breaks; because during the academic year YY was teaching. She taught mechanical engineering for 55 years at Tennessee State, a historically Black university in Nashville. She inspired generations of young Black engineers, both men and women. KATIE HAFNER: To tell YY’s story, which in many ways is a family story, Carol is joining me as cohost this season. She has a background as a lawyer, and she hosts her own podcast called Ground Control Parenting, which is a series of conversations about parenting Black and Brown children. So Carol, YY’s story is one of multitudes. Where did you start?
CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: Oh, absolutely. The family’s perspective was if you want to do this, let's figure out how you do this and we'll support you doing it. KATIE HAFNER: Tom Owen is an archivist at the University of Louisville. Carol and I sat down to talk to him about his true passion: the city of Louisville itself.
KATIE HAFNER: Hortense worked at the University too, as a librarian. She also wrote a newspaper column for the Louisville Defender. It was called “Tense Topics,” both because her nickname was Tense, and because she wrote about the issues that riled her up most: segregation, housing discrimination, and civil rights.
CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: The second source of YY’s strength takes a little more explaining. When Carol started showing me the books she'd brought, I quickly discovered...CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: YY’s family has a fascinating history—and it’s recorded. CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: YY's family, on her mother’s side, were Houstons. And the reason they had the last name Houston… CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: General Sam Houston, founding father of Texas, reason why the city of Houston is called Houston, owned slaves. CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: YY’s great grandfather.
SKIP GATES: In Joshua Houston's case, he participated in Bible study while owned by his first master and mistress, Temple and Nancy Lee. SKIP GATES: The first freedom summer, as I put it, was the summer of 1867, when all those Black men formerly enslaved and free got the right to vote. They registered to vote in that first freedom summer, 80%. Think about that.SKIP GATES: He was a city alderman in Huntsville, Texas in 1867 and in 1870, and he won election as a county commissioner in 1878 and in 1882.
SKIP GATES: The Freedmen's Bureau in Texas has a register of, of murders listing over a thousand in the year between 1865 and 1866.So vigilante violence, in other words, was a continuous part of Reconstruction. SKIP GATES: And it was those federal troops that were guaranteeing the right of Black men to vote in the south.
CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: YY’s relatives were exemplars of this legacy. They gathered in Black fraternities and sororities, at cotillions, bridge parties. They created strong, resilient communities and found ways to thrive. Her family included journalists, doctors, cooks, teachers. KATIE HAFNER: Anyway, so she, she decided to become a pilot. And the Godman pilots she met that night, they were all men. But she didn’t—one thing that is striking me about the whole YY story to date is that the fact that she was a woman doesn’t seem to have figured into that. So anyway, but at the time, it seemed like a future in aviation might be possible for a young woman, too… KATIE HAFNER: With so many male pilots overseas, the US Army Air Force began to recruit women.
MILTON CLARK: Literally the next day, she went down to Central High School and looked up what their engineering courses were so that she could sign up for them for the next semester.MILTON CLARK: She had bought her T-square and she bought her protractor and everything that she needed to take the course. And when she went to the classroom, the instructor wouldn't let her in… because she was a female.
YY: And, uh, he let me take over the controls once he took off and mom was on the passenger seat in the back, it was nice.KATIE HAFNER: Back at school, YY found a practical workaround after being rejected from the mechanical drawing class: She signed up to take the course over the summer, with a different teacher. YY: That was, that was cool. We would make planes. You would go out on the fire escape, roll your propeller, and then aim it at the football field and watch it fly.
KATIE HAFNER: According to Milton, her son, YY was accepted at all three schools. But after two years in Boston, her preference was to stay close to home. TOM OWEN: They would have some technical courses, but no, to my knowledge, they did not have a program in engineering at all. TOM OWEN: There was a fund to pay African Americans to go to graduate school out of state. It didn't pay for expenses or living expenses to leave the state and the fund was frequently depleted.
CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: Hortense threatened to take legal action. She spent several days negotiating directly with the University of Louisville. If her daughter’s acceptance letter wasn’t going to get her admission, Hortense was going to make sure it got her something. CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: But I just couldn’t leave it at that. I asked Tom, “Isn’t it possible that the University didn’t want this on the record at all? Couldn’t the negotiations have happened behind closed doors?”
CAROL SUTTON LEWIS: It certainly didn’t surprise me either. This well educated, civically minded Black family is dealing with a rule that says their whip smart daughter, who wanted to be an engineer, was being denied that opportunity solely because she was Black? When the Youngs saw an unjust rule, they refused to accept it. And they actively challenged it.
KATIE HAFNER: That's right. Hortense would later go to law school at the University of Louisville. In 1951, she was one of four Black students to enroll.
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