An excerpt from Shine My Crown -
Raye Montague: The Black Woman From Little Rock Who Revolutionized U.S. Navy Ship Design
by Gee NY
Though rarely mentioned in history books, Raye Montague, a naval engineer from Little Rock, Arkansas, transformed the future of shipbuilding in the United States Navy.
With that feat, she shattered barriers of race, gender, and technology in the process.
Born in 1935 in segregated Little Rock, Montague grew up at a time when Black children were denied equal access to education, and women were rarely encouraged to pursue careers in science or engineering. But that didn’t stop her.
Her interest in engineering began at the age of seven, when her grandfather took her to see a captured German submarine during a World War II exhibition tour. She was captivated.
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Montague moved to Washington, D.C., and began working for the U.S. Navy in 1956 as a clerk typist. However, her position put her close to the engineers and computers she’d long dreamed of working with. Through keen observation and determination, she taught herself how to program the UNIVAC I computer system—one of the earliest commercial computers in use at the time.
Her tenacity paid off. Over the next decade, Montague worked her way up through the Naval Sea Systems Command, eventually becoming a computer systems analyst and then an engineer. But it was in 1971 that she truly made history.
At the time, ship design was an excruciatingly long process. Engineers typically took two years to design a draft of a naval ship using manual calculations and physical drafting tools.
But after being assigned to streamline the process for a new class of frigates—and facing immense pressure to deliver—Montague did what no one else had done: she used computer programming to automate the design process.
In just 18 hours and 26 minutes, Montague produced the first-ever computer-generated draft of a naval ship—the Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate. It was a feat that stunned her superiors and sent shockwaves through the defense engineering world.
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