Adding Up the Difference: Vivienne Malone-Mayes
Archimedes’ bath-time “Eureka!”.
Isaac Newton’s apple.
Albert Einstein’s E = mc2.
The history of science is full of heroic conquests of mind over matter (sometimes very abstract matter), the stories of which have become cultural touchstones. I study this cultural history – particularly through interrelations of literature and mathematics – highlighting the often-overlooked material circumstances and societal impact of such stories. In the canons of both English Literature and the history of Mathematics, a lot of emphasis is traditionally placed on “pale, male, and stale” figures [1]. Empowering silenced voices to address institutional violence suffered by marginalised people has never been more important. I’d like to share the following story of a mathematician in their institutional and historical context.
In early June 2020 – amid global protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd – communications researchers Dr. Shardé M. Davis (University of Connecticut) and doctoral candidate Joy Melody Woods (University of Texas at Austin) launched @BlackInTheIvory on Twitter to “Retweet and Amplify Black voices and experiences in Academia”, as part of a call for higher education to confront systemic racism with radical, structural institutional change.”
A little under sixty years previously, in the Jim Crow South of the United States, Vivian Malone famously suffered an attempt to obstruct her enrolment at the University of Alabama. Across the Mississippi, another V. Malone had faced the barriers of segregated education. In August of 1961, in her hometown of Waco, Texas, Vivienne Malone-Mayes applied to pursue a Ph.D. in Mathematics at Baylor University. She already held B.A. and M.A. degrees in Maths and was teaching the subject at Paul Quinn College. A few days after she wrote to Baylor’s admissions board, she received the following reply.
August 28, 1961
Dear Mrs. Mayes:
Thank you for your letter of August 24. I have discussed it with my superiors in office here but have nothing favorable to report. We have not yet taken down the racial barrier here, although I have been hopeful that it would be done eventually. It seems that everyone is waiting for everyone else and no one will take the initiative in such matters.
I sincerely wish that it were possible for me to process your application for admission to Baylor University as a student.
Very sincerely yours,
Alton B. Lee, Registrar and Director of Admissions [2]
Vivienne was born in 1932 to Vera Estelle Allen Malone and Pizarro Malone – a farmer turned self-taught accountant. It was her father Pizarro whom Vivienne credited with her first mathematical revelation:
One incident stands out in my mind. I will never forget it. I had had 5’s and then we were on the 7’s, and we just took them one by one. We never tried to see relationships between anything. So my daddy said, “What's after 7 times 1 ?” I answered, “7 times 2,” “7 times 3,” etc., and when we got to 7 times 5, I couldn't answer. So Daddy said, “What's 5 times 7?” And I said, “35.” He said, “What's 7 times 5?” And I said, “I don't know.” He sat there and I don't know how many times he had to say it before I caught on, but he never told me the answer of 7 times 5. He kept saying, “What is 5 times 7”? He taught me, without knowing, the commutative law of multiplication []. That's how I know it now. No one else had ever pointed that out. [3]
Pizarro was arithmetically gifted and encouraged his only child to pursue formal education to achieve her emerging scientific potential. Meanwhile, at her underfunded and segregated school – in Texas, education was separate but certainly not equal between races – Malone developed her drive.
Black girls were expected to excel in their studies. No difference was made between boys and girls. The moral lectures given by lectures and designed to stimulate students to aspire to high and lofty careers were directed equally to boys and girls. Girls were conditioned from my earliest recollection to prepare to work. [4]
Yet, in pursuing her passion for learning to higher education, there were limitations. As Claudia Henrion writes “one of the primary purposes of [Malone] attending college was to find a husband, preferably a doctor”. Moreover:
My father wanted me to go to Fisk [a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee] because it was in the South, and they had brainwashed me to try to come back to Waco [following graduation]. In those days there were no rest homes and no nursing homes, and I was their only child. They didn’t want me so far away that I couldn't be of any help to them. [5]
I think this is worth stressing: the expectation to be wife and caregiver is something that’s conspicuously absent from the biographies of, say, Newton.
Malone had enrolled in Chemistry at Fisk University, but switched to Mathematics after being inspired by her lecturer Evelyn Boyd Granville. Granville was just the second African-American woman to earn a doctorate in Mathematics, and her visibility as a Mathematics professor and Ph.D. made her an important role model for Malone.
We admired her [Granville]. That’s another reason I became so interested in becoming an intellectual. When she was introduced at the first convocation, the whole student body applauded. It shocked all of them. This young woman was attractive and had all of these qualities you admire: poise, tact, softness of voice, refinement, etc. We had enormous respect for her. […]
Math became more fulfilling with Evelyn Boyd Granville and Lee Lorch because they began to really let me discover math; before that, math was like rabbit-in-the-hat stuff to me. Evelyn Boyd walked in class every day: definitions, theorem, proof, then example; it was almost like a little song. A lot of the fellows in the class thought it was all worthless, they couldn't stand it. But I loved it. You had to understand it to do well on the tests; you could not reproduce it by rote. But once you began to understand it, the beauty of it began to shine through. I never liked what I call reading and writing courses, interpretive courses, because, whenever I wanted to give my interpretation, it was always wrong or didn't jive with how the teacher saw it. But math is so logical. [6]
Malone celebrated the “logical” not just for its austere purity, but also for its ability to empower individuals and communities. She brought this belief – and the attitude that “my career and success as a mathematician should be cherished and are important - but that decency is more important than success” – to her pedagogy as a College lecturer in Mathematics. As Henrion explains:
[Malone] thought it was crucial for students to learn how to read mathematics. She often talked about wanting them to learn to “be their own doctor,” to analyze the underlying problem, gather the data they need, and learn how to solve it. [...] She also believed it was critical to allow people the room to fail. As she wrote in a column for a local newspaper and in one of her sermons, too often we present only our successes; we show only the prize fish we caught, not the one we threw back in the water. We show the theorems that have been proven, and the correct answers, not the failed attempts and dead ends. But mistakes and false starts are critical to growth and learning.
This privileging of decency and growth through failure is an important alternative to more familiar scientific biographical tropes of the lone genius. Malone encouraged many students to pursue doctoral degrees and, eventually, they persuaded her to take her own advice. Another factor, however, was her marriage: she was now Vivienne Malone-Mayes. Her relationship with her husband (at best dysfunctional, but more likely abusive on some level), “whittled away at her confidence in herself”. They also had a daughter, Patsyanne, whom Malone-Mayes cherished, though it is important to note that she was at this point the primary carer. In this unhappy marriage, Malone-Mayes started to “believe that she really was stupid and couldn’t do anything right”. She did not leave him, but she may well have pursued her doctoral studies “in an attempt to salvage a sense of herself or to prove him wrong” [7]. Either way, as a black woman seeking independence from a stifling marriage through research education in the segregated South, Malone-Mayes’s story is both inspirational and frustratingly absent from most mathematical histories.
It’s worth noting that, in 1961, Baylor didn’t even run a doctoral Mathematics programme (which the letter from “the Registrar and Director of Admissions” does not feel necessary to point out). It was the University of Texas at Austin that would, in 1966, confer Malone-Mayes the title of Doctor. First, however, there was “the cultural shock I received in my transition from an all-Black to a predominantly white institution” [8]. At Austin, Malone-Mayes found herself a conspicuous matriculant in a number of ways:
I remember that the advanced calculus course was taught by a graduate student and met at 7 A.M. every morning, and not only was I the only woman, I was the only black in the class. I sat right next to the door and I was truly isolated. I had no one to talk to in the class; even though there were two other girls in the class, they avoided me like I was some sort of plague, because if you're not a white woman, you can't associate with anybody except maybe handicapped men. [9]
Separated from her daughter and shunned by the all-white, all-male study group, Malone-Mayes’s graduate experience at Austin was very lonely and structurally isolating.
It takes a great deal of mental and emotional energy “just to get through a day,” when every encounter emphasises your difference [10]. Malone-Mayes asked herself “Was my vacuum created because I was black or female or both?”
In spite of the growing acceptance of me by classmates, certain privileges or opportunities that would have accelerated my mathematical maturity were withhel
I could not become a teaching assistant. Why? Black.
I could not join my advisor and other classmates to discuss mathematics over coffee at Hilsberg’s Café. Why? Because Hilsberg would not serve Blacks. Occasionally, I could get snatches of their conversation as they crossed our picket line outside the café. (It was only after Hilsberg was required by law to serve Blacks that I noticed that women were seldom included in these informal over-coffee problem-solving sessions.)
I could not enroll in one professor’s class. He didn’t teach Blacks. And he believed that the education of women was a waste of the taxpayer’s money. [11]
Even in the face of such blatant inequality, one of Malone-Mayes’s professors complained to her about the civil rights demonstrations around the country. “If all those out there,” they said, “were like you, hardworking and studious, we wouldn’t have any problems”, to which Malone-Mayes replied “If it hadn’t been for those hell-raisers out there, you wouldn’t even know me” [12].
Her support came – at distances of both geography and understanding – from her family and her church community back in Waco.
Everybody thought I was crazy. They said, “In the first place you don't need a Ph.D. You’re black. Where are you going to work?” Every time I'd come home, and even in my class, they would ask me what I was going to do with a Ph.D. “Where are you going to work?” […] So even my family, they were just tolerating me. I had no big push from my people to complete the Ph.D. or go get it or anything. They said, “We'll help you if that's what you want to do, but we don't see why you want to do it.” [13]
I’m sure many first-generation graduate students can empathise this type of support, which further distinguishes Malone-Mayes from say, Rene Descartes, whose father Joachim had studied and practiced law in the 16th Century. Nevertheless, Malone-Mayes “felt like everything would work out. I don't know why”.
And it did work out: at least as far as completing her Ph.D in asymptotic analysis – which she did in 1966 – and in her early post-doctoral career achievements. “I never dreamed that Baylor” – the University that initially rejected her because she was Black – would hire me, but I just had to keep it up.” When Baylor did end up offering Malone-Mayes a professorship, “Everybody[, her family and friends,] congratulated me for getting on at Baylor, but my aunt had the best response for everybody. She would say, ‘Yes, it is a blessing for Baylor’” [14].
Baylor College had lowered at least one racial barrier and offered Dr. Malone-Mayes a professorship. Yet, of course, as Henrion notes, the barriers Malone-Mayes continued to confront at Baylor “were both large and small, and it took tremendous determination to pursue this path in relative isolation as an African American, and as a woman in mathematics” [15]. Being conspicuous, as a Black member of faculty in a White institution, was incredibly difficult. Members of the “default race”in both Western countries and Western intellectual endeavour are often seen as individuals – with term ‘eccentric genius’ being used to romanticise behaviour that others would be condemned for. Yet, Malone-Mayes acknowledged that her responsibilities were greater:
There were 11 million blacks in this country, and we felt we had the reputation of all 11 million of them riding on our shoulders. That's why I emphasize in my classes that proof by special case is a logical fallacy, because going around trying to be proof for 11 million people is a tremendous burden. I felt like I had to show and prove that blacks can produce, they can do research, they can write papers, they can teach. I always felt that I had to prove something. As I said to a colleague, "I can't afford mediocrity." [16]
As Baylor’s only African-American educator on campus, and with Black students accounting for a little over 1% of the student population, Malone-Mayes was in some ways as isolated as she had been as a graduate student at Austin. Yet, she fondly remembers the “splendid cooperation” with which she and students worked. She made particular efforts in her “counseling of gifted women students”:
Fortunately, the situation is changing. But until recently, their response to my enthusiastic encouragement of what they could accomplish was met with apathy. Their response was a complete puzzle to me. One girl revealed quite frankly that she didn’t want to have any special plans for her life so she’d have no difficulty in accepting the plans her husband would have for their lives. Perhaps the greatest service the women’s movement will give is to awaken women that they should participate in the decisions that shape their destiny. [17]
Against the mythic image of the lone genius – and the rarely-mentioned privileges that support such work – Malone-Mayes’s successes raised entire communities:
She was the first Black elected to the Executive Committee of AWM and served on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Mathematicians (oriented toward the Black community in the mathematical world). She was a member of the AMS, the NCTM, and the MAA, where she was elected director-at-large for the Texas Section. In addition, she served as director of the High School Lecture Program for the Texas MAA. Her dedication to the community at large was just as great. We have already mentioned her antiracist picketing; her articles situate her academic struggles within the broader antiracist movement. She served on advisory boards for civic and charitable organizations and was both choir director and organist for her church. [18]
Yet, the institutional structures of Baylor were still alienating. Even progresses, such as a federal inspection programme being introduced to ensure standards of racial equity, was not to last. The Reagan and Bush administrations of 1980s and early ‘90s “saw the budgets of the civil rights agencies cut drastically, and inspection visits fell victim”. Malone-Mayes felt that this lack of oversight “weakened her position and cited several specific complaints”, that including her salary that was $12,000 below her equally qualified peers [19]. At this time a new head of the department was appointed, who denied Malone-Mayes teaching on the courses she enjoyed; her request to teach summer courses was met with the response “I haven't even offered those to the white male faculty yet” [20]. A student remembers seeing Malone-Mayes and thinking: “She was most alone person I’d ever seen in my life”. The stress that these issues caused Malone-Mayes drastically affected her health and she suffered a fatal heart attack on the 9th of June 1995 [21].
In this biographical sketch of Dr. Vivienne Malone-Mayes, then, we can clearly see the intersectional difficulties posed by certain ‘systems of domination and the inter-relatedness of sex, race, and class oppression’ [22]. In Malone-Mayes’s words “In many instances, it will be quite difficult to conclude whether these events happened because I am Black or because I am a woman or because I am both Black and female” [23]. Though her visibility made her a role model and her activism helped change the structure – and this is a legacy that should be celebrated just as much as any singular genius of bygone centuries – this question of “Black and female” remains. As Davis and Woods’s efforts show, fifty years after civil rights “race still matters” [24]. It is especially important to examine such intersectional inequities in academic institutions and, as a matter of urgency, implement lasting, structural solutions within those institutions. Literature and Science studies have a duty to honour the legacy of Malone-Mayes, telling more inclusive stories to help to change the narrative for the benefit of all.
References
[1] Alice Te Punga Somerville, “‘If I close my mouth I will die’: Writing, Resisting, Centring” in Resistance: An Indigenous Response to Neoliberalism, ed. by Maria Bargh (Wellington, NZ: Huia), p. 90.
[2] Claudia Henrion, Women in Mathematics: The Addition of Difference (Race, Gender, and Science) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp.193-194. The vast majority of this blog post comes from Henrion’s superb book of interview-supported essays.
[3] Henrion, 1997, p. 197.
[4] Vivienne Malone-Mayes, “Black and Female,” pp. 178-181, in Complexities: Women in Mathematics, ed. by Bettye Anne Case and Anne Leggett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 179.
[5] Henrion, 1997, p. 198.
[6] Henrion, 1997, pp. 200-201. Granville was famously denied entry to the 1951 regional meeting of the MAA, which was held in a whites-only hotel. At the intervention of Lorch, a white New Yorker, the MAA and AMS changed their practices to avoid such appalling exclusion – (2011) Media Highlights, The College Mathematics Journal, 42:2, 163-172, DOI: 10.4169/college.math.j.42.2.163
[7] Henrion, 1997, pp. 202-203.
[8] Malone-Mayes, 2005, p. 179.
[9] Henrion, 1997, p. 206.
[10] Constance Carroll, “Three's a Crowd: The Dilemma of the Black Woman in Higher Education”, in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, ed. Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982), p. 120.
[11] Malone-Mayes, 2005, p. 180
[12] Etta Zuber Falconer and Lee Lorch, “In Remembrance”, pp. 181-183, in Complexities: Women in Mathematics, ed. by Bettye Anne Case and Anne Leggett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 182.
[13] Henrion, 1997, p. 207.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Henrion, 1997, p.194.
[16] Henrion, 1997, p. 207.
[17] Malone-Mayes, 2005, pp. 180-1.
[18] Falconer and Lorch, 2005, p. 183.
[19] Falconer and Lorch, 2005, pp. 182-3; Henrion, 1997, p. 208.
[20] Henrion, 1997, p. 208.
[21] Falconer and Lorch, 2005, p. 183.
[22] bell hooks, Feminist Theory: from margin to center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), p. 31.
[23] Malone-Mayes, 2005, p. 178.
[24] Yuya Kiuchi (ed.) Race Still Matters: The Reality of African American Lives and the Myth of Postracial Society (New York: SUNY Press, 2016).
Written by Stuart Taylor, GTA for LEADS