Raye is seated front row at the dedication of the LARC Computing System at the Applied Mathematics Laboratory on May 15, 1961.
Raye continued to work at the David Taylor Model Basin for the next eight years, steadily rising through the ranks into jobs with better pay and more responsibility. Her salary had more than doubled, from $3,155 to $6,435, since she was first hired as a clerk-typist, and her General Schedule, or GS ranking, had more than doubled, from a GS-3 to a GS-7. She was learning new technologies on the job as they were developed and training others how to use the new equipment that she was mastering.
In the early 1960s, UNIVAC developed a 115,000-pound computer that ran hydrodynamic simulations for nuclear weapon design. It was called a LARC, for Livermore Advanced Research Computer, and Raye oversaw its operation and maintained computer operator guidances for using it. She also became savvy in debugging and coding for it, seemingly increasing her confidence and authority in an office where she felt insignificant and ill prepared on her first day.
“I analyze problems arising during production and code-checking, and correct the routine when possible in order to complete a given run,” she typed in an experience and qualifications statement dated October 30, 1963.
I conduct a training program to ensure that all operating personnel are thoroughly familiar with operating methods and procedures. I maintain liaison with Mathematical and Programming personnel and advise them of better utilization of the computer and assist them with finding errors in their routines. I check and proofread data and instructions prepared by programmers for computer runs. I prepare forms required for processing of work by other offices on the LARC computer. I give advice and assistance to programmers and mathematicians on matters affecting the use of the computer and auxiliary equipment. I maintain liaison with the management Data Processing Section with regard to their processing of LARC input and output data. I set up priorities on the work using various input and output medias in order to coordinate their schedules with the LARC operating schedule. I analyze computer problems and give the engineers sufficient details about machine malfunctions in order to allow the maintenance engineers to correct the source of trouble quickly and efficiently. I maintain a tape library for the LARC and I am responsible for keeping their maintenance files up to date. I provide recommendations concerning promotion or other recognition of personnel under my supervision. I program minor test routines.
Raye was in the thick of things and was the only person who knew how to operate the machine. Her boss, she said, knew nothing about the computer.
“I resented it, but that was the way it was at that time,” she said. “People were bypassing my boss and coming straight to me to solve their computer issues. Eventually my boss resigned because he got sick of it.”
Raye said she was asked to replace that boss on an interim basis. If everything worked out well, she was told she would be promoted two GS levels after six months. Raye decided to take her manager, Jack Smith, up on the offer. For the next half year, she ran three shift operations and taught people how to debug the LARC. When it came time to receive the promotion she was promised, Raye was told that it would not happen because there was a salary freeze. Raye said she looked around her and saw others getting promotions. Then she asked Smith was why there was a freeze for her but not for everybody else.
“And he said to me, ‘I gotta be honest. You’ve got the right name, but you’re the wrong sex,’” Raye recalled. “He said he couldn’t stand women in supervisory positions, but they really needed me and hoped I would stay. He told me, ‘I wish the guys worked as hard as you do.’”
Raye said she went back into the computer room and began filling out new job applications as obviously and quickly as she possibly could. Word got around the Applied Mathematics Lab that she was looking for a new opportunity, and the head of software systems development, Betty Holberton, approached Raye and asked if she’d come work for her. Holberton, an icon of early computing who had been instrumental in developing the UNIVAC, saw great potential in Raye, and she disapproved of the way Raye had been treated by her previous bosses. She planned to take Raye under her wing and give her a more supportive environment as they worked together on next-level computing for the government. The transition didn’t go as smoothly as expected.
“At this point I had been working for eight years and the personnel people decided that I had to take the federal service exam,” Raye said. “I took it and passed it with a ninety-something. They told me that my score wasn’t high enough, and then they said the same thing after took it a second time and got another high score.”
Raye was about to take the test a third time when Holberton told her to bring the exam to her when she was finished, and they would go together to take her results to personnel.
“I scored a ninety-five on this test,” Raye said. “So when we showed it to personnel, they told Betty Holberton that they knew I was scoring high, but they had never had a non-mathematician or non-engineer working as a systems analyst or systems developer and they didn’t want to establish a precedent for that now.”
Frustrated, Betty Holberton asked the personnel staff to pull her own file. When they did, they saw that she had a journalism degree and had helped develop the ENIAC, which was used to study the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.
Raye is seated front row at the dedication of the LARC Computing System at the Applied Mathematics Laboratory on May 15, 1961.
“Needless to say, I was transferred to Betty Holberton,” Raye said. “And I worked for her as a software systems analyst and developer, taking whatever software was needed to operate the computer and modifying it so that it would be standard for the lab’s operations.”
In the meantime, Betty Holberton was so angry about the way Raye had been treated, she told Raye she would stay at the Model Basin until she could promote Raye from a GS-9 to a GS-11.
“Even though I had left Arkansas, you still had racism in Maryland and Washington, DC,” Raye said. “Sometimes when I encountered it, it stunned me. By this time, I was working with White people at the Model Basin, and they accepted me for who I was: a human. I remember one day some of them asked me to go to lunch with them, so I said sure and jumped into the car with them.”
The group headed to the department store Woodward & Lothrop, which had a nice dining room. “There were Black people with us, but they were lighter-skinned than I was, so the hostess looked at me and said to the group, ‘We can’t serve you in the dining room, but we’ll take you to a private room and serve you in there.’” Raye said. “I have to give credit to the people who were with me, because they said if I couldn’t eat with them, they weren’t going to eat there.”
Raye said her coworkers called all the people they knew and told them to stop shopping at Woodward & Lothrop, and if they had credit cards with them, to pay them off and get rid of them.
“The racism I encountered [in Maryland and Washington, DC,] was much more subtly done, but it happened,” Raye said. “I just assumed in this particular case, that if you asked me to go to lunch with you, that it would be OK.”
Although the civil rights movement had begun to gain momentum while Raye was in college, she didn’t join the ranks of those who marched or picketed, even though she did believe in the larger cause. She was a fervent supporter of President John F. Kennedy and believed that he would push the country to pass national civil rights legislation.
“I thought he had a lot to offer, and he had been on the naval ship, PT-109,” she said, referring to the American patrol torpedo boat that had been rammed by a Japanese destroyer on August 1, 1943. Kennedy’s actions to save the eleven crewmembers that survived made him a war hero and captured the imaginations of those who believed in his ability to unite and inspire an entire nation. Raye certainly had great hopes for him, especially with all the political, social, and scientific change that was happening in the country.
Not everyone shared Raye’s optimism about Kennedy’s commitment to the civil rights movement. Some believed that he was too tentative in his approach to helping Black people in the United States. As the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, he understood what it felt like to be discriminated against, and he felt there was a moral imperative to treat people equally and fairly. However, he was a foreign policy aficionado at heart, and it would take him some time to understand the full extent of the discrimination Black Americans faced. Plus, he believed there would be political repercussions if he came out solidly in support of equal rights and opportunities for Black people. So Kennedy walked a tightrope between wanting the support of Black voters and wanting the support of southern Democrats who embraced segregation. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was growing increasingly frustrated with Kennedy’s desire for order at the expense of moral progress, and he organized a demonstration in Washington to push for a strong federal civil rights bill. It had been a long time coming.
On Wednesday, August 28, 1963, Raye made her way down to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to hear Reverend King deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech to the more than two hundred thousand people who had gathered there.
“I was living his dream,” Raye said. “And to hear him speak was marvelous.” It was an exciting moment that inspired Raye and the countless others who had filled in around her.
“They brought people in from all over the country on buses,” she said. “And when it was over, everyone quietly left. There was no free-for-all, nothing. But nobody expected any fighting or anything after something like this.”
After the speech, King met with Kennedy and his vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, to stress the need for bipartisan support of comprehensive federal civil rights legislation. Such a meeting would have been unthinkable a decade before, at a time when Raye wasn’t allowed to study engineering because of her color. The promise of what could come next was inspiring, and Raye looked to both these men as beacons for what should be. She was a government employee, but that fact didn’t mean she felt like she couldn’t protest government policy. As a matter of fact, the fact that she was a federal employee made her well placed to protest in her own way and on her own terms.
“My mom believed in civil rights for everyone,” David said. “She didn’t care about your looks, your orientation, your religion. She believed everybody had the same rights, and she would support you as an individual if you wanted to make a change. But she would also let you know that you had the obligation to do the same for other people.”
David said his mother later understood the implication of her being on some of the boards she was on. Not only was it a good opportunity for her, it was an inspiration to people like her, and it sent a message to those who were uncomfortable with her being there.
Whether it was civil rights, or technological advances, the nation was undergoing big, ambitious changes. Black and White youths traveled through several southern states to expose unlawful segregation in interstate bus travel. After Alan Shepard became the first American in space, President Kennedy promised a man on the moon by the end of the decade. James Meredith became the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, and in the following year the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began a movement to show what happened to Black Americans who attempted to integrate public spaces in Birmingham, Alabama.
Not all of those changes were welcome. Even those that were didn’t happen overnight. But there was the sense, however fleeting, that there could be something good on the horizon, and that things might be better, someday. Hope bloomed like the soft pink cherry blossoms that surrounded the capital each spring. However, like the beautiful flowers, this optimism would be short-lived. On Friday, November 22, 1963, Raye said she was running through the halls at the David Taylor Model Basin happily telling coworkers about a colleague’s newborn.
“That’s when we found out that President Kennedy had been assassinated,” she said. “We just stopped everything and left work.”
The nation was glued to television sets that entire weekend, watching as Air Force One arrived in Washington, DC, that Friday evening with Kennedy’s body on board. Lyndon Baines Johnson was now president. Martin Luther King Jr. said he was “shocked and grief-stricken” about the assassination. “The finest tribute that the American people can pay to the late President Kennedy is to implement the progressive policies that he sought to initiate in domestic and foreign relations,” King said.
But first, there was mourning. The world grieved as it watched four full days of television, much of it commercial-free. Kennedy’s body was brought to the Capitol Rotunda so that Americans could pay their respects. Raye and Flossie were sitting in front of their set when nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters. Raye wondered what was happening to the country, and immediately changed the channel to watch mourners file past President Kennedy’s flag-draped coffin at the Capitol.
“I said to my mother, ‘You know if we lived any other place in the world, we’d be saying that we’d be at the Capitol if we lived in DC. So come on, let’s go,’” Raye said. “And we went down and stood in that line for eighteen hours. The line wound all the way around the Mary McLeod Bethune monument that’s there in Lincoln Park, but we waited and were able to pay our respects. My aunt in Little Rock said she saw me and my mother go through the line at four o’clock in the morning.”
Raye said she had such great hopes for Kennedy and his vision for the country. It seemed like just yesterday that Martin Luther King had led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and she said she was keen to see how Kennedy’s and King’s vision for civil rights could push the country forward. Despite her grief and shock, she said she knew that she had exceeded many people’s expectations for her. This moment only strengthened her resolve to keep pushing, to keep fighting.*
No matter Raye’s determination, everything seemed like an uphill battle. She was going through a divorce and fighting for herself at work, but she didn’t want to let anyone except for her mother know that she was feeling vulnerable, or even why. She needed people to see that she was strong, charismatic, and capable of doing anything. If she felt threatened or hurt by someone, she would never let them know that they had gotten to her. There was no sense in giving them that sort of power.
And then a coworker introduced Raye to a handsome barber named Dave Montague.
Raye said she was always so busy working she never had time for dating. Men were interested in her, she said, but they would often drift away after a period of time. Raye chalked it up to their insecurities, but when she met Montague, things were different. He was smooth, handsome, and seemingly very self-assured.
“He was a tall, dark chocolate yum-yum,” Raye said. “Oh, he was a hunk. Smart, danced beautifully, played chess, played bridge, you name it.”
It was 1964, and Raye’s divorce to Weldon was not yet final. After how things had fallen apart with Weldon, Raye was frankly hesitant about falling in love. But Dave was impossible to resist. His looks and charm aside, he was a successful barbershop owner who once appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. According to Raye, The Tonight Show filmed an ongoing segment on talented workers across the country, and Dave was invited to appear to talk about his flair for doing hair. Dave did well for himself, and Raye joked that because he was a womanizer, he likely used his appearance on Carson to meet and impress more women. As it stood, he had no shortage of female admirers who would have loved to take him off the market. These were the early signs that he was a catch, and also that Raye would find herself caught.
Over time, though, troubling details about Dave emerged: He was the absentee father of a preteen girl named Debra, who was being raised by her grandparents. He had drug and alcohol problems, and a prison record. There was also a string of women he was unwilling to ignore. Yet he and Raye fell in love and married on October 15, 1965, less than a month after her divorce to Weldon was finalized.
Within months, Raye was pregnant and suffering through two hours of morning sickness every day before working an eight-hour evening shift. She spent her nights testing timesharing, a process in which multiple users could perform different functions on a computer at the same time, thus increasing its efficiency.
Prior to this, when computer users entered information, there was typically some wait time for a response to that action. As computer memory and speeds increased, it became possible for more than one user to work on the machines. With timesharing, the computer could be programmed to remember where one user was during their process, and start performing functions for another user or users. As time-sharing was being developed, David Taylor Model Basin was one of the beta sites, and they needed someone to test the system from 4:00 to 6:00 PM. These hours were convenient for Raye’s new schedule, so she would work with the companies who had developed the program and the employees who were creating ship models using the numerical control tapes. Once she was done troubleshooting, she advised the system people about the types of problems people were running into so they could make changes. It was exacting work—made even more exhausting by her pregnancy and a husband who could not seem to turn a blind eye to other women.
“One of the things that hurt me, I remember, was that he kept saying to me, ‘Hard as you work, you should be promoted,’” Raye said. “I said I agreed. Well, I was pregnant, wearing my maternity clothes, and I had a promotion that I showed to him. I told him, ‘Let’s go out and celebrate,’ and his whole confidence changed just like that. He told me, ‘That’s how the White man keeps his foot in the Black man’s ass, by promoting you women.’”
Raye was stunned.
“After that, it just sort of went downhill,” she said. “I think that some of the guys he was hanging out with were talking about women making more money, doing things, or excelling and maybe he didn’t mean to hurt me in that fashion, but he did. It really hurt.”
On the other hand, she and Dave were about to become parents, so she was likely hopeful that they could work things out. Raye applied for and received three and a half months of maternity leave, which she began on August 1, 1966. Nine days later, her son, David Ray Montague, was born.
Whatever problems Dave and Raye had prior to the birth seemed to fall by the wayside, at least temporarily. The birth announcements they sent to family and friends exude sheer parental delight:
David Ray Montague
is my name
Wednesday, August 10th, 1966
is the day I came
4 lbs. is what I weigh
and these are the folks
with whom I stay:
Raye and David Montague
3700 Thirtieth Pl. NE
Washington, DC
David was a delicate baby, likely because of his mother’s smoking habit. Given the tentative place Dave and Raye were in their marriage, it is easy to see how the initial joy of having a newborn could be replaced with the anxieties and challenges of nurturing someone so frail. As a good-time guy, Dave, who had previously walked out on his daughter Debra, was likely thinking about how to make a quick exit from his taxing new reality. True to form, he left when David was nine weeks old, leaving Raye to care for him on her own. She had less than two months to figure out how she would care for David once she went back to work.
As far as Raye was concerned, it was time to kick like the devil and holler for help. Flossie had moved back to Arkansas once she was confident that Raye had gotten back on her feet after Weldon. But this was an entirely different situation. Raye called her mother and told her she needed her. Flossie didn’t hesitate; she sold her salon in Pine Bluff and moved up to Washington permanently to help her only child and grandson. After all, a mother’s unconditional love and encouragement have a way of steadying an uncertain child, no matter their age or circumstance.
Flossie moved one of her two salon chairs and a heavy hair-dryer into Raye’s house, perhaps as a reminder of the profession she embraced that enabled her to take care of herself and daughter after her divorce. Her things in place, she took to looking after David, cooking, and cleaning. That way, when Raye went back to work, she could focus on her job. Then Raye’s father, Rayford Jordan, reached out to her for the first time since he and Flossie divorced. Flossie had sent him the birth announcement, and he wanted to see his only grandson.
“David was the only grandchild he had because my father never remarried,” Raye said. “I asked mother if it was OK with her, and she said it was.”
Rayford Jordan came to Washington to stay with his daughter and ex-wife for two weeks. During his visit, he reflected on the family’s early years together and how his struggles with alcoholism made it difficult for him to be a good provider. Now, he watched as his thirty-one-year-old daughter and namesake, Raye, was supporting both an infant and Flossie, and he felt that it didn’t need to be that way.
Rayford wanted a chance to make things right. He returned to Mississippi and considered the twenty-six-acre portion of the family farm he had been given. The land was not to be divided or sold until grandkids came along. Although he and Flossie had long been divorced, and though he had not seen Raye since she was four years old, David was still his grandchild. The condition of his inheritance therefore being met, Rayford pled his case to divide his portion and succeeded. He then deeded the land to Raye. Rayford told her she could rent it to someone to live on or sell it. The easiest thing for her to do would be to have the timber on the property thinned out and sold from time to time so she could keep a steady stream of cash coming in. Whatever she decided, Rayford wanted her to take the land and do what was right for her and her little family. Knowing the parcel was hers and that her mother was home with David was a great comfort to Raye as she headed back to work.
Raye, and her mother Flossie McNeel (seated at the head of the table) with David on her lap, Thanksgiving 1966.
“I was a single parent and fighting the war at work,” Raye said. “My mother was living with me and could help me with the baby while I worked. My father gave me this land. Betty Holberton then wrote me up for a raise, telling me I was well past due for it. Then she left, but not before giving me a copy of that promotion ‘in case they decided they lost it.’ Betty set up the same kind of operation at the National Bureau of Standards, but didn’t ask me to come with her. She said I had a role to play where I was and I agreed.”
Raye said Betty was a godsend to her. “Everything that happened to me, happened for a reason,” she said. “I had to face all these obstacles to be ready for the big thing that was in store for me. I had to go through all the traps, hard work, and frustrations in order to be ready for whatever it was I was sent to do.”
* Less than a year later, President Johnson advanced Kennedy and King’s vision by signing into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discriminatory practices in voting, hiring and education. It also provided for integration of public places such as restaurants and schools. In 1965, he then signed the Voting Rights Act, which gave Black voters the legal means to challenge any voting restrictions they faced on the local level. Decades later, in 1995, Raye’s son would become the senior investigator for the Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, which was a source of great pride for her.
