EP 11 Gladys West - She Built GPS, Yet No One Knew Her Name | Women And Resistance

Every time your phone finds your location, you're using math that a Black woman built in secret for four decades.

This week on Women and Resistance, Aya Fubara Eneli, Esq. and Adesoji Iginla honour Dr Gladys Mae West, the mathematician whose satellite geodesy models became the mathematical backbone of the Global Positioning System.

Her work wasn't publicly recognised for more than 60 years after she started.

In this episode, Dr Gladys West shares her inspiring journey from a farm girl in Virginia to a pioneering mathematician whose work was crucial to the development of GPS technology. Her story highlights resilience, dedication, and the importance of recognising hidden figures in history.

From her childhood on a Virginia farm to her groundbreaking career at the U.S Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Dr West shares how discipline, faith, education, and resilience carried her through segregation, loss, and long years of unrecognised labour.

Takeaways

*Gladys West's early life and education in Virginia
*Her work on geoid modelling and GPS development
*Challenges faced as a Black woman in STEM during segregation
*The importance of perseverance and discipline in her career
*Legacy and recognition of her contributions to technology

Chapters

*Introduction to Dr Gladys West's Legacy
*Her Early Life in Virginia and Childhood Influences
*Educational Journey and Overcoming Segregation
*Joining the U.S. Naval Research and Early Work
*The Development of Geoid Models and GPS Foundations
*Challenges as a Black Woman in a Male-Dominated Field
*Her Personal Life, Marriage, and Family
*Recognition and Legacy of Dr Gladys West
*Lessons on Dignity, Discipline, and Persistence

Welcome  to Women and Resistance, a powerful podcast where we honour the courage, resilience, and revolutionary spirit of women across the globe. Hosted by Aya Fubara Eneli Esq and Adesoji Iginla...

You're listening to Women and Resistance with Aya Fubara Eneli Esq and Adesoji Iginla—where we honour the voices of women who have shaped history through courage and defiance...Now, back to the conversation.

That’s it for this episode of Women and Resistance. Thank you for joining us in amplifying the voices of women who challenge injustice and change the course of history. Be sure to subscribe, share, and continue the conversation. Together We Honour the past, act in the present, and shape the future. Until next time, stay inspired and stay in resistance!

Transcript

Adesoji Iginla (00:01.21)
Yes, greetings, greetings, greetings, and welcome to another episode of Women in Resistance, your podcast where we highlight the role women have played in our collective liberation and help resuscitate their memories with regards to people. Now, today is pretty interesting one, as they all are, but this one bears special significance.

Because if every time your phone had told you to turn left and you did, each time you've landed at the right airport, every time a ship had fought found the harbor in a fog, and it doesn't stop there. Every time your farmer's tractor has planted a row, a straight row without missing an inch, there is a woman behind all of those achievements.

That woman we would meet today. But for the most part of the 42 years of our work, almost no one, and I repeat, almost no one knew her name. Today we are going to correct that and further cement her legacy in history. So again, welcome to Women in Resistance, the show where we reframe the narrative about the women history tried to underplay and in some cases erase.

But the job we do here is to bring them back into our collective memory. I am your host at this OG Ginla, and with me as usual is Aya Fobera Nelly Esquire, before she goes into character. So today, finding our way back, which is going to be a theme today, about you know, finding our way, is we're going to speak to Miss Gladys, Dr. Gladys May.

West. So who she is, what she's about, we'll find out. Welcome, Miss West. Dr. Gladys West, sorry.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (02:09.464)
Thank you, Dr. West. You know I got my my PhD at age 70.

I will tell you more about that. I am so humbled and delighted to get to spend some time with you and your audience. I hope there are some young black girls who are listening, young black boys who are listening, and that they draw some inspiration from the story I will share with you today. That will make it all worthwhile.

Adesoji Iginla (02:46.874)
I'm sure it will be. So, Dr. Gladys West, tell us how it all began.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (02:57.704)
It is a story that I still have to pinch myself to believe.

Could never have predicted how my life turned out. But you know what? Even as a young child, I would often hear, this one is different. So maybe you have children who you there's just something about them. Please nurture it. Please give them opportunities. You know, we lived in this.

one story building, kind of like a Cape Cod frame home. Very similar to what all the black people around us lived in. And most of us had a little plot of land that we worked as farmers. And

We had this beautiful oak tree in front of the house that I absolutely loved because those summers were brutal, but that tree would provide some shade and we would have all the windows open because we did not have the air conditioning and all of the technology that we enjoy today. And we had hardwood floors in this home, and as a child.

When I got very hot, I would just lay down on these hardwood floors because they were always cooler than the air in the room and standing up. And after a while, my siblings, there were four of us, it was my brother Joseph and then me and then my sister Annie and my other sister. And sometimes they would, you know, emulate me and they would lie down on the the

Aya  Fubara Eneli (04:49.312)
on the hardwood floors as well and realize, it is much cooler here. But that's how my brain worked. And they didn't lie down on the hardwood floors as much as I did, but that that is that is how my brain worked, was always looking for the ways that I could address the situation that I was in. So like you said,

Adesoji Iginla (04:49.787)
Flow.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (05:16.216)
Most people don't know me. In fact, it wasn't until 2018 when I I was speaking, I was going to be part of a a presentation for the aka's the Alpha Kappa Alpha that is the sorority that I'm a part of, and I put just the one line in there that I had worked on the GPS you know program that.

Is so prevalent in our world today. And Joyce, one of the ladies in AKA, she saw that line. She had no idea what my life's work had been. And she took that line and she ran with it. And the next thing the reporters were calling me. Now, remember, I told you this was 2018. I was born in 1930.

So for the vast majority of my life, I just put my head down and I worked the same way I saw my parents working, the same way I saw my grandparents working. So I did not build a monument, but what I did for 42 years, bent over numbers that nobody thought to thank me for, is I

Built the shape of the earth itself.

Adesoji Iginla (06:45.594)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (06:46.742)
I measured it, I corrected it, and I coaxed it into a model precise enough that a satellite could trust it. They call it, we in the scientific world, we called it the geode. You call it GPS. So I was born Gladys May.

Adesoji Iginla (07:07.098)
Gio.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (07:15.416)
Gladys May Brown West. Well, Gladys May Brown, and then I got married to the most incredible man on the face of the earth, Ira West. I will tell you more about that. But I was a farm girl from Dinwiddie County in Virginia. Do any of your audience members know where Dinwiddie is? And by the

Adesoji Iginla (07:42.546)
I'm sure they will, they will tell us.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (07:44.182)
Time I was through, I was literally, it feels like holding the whole world in my hands.

So I want to tell you the whole story, not just the part where the world clapped. You know, so many people now we're seeking fame and fortune. That is not what drove me. I was committed to the work. The long, quiet decades where nobody was noticing me and nobody was clapping at all. And the work I had to do had to be precise.

It had to be done the right way. So, like I was saying to you, I was born on October 27, 1930, in a stretch of Virginia called Sutherland, which is in Dinwiddie County. It's just south of Richmond, Virginia. My parents to whom I am indebted were Nolan Brown.

Adesoji Iginla (08:49.158)
Okay.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (08:55.98)
And Macy Pearl Scott. They had married in 1926, and like I said, I was the second of their four children. Now, my father, my father, Nolan Brown, was born in a place called Bellefonte in Nottaway County. But he moved to Dinwiddie when he was 10 years old, and that is where he lived his entire life.

He worked our small farm, but he also worked the railroad. And later he took a job at the Titmus Optical Company. And my father was a member of the Rocky Branch Baptist Church his whole life. And that was the same church that would one day host my funeral.

Adesoji Iginla (09:56.966)
Please in the circle.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (09:57.485)
My mother, Macy Pearl Scott, was born in Namozine, not far from where we lived, and on top of the farm and the house and four children. So she's working the farm, she's taking care of the house, the family. My mother worked shifts in a tobacco processing plant. And I have to tell you this when people talk about

My humility and my dedication and my work ethic, I say, you have got to look to my parents. Because between the two of my parents, I never saw an adult in my family sit still. There was work to be done, and that work had to be done right. Now we were not sharecroppers, thank God.

My father owned our own land, but nearly everyone around us was a sharecropper. And I tell you though, the difference between their lives and our lives was much thinner than you might imagine. I was picking cotton and tobacco before I even knew my times tables.

I knew the exact weight of a full sack against my shoulder.

And I watched every single day of my childhood the two roads that were laid out in front of a poor black farm girl in that part of Virginia in the 1930s. Now I know you have trained your audience to always situate the story in the history of the time. So remember, this was right around the Great Depression.

Adesoji Iginla (11:52.85)
Good time.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (12:02.324)
So these were the two roads that were presented to me. Black girl, farm girl, poor girl in Virginia. Stay and work the land like your parents, or go and work the tobacco plant like your mother.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (12:28.096)
Nobody presented any other options for me.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (12:35.534)
to imagine a a third option for myself.

And I imagined that for a long time. And I tell you, imagining was all I had.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (12:52.822)
Now, in terms of my education, what I had for school was a one-room building with a single teacher trying to teach every grade all at once. Now I know it's about to be back to school time.

And parents are blaming teachers and the school districts don't have enough money and so on and so forth. Now I believe we should properly fund our education, but I also want to say to all the children from economically disadvantaged places, I don't rightly care.

What the school district does or does not do. You have no control over that as a child. Now your parents and the adults who can vote might. But you as a child have a responsibility to imagine the life you want to have and to take full advantage of whatever you do have, you see.

So we were all packed into the same space. The youngest children's lessons bleeding right into the old children's lessons. I tell you, there were many days when I sat and I wished for more books, for more space.

And for more time when I didn't have to go and be in the fields to help the family with the harvest, cause it was a family affair. We all had to pitch in as best we could in order to live.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (14:49.006)
Made a promise to myself somewhere in that one room schoolhouse, no matter what was going on with anybody else or the teachers or our lack of resources, I said to myself, Gladys May, you are going to be so good at your studies that nobody looking at what you accomplished.

Adesoji Iginla (14:54.544)
Right.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (15:16.374)
would hand you back to the fields for good.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (15:24.382)
Now, young people fall in love and get crushes at a young age. I tell you, for me, geometry was my love. Ooh, it did something to me. I still find it hard to explain. Someone needs to make a love song about geometry.

The shapes made sense in a way the rest of the world often didn't to me. A proof either held together or it didn't. Nobody's opinion of a black farm girl could change whether the angles added up.

Adesoji Iginla (16:16.37)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (16:18.104)
Fell in love with that kind of fairness. I didn't know yet that I would spend my whole life working inside of it with my love.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (16:36.206)
After seven years in that one classroom school, and I give so much credit to that teacher. Can you imagine teaching multiple subjects to children of all ages all at the same time? Come on now, teachers, what are you complaining about? After seven years in that one-bedroom classroom, that one room classroom.

I rode a bus every day to the Dinwiddie Training School. It was a high school that was built for children like me. And when I say that, I'm talking about black folk because this was under segregation. Remember, Jim Crow was alive and well, so was Jane Crow. It was a long ride.

Adesoji Iginla (17:24.294)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (17:35.105)
And Dinwidd not in those days a place at all built for a black girl with dreams. But I made my peace with that bus and I did not let off on my studies. Excuse me, please, as I will share with you later, this body of mine has gone through some things.

Survived two strokes in a battle with breast cancer. And I do work out, I got a green belt in Jiu Jitsu, as a matter of fact. So I I keep pressing on, but every once in a while, so bear with me. You gotta bear with an old woman, right?

Aya  Fubara Eneli (18:31.022)
I wanted more than anything to be the best in that building. Because I understood, even as a teenager, that being the best was the only door I was going to be handed.

So let me say this. You know, in preparing to come and meet with you, I was reading about the uproar about Tuskegee University.

Adesoji Iginla (19:03.634)
The bonnet.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (19:05.632)
And I have a great love for the HBCUs, and I'm going to tell you the difference between the HBCUs I went to and what seems to be happening right now. I am delighted that the president of Tuskegee University said we must have standards. Because I could not have gotten to where I did or to work on this GPS.

Program that is now changing how the whole world operates. If I had chosen to get on that bus and go to the school with my bonnet and my house shoes. As a matter of fact, money was so tight for us. I had one blue nice dress. I wore it on Sundays.

Adesoji Iginla (20:03.473)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (20:04.534)
Now, fortunately for us, we had a traveling preacher. So we only had church once a month. So I was able to stretch out that dress and those two tight shoes that I had. But when you stepped out of your house, you did not step out in your work clothes. The work clothes were for the chores and the farming and the dirty work you had to do. You stepped out with your best foot forward.

But I digress. Let me get back to my story. But really, they're all connected. When I graduated in nineteen forty-eight, I was named valedictorian of my class. A black girl. A black farm girl.

That honor that I achieved gave me and my family something that we could never have paid for on our own. And that was a scholarship to Virginia State College.

Adesoji Iginla (21:03.666)
Mm-hmm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (21:21.978)
HBCU. Now my father worked the railroad and the optical company and our farm all at once.

And it still would not have been enough to send me away to school without that scholarship. But parents, I have to ask you: when you bring your offspring into the world, if you are so blessed to do so, can you possibly complain about the work it takes to

To provide a better life for your children.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (22:14.442)
When I got that scholarship, I looked at it. And I understood that that piece of paper telling me that I had a scholarship to go to college meant that that third road I had been imagining since I was a little girl in that one-room schoolhouse actually existed.

and I had just found the entrance to that pathway.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (22:56.49)
My mother, between her shifts at the tobacco plant, was known for her cooking.

she was an all around woman in every way. She taught me that you never put limitations on yourself, no matter the challenges. And today I still associate the smell of a certain kind of Sunday dinner with the particular safety of being a child who was loved and cared for.

Adesoji Iginla (23:35.313)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (23:35.732)
Even when the work never stopped.

Parents, do your children feel like they are an inconvenience to you or a blessing?

Aya  Fubara Eneli (23:53.163)
Now, however much my parents loved us, don't get me wrong on this point. It did not erase the work that was demanded of us. Harvest season, the picking season, did not care whether a child wanted to be reading instead.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (24:20.142)
I loved my family dearly, but I also spent my entire childhood plotting quietly how to get out of the exact life my parents were living. Not because I did not love and respect them, but because I wanted more rooms than the ones I had been given to grow in.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (24:48.888)
Today, you all might call what I did manifesting. I don't rightly care what you call it. What I am saying is you gotta dream a bigger dream than just what's presented to you.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (25:10.232)
Born just four years before the start of the Great Depression, that depression shaped every farming community in my county, and of course beyond. In Dunwedi County, black children attended separate and, as I've explained, chronically underfunded schools.

Decades after white schools in the same county had multiple classrooms, dedicated teachers for every grade, and of course much fatter budgets, black students in the county in our county had nowhere else to go for secondary education.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (25:59.151)
Now you understand the same Virginia would spend the coming decades resisting school integration by any legal maneuver available to it, including at times closing all the public schools entirely rather than choosing to desegregate them.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (26:29.23)
That is a twisted way of thinking.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (26:39.544)
went from that historically black college into a federal research laboratory.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (26:55.106)
There were a few of us, not that many. When I was at the college, I chose mathematics as my major, and that surprised quite a few folk. Again, remember, I am a black farm girl.

A lot of folk back then assumed, a black girl with good grades, well, she should study home economics or maybe elementary teaching, something that was appropriate for her race and her gender. But I wanted the one subject that did not bend.

to anybody's opinion of what I was capable of.

Adesoji Iginla (27:49.744)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (27:52.119)
You see.

Numbers didn't know or care who my parents were. Numbers did not care what county I came from. Numbers did not care the color of my skin. And numbers did not care about my gender. Numbers just cared to be right.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (28:25.568)
I earned my Bachelor's of Science in Mathematics from Virginia State College in nineteen fifty two. Now, even with that scholarship, money was tight. And so after I graduated, I went to work.

Told you, my people didn't sit still. I taught mathematics and science in segregated schools in Virginia, and for a time even in Mazzara.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (29:01.742)
I was good at teaching and I really liked my students. But remember my dream. I had not spent all those years chasing proofs in a one-room schoolhouse just to stop at another schoolhouse door for the rest of my life. I taught for two years.

Adesoji Iginla (29:21.252)
Mm-hmm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (29:29.984)
I saved what I could, and then I went right back to Virginia State to finish my Master of Science and Mathematics, which I completed in 1955.

This was right after Brown v. Board of Education.

Adesoji Iginla (29:50.746)
Auto education, yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (29:54.593)
Now, back then, even though we were now in the mid-1950s, teaching was one of the only career paths that stayed open to women and to black graduates.

There were a lot of brilliant people that I knew from those years, and they never got offered anything else. One of the tragedies of racism, of sexism, of all the forms of discrimination is that it limits what people are able to do.

Adesoji Iginla (30:40.027)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (30:40.482)
And therefore what they're able to contribute, it actually hurts us all.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (30:50.412)
Well, I was luckier than I understood at the time. Because in nineteen fifty six an opportunity appeared, just like that scholarship paper.

A position as a mathematician at the U.S. Naval Proving Ground in Dalgren, Virginia, a federal weapons and research laboratory nearly 240 miles from my home in Dinwiddie County.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (31:35.726)
Third road The scholarship had opened the entrance, and now I was walking the path.

Adesoji Iginla (31:44.335)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (31:47.023)
I applied. I did not dissuade myself. I did not look at the times and say, they're probably going to reject this black farm girl. I applied anyway.

They said yes.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (32:18.318)
Heart was beating so fast. What did yes actually mean? It meant I was leaving the only county I had ever lived in. I was leaving my parents' farm, leaving a teaching job, a good secure job that I was good at. To go.

two hundred and forty miles inside a military research installation where I did not know a single soul. Did I tell you I was a black farm girl?

Adesoji Iginla (33:04.284)
Yes you did.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (33:07.81)
Well, I was twenty five years old, and I packed what I owned, and I made that 240-mile trip, not entirely sure what I was walking into. And I want to thank my parents for believing in me, for not telling me that it was foolhardy and too dangerous, and for not limiting me.

Adesoji Iginla (33:21.318)
What?

Aya  Fubara Eneli (33:37.762)
Been fortunate in my life to have people who saw something in me and nurtured it.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (33:50.317)
What I knew as I made my way to that military research laboratory was that I would rather walk into the unknown than spend my whole life inside the two roads I had been shown as a girl. You gotta take some risks in this life, you understand.

Adesoji Iginla (34:09.466)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (34:20.076)
My two years teaching before Dalgreen, because I don't want that erased. I taught teenagers mathematics and science in segregated classrooms with secondhand books and not nearly enough of those books anyway to go around.

Adesoji Iginla (34:39.642)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (34:41.574)
Some of those students were sharp enough to do anything I was doing. If the world had simply let them.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (34:51.47)
I have wondered across the years since how many of them ended up exactly where I may have ended up myself.

Adesoji Iginla (35:04.357)
Mm-hmm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (35:04.746)
If a scholarship and a job offer had not come along for me the way that they did. This is part of why, although I am grateful for this recognition.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (35:23.436)
I am humbled by it, and I understand that it never belonged to me alone. It felt like it belonged to every one of those classrooms. I was just the lucky one who was given an opportunity. America, how you squander the minds and the talents of so many.

Based on your discrimination.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (35:58.765)
To tell you about this one student in particular. He was a young black boy and he could solve an algebra problem faster in his head than most of his class classmates could manage with a pencil and paper.

But he also said this to me. He said that

Mrs. Brown, Miss Brown, they called then. Miss Brown, he said, there is no point in me working hard at mathematics because nobody was going to hire a black man to do anything with it beyond teaching. Same as me.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (36:46.668)
I did not have a satisfying answer for him at the time.

Because in nineteen fifty four and nineteen fifty five I had no proof that he was wrong.

Adesoji Iginla (36:59.42)
Possible.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (37:05.012)
Now, when the reporters asked me what it felt like to help build the GPS program, I think of him often. I wish more than anything else from that whole chapter of my life that I could have handed him the ending of my own story back when he needed it. And that is why, young man, thank you for this opportunity to share with you because.

There is a young person, parents, grandparents, share this with your young people. There is a young person who right now believes why should I work hard at this? Look at all the black women who have been fired by the federal government. I suppose back in my time it could have been me. And they might think well, what's the what's the purpose?

Adesoji Iginla (37:57.939)
That's the point.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (38:01.036)
Tell them my full story that they might remember, that they might know that they can dream and manifest a different life than what a bigoted society might have drawn up for them.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (38:22.38)
Now, my college years at Virginia State were not without their own quiet defiance either. I was one of relatively few women in the mathematics track. And I was aware that every single day my professors and my classmates, my male classmates, were watching to see whether I would falter. Remember when you spoke with Reverend Pauli Murray?

Adesoji Iginla (38:49.594)
Yes.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (38:51.36)
And what she endured at another historically black college in University Howard College of Law, when they would not acknowledge that she was the best student in her class.

Adesoji Iginla (39:03.699)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (39:08.814)
I made a habit while I was a teacher to begin early to class, being early to class, and staying late.

And I would hold those teachers back asking them questions because I was determined, woman, black, poor, and all, that nobody was going to be able to say that I had not earned my place at the university.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (39:44.066)
Ooh, let me catch my breath. The dull green years. I remember that like it was yesterday.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (39:57.869)
The entire base was gray. Government gray. The kind of color that seems to belong to every federal building in the country. And people were milling around before the workday started, laughing, drinking coffee out of thermosis, easy with one another.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (40:28.94)
I was the second black woman ever hired at that installation. In fact, there were exactly four black employees in the entire place when I walked through the gate, and I was one of the four.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (40:50.356)
Now, you may have seen the movie Hidden Figures. They took some liberties, but they also told the truth. My white colleagues, for the most part, were friendly enough and respectful enough during the workday, I suppose. But outside the office, in the ordinary daily rhythm of life.

Adesoji Iginla (40:59.216)
With your license?

Aya  Fubara Eneli (41:17.666)
There wasn't much socializing across that color line.

And I made a decision early on not to let it wear on me more than it had to.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (41:38.627)
Did you not recently talk to a woman who said she came to a historically black college and university, Fisk University, I believe? And she said the racism in the area was so much it was as like they want to just strip you of your humanity. And she left and went back to Puerto Rico. Well, I wasn't going back to the farm, and I was not going to the tobacco plants to work ships.

Adesoji Iginla (41:56.657)
I should have to go back. Yes.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (42:08.8)
I was a serious woman. I had left my home, county, and my family and a good teaching job, and I did not have time or patience to spend energy on people who weren't going to meet me halfway. My focus went into the work because the work, at least, would always meet me exactly where I was. Now, as I say this to you,

Adesoji Iginla (42:35.237)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (42:39.946)
It occurs to me that that is probably how a lot of immigrants feel when they come to this country. You have left behind everything that you knew, everything that was familiar.

You dreamt a bigger dream than the path that was shown to you where you were. And now that you have made it to these shores.

You

So focused on the work. It's not that you don't feel and experience the racism or the sexism or any other ism. It's that you have made up in your mind, based on everything you have had to give up to get there, and everything that you are dreaming of, that you will not let some small-minded people turn you around.

Adesoji Iginla (43:35.344)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (43:41.315)
You know, we sang this song during the civil rights movement. Now I wasn't all engrossed in the civil rights movement because I had to be careful with my job. I eventually rose to a position where I had some clearance, secrets clearance, you know. And so I didn't march, but I sang those songs underneath my breath. I

Unlet nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around. I'm gonna keep on walking, keep on marching. That was my focus.

I'm mindful of the time. there's so much to tell you. My first assignments had me programming one of the Navy's early computers. The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator, the NORC. A machine that filled an entire room and represented at that time some of the most advanced computing power in the entire country.

I was doing the kind of hand and machine calculation that a few decades later people would start calling the work of hidden figures. But nobody was using that language at the time. We were just people doing our jobs and trying to get the numbers right. In my early years there, I helped process data for an astronomical study.

That confirmed mathematically the regular motion of the planet Pluto relative to Neptune.

Adesoji Iginla (45:40.167)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (45:41.994)
A black farm girl from Dinwidi County helping to settle the question about the orbit of a planet at the edge of the solar system.

Adesoji Iginla (45:54.586)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (45:58.841)
Honestly, I didn't think of it as being glamorous. It was just a Tuesday. It was just the work I had to do. Now, Dalgreen itself was a strange and it was a self-contained world. A high-security installation with its own dormitories. One side for the young man, one side for the young woman. And getting to any real city or town meant you had to catch the Greyhound bus.

I wasn't bothered by the isolation, I'd grown up in a farm.

Think it may have bothered people who had grown up in a city, but I was used to distance. What I was not used to was the particular loneliness of being one of four.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (46:55.746)
With the three other black professionals on that base, we made a kind of unspoken arrangement, like an unspoken agreement early on. We would be respectful to the leadership above us, and we would treat one another and everyone else the way we hoped to eventually be treated ourselves. Even when that hope felt hurt.

Adesoji Iginla (47:17.852)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (47:24.46)
This strategy was born not from idealism, it was born of necessity. What were we going to do? Four of us, we had to figure out how to exist in the space that we were in. We were not in a position to make demands. So, what we did, and what I encourage every young black person and those of you old to,

Is you make a discipline out of dignity instead?

Aya  Fubara Eneli (48:02.476)
Your work is done in such a way that it is above reproach. You know that saying, we gotta be twice as good to get half as much.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (48:15.628)
We watched out for each other. Do black people still watch watch out for each other?

Adesoji Iginla (48:21.702)
Yeah, yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (48:23.274)
Or are you busy trying to be the only one?

Adesoji Iginla (48:26.322)
I mean there's always the exception, but

Aya  Fubara Eneli (48:30.24)
Now, mathematics itself in those early years was unglamorous and exacting. I would take real world measurements, tracking data, trajectory data, astronomical observations, and translate them into the kind of precise, repeatable calculation a machine like the Nork could process.

There was no room for shortcuts or approximation in that work. A rounding error that seemed small on paper could become enormous once it got multiplied out across a real trajectory. Don't believe me, think of this. You can stand up right now, those of you listening to me.

If you

Walk a straight line, just maybe five to ten steps. Mark where you stop. Now go back to your starting point, and I want you to turn your right foot just a little bit to the right. And then I want you to start taking those same steps, five to ten steps. You see that little turn.

Doesn't seem like a big deal when you're first starting off. But if this is going straight and that is going this way, you see the more steps you take, the larger the different distance. Do you see what I'm saying? So we had to be exact. I learned in those years to hold two things in my head at once. The

Aya  Fubara Eneli (50:23.16)
confidence to trust my own math and the humility to check it three times before I let it leave my desk. That's the discipline of dignity.

Adesoji Iginla (50:36.999)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (50:39.298)
That nork took up the entire room humming and clattering. We thought it was alive, quite frankly. And we fed it punch cards and waited sometimes for hours for a single calculation to finish that a modern machine would complete before you finish the thought.

Patience was not a virtue in that job. It was simply a requirement of the equipment.

I think that early apprenticeship in waiting, in trusting a slow process to eventually deliver a correct answer, prepared me far better than I realized for the four decades of quiet, uncredited work that followed. I at

Twenty-six had already learned to sit with something unfinished and to trust it anyway.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (51:45.045)
Now, among the small handful of black professionals at Dalgreen was another mathematician named Ira Vivian West. He'd been born in Glen Allen, Virginia in May of 1931, just a little younger than I was. And he served in the United States Army in the early 1950s, as most black men did at the time.

And he earned his own degree in mathematics from Virginia Union University in nineteen fifty-five.

He would go on to lead the Bayes Ballistic Services Branch. Well, I met Ira West on a launch break not long after I got there.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (52:46.284)
I was too focused on my work at first to pay him any attention. I had places to be, calculations to finish, and I was not a woman who had time to be playing around. And as I used to put it.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (53:10.04)
Did not believe when it came to romance and things of that nature. It was something I needed a chase after.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (53:20.808)
Ira liked to tell people later that he knew right away that there was something between us. I did not know it quite that fast. I noticed him the way I would notice any capable colleague, and I kept walking.

But Dalgren was small and the circle of black professionals on that base was smaller still, and over time our friendship grew into something more serious. Ira, my dear Ira, he was steady in a way I respected. He was unshowy. He was precise and

The kind of man who understood exactly what it meant to spend his working hours inside columns of numbers that most people would never know or thank him for.

And on june fifteenth, nineteen fifty-seven, Ira and I were married in a Baptist church in Dinwiddie, Virginia, not far from the farm where I grew up.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (54:38.154)
It is the great joy of my life that we stayed married for sixty seven years until his passing.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (54:58.296)
He passed in twenty twenty four.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (55:07.278)
to leave something for you to go read about in my book. So let me try to wrap up a little bit.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (55:25.192)
Ira and I, we lived on a section of the base called Boomtown, where the married employees lived. Again, an isolated kind of community.

I became part of a small club of black women on that base as the numbers grew, and we would meet to talk through the civil rights questions of the day. The movement was in full swing while we were raising our children and I supported it with everything in me, but as a federal government employee, I could not go march or protest.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (56:17.036)
Well, Ira and I tried to have children, and we got pregnant.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (56:29.26)
I was just a few weeks away from my due date. And I felt this god awful pain. Ira and Ira drove me to the hospital as fast as he could.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (56:46.862)
And they performed a Caesarean section. But my child was born stillborn. what a devastating time it was.

But we had our faith and we believed.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (57:11.598)
And I again was just a few weeks from my due date. I started to feel a pain. We rushed to the hospital. And my second baby didn't survive. But I was hemorrhaging so bad that they had to rush me into surgery. And when I came through, Ira said,

Aya  Fubara Eneli (57:51.513)
Hysterectomy. That means I can't have any children. I looked up at Ira. This was our dream.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (58:05.374)
Ira said, the only reason I let them do it is because you were otherwise going to bleed to death.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (58:40.472)
Well my family rallied around us.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (58:52.236)
And we started the process, and we ended up adopting first our daughter Carolyn.

And then later our sons, David and Michael. We were actually gonna stop right with Carolyn and David.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (59:11.49)
We got a call from the adoption agency that we had used for both Carolyn and David, and they said, We have a young infant baby here. And there are not too many black families that can take in more mouths to feed. And we have the utmost respect for you and your husband. We think

Your older children would love having this younger sibling.

And so we adopted Michael as well. We attended chapel on the proving ground every single Sunday and without fail, and we raised our children inside a house that ran on faith and on schedules, kept as tightly as any of my calculations.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:00:06.894)
With my supervisor. Now, his wife was a stay-at-home mother, and he didn't quite know how to handle a woman who was also a mother. And I said, I take my work seriously, but my family is also very important to me. And I expect to be allowed.

Adesoji Iginla (01:00:17.136)
Working.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:00:30.99)
To do what I must do for my family, and I guarantee you that it will not affect the quality of my work. And by the way, Ira had the same conversation with his supervisor. It was not going to be left alone to me, the mother, to raise the children. Ira told his supervisor, I need to be able to take time off to take my children to their medical appointments and to be a present father. What a man.

He fully respected me and my career, that it wasn't just a hobby, just something to do while I waited on him and the children hand in foot. No, he saw us truly as equals. He respected my intellect as I respected his. And it was a wonderful marriage. And I could not have achieved what I did had I not had that kind of support.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:01:34.466)
We eventually bought our own, we bought land and built our own home. We were able to buy 10 acres from a black family. Ira likes to describe that first lunch break. He remembers what I was wearing. He said I had on a pleated blue skirt and a white blouse.

It tells you the kind of attention he paid to people.

Ira spent his own 35 years at Dahlgren as a mathematician. He understood the base, the work, and the particular loneliness and responsibility that we had, being one of a handful. We shared that understanding. And I think that understanding, more than anything else.

Adesoji Iginla (01:02:28.345)
Hmm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:02:35.808)
Is what held our marriage together in addition to our faith for 67 years. He understood when I stayed up working. And he never felt or made me feel like my work, my career was an inconvenience.

Alright, so by the mid-1970s, after the Pluto-Neptune study and years of work at Dalgreen, I was assigned to something enormous. I've already told you about the shaping of the Earth. Now, at that time, my colleagues were being able to travel and things of that nature, and we, the black professionals, were never invited to travel. And I always wondered why that was, because there was professional development and other opportunities.

Well, it was because at one point one of the black professionals had gone on a trip with his white colleagues and could not get a place to sleep. The hotels would let his white colleagues but not him in. And I suppose our supervisors decided that it was better not to even send us out on these trips at all. But that too created a limitation.

Adesoji Iginla (01:03:35.302)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:03:48.623)
I was given one of the most advanced computers in the 1970s to work on. It was an IBM 77030, we called the stretch. I programmed algorithms into that machine that accounted for the gravitational pull, the tidal drag, and every distortion I could account for to help refine the model of the Earth.

In 1978, I was made project manager for CSAT, a satellite that was built to read data off the world's oceans.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:04:36.65)
Now, CSAT's mission was short because that satellite failed only after a few months in orbit. It could have felt like defeat, but the data it managed to gather in that brief window fed directly into that Jilled model I kept refining, helped us get even closer to what we needed.

And there's a lesson in that.

Adesoji Iginla (01:05:07.408)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:05:11.938)
An imperfect run at a heart problem can still leave behind something permanent that is very useful. If you're paying close enough to the lessons from even what seemed like a failure. Then I worked on the Geostat, a satellite that measured sea surface height with even finer precision than the CSAT had managed.

Using a radar altimeter to bounce a signal off the ocean surface. Doesn't this sound exciting? Shouldn't every young kid realize the world's mathematics could open for you?

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:06:02.092)
The refinement that we made as we worked on that geostat, me and my team became another brick and a foundation nobody outside our building could see. And that structure that we were building, that foundation we were building, brick by invisible brick.

was the global positioning system. The very same GPS sitting quietly in your pocket right now.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:06:44.238)
I was not thinking about legacy as I poured in all that time and effort. Legacy is a young person's word. I was thinking about whether the numbers were right. Because if they weren't, a ship somewhere might run aground or a missile might miss its intended target and hit something it shouldn't. That weight of that kind of responsibility.

Adesoji Iginla (01:06:53.959)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:07:13.622)
It does not leave much room to Did I get credit? Did I get credit? Did I get credit?

Do the work. Let the work speak for itself.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:07:37.262)
There's so much more I could tell you about the GPS.

Adesoji Iginla (01:07:40.378)
Yeah.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:07:42.53)
But you again could do a little bit more studying.

What the global positioning system does, which is now operated by the United States Space Force and available to all of us, is that it relies on a constellation of orbiting satellites broadcasting precise timing signals to receivers on the ground. For those signals to translate into an accurate location.

The system requires an equally precise model of Earth's true geometry. How does your device know exactly where you are? And when you make a wrong, wrong turn, it will tell you that it's rerouting you. My specific contributions, my orbital analysis on the CSAT and the geostat machine missions, and my

Algorithmic refinements to the geoid model on Dow Green's mainframe computers have been cited by the Department of Defense as directly foundational to the GPS's eventual accuracy.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:09:10.166)
Like I said at the beginning,

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:09:15.842)
Did not get any recognition for decades. I retired from Dalgren in 1998 after 42 years of service. 42 years in which I got married, buried two stillborn children, raised three children, buried a father, watched my country transform itself.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:09:43.599)
And for almost all of those 42 years, and for two full decades later, my part of what I did was only known by a handful of people, the people I worked with, not to the wider world. Frankly, not even in the black community, until 2018. And I am hidden no more.

So I want to say this. There are many ways that I have been recognized. Too many recognitions for me to list, but I named some of them in my book. my goodness. We created the name of the book, it began with a dream. We started the Ira and Gladys West Scholarship Fund.

Adesoji Iginla (01:10:26.364)
Title of the book.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:10:38.786)
Diversity and Action magazine featured me. so many Black History Month programs have had me come and be recognized. the county in which I was born recognized me during their monthly board meeting. I I could go on, I served as Grand Marshal for my university. I was honored at the seventh annual Strong Men and Women in Virginia History program.

it it it it goes on and on. And

I was even lauded by Stacy Harris, the first black woman to rise to the rank of three star general in the United States Air Force. None of these were expected, and all of them have been beautiful. I have given back to my community serving my sorority, mentoring children, young women.

I've served as president of the Toastmistress International Chapter. As I said, I am active with Ishinryu karate lessons, and I even rose to the level of a green belt. This, notwithstanding the fact that I had two strokes that caused me to have to learn how to walk again.

Adesoji Iginla (01:12:05.531)
Mm.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:12:09.814)
And that I've also had quadruple bypass surgery. But I lived a full life. And finally, I was called home in January of 2026. Still a baby as an ancestor.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:12:32.798)
I want to thank you for all the time you've given me.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:12:40.748)
I know I went long, but I hope it's a story that was worth you hearing.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:12:50.762)
My daughter said something as she eulogized me that I want to share with you because it's always so weird to talk about yourself. It's actually for me so much better for other people to talk about you.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:13:14.178)
My daughter is Dr. Carolyn Oglesby, and I have two sons, David and Michael.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:13:24.204)
My celebration of life after I passed away on january seventeenth of this year was held on february seventh, twenty twenty six. Colleagues from Dalgren came, my sorority sisters, my church, neighbors, young engineers who had worked under me.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:13:51.545)
Together, those who C Valley in my work have created the Gladys West Elementary School in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where children as young as five years old walk in the front door with more rooms than I had when I started.

Virginia Tech, where I finished my doctorate in the year 2000. I was 70 years old. I finished my doctorate two years after my strokes. And in that doctoral program, where I was doubting my ability.

Based on the superior education I had gotten at the HBCUs, was running circles around all of these white younger men who had gone to the so-called prestigious, predominantly white institutions.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:14:55.096)
My daughter said she had never met a woman more remarkable than her.

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:15:08.802)
I did not need my name in your pocket. I needed the model to be right. It was right. And every time you use it, you prove that it is still right. Thank you so much for your time.

Adesoji Iginla (01:15:25.114)
Right. Yeah.

Adesoji Iginla (01:15:29.52)
No, thank you. And thank you for showing the way here and also continue to show the way because like you said, that has become a staple in everyone's life from your

Adesoji Iginla (01:15:46.77)
From traveling, riding a bicycle, running, everybody uses a GPS. The fact that they were black women and was able to contribute to that aspect also means we've always been here. And if only the opportunities were far and few between far and wide.

maybe the world could have moved further than we currently are. So thank you for coming through, Mrs. West. And we continue to do this. Next week will be the turn of

Enna Bromba, who is going to be our guest next week, who she is, what she's about, we would find out together. Again, women in resistance, we've come to bring these stories to you. Like you said, 40 years and no one's heard your name. In itself, is a crime on our collective memory. So.

we continue to do the work and next week it will be the turn of Edna Broba, who she is what she's about, would hear. So Miss West or Doctor West. Let me okay, let me correct that. Dr. Gladys West. Any final thoughts?

Aya  Fubara Eneli (01:17:19.928)
Thank you. There's dignity in discipline. Go and do the best work you are capable of. And let the work speak for itself. Thank you.

Adesoji Iginla (01:17:37.594)
And thank you. And from me it's good night and God bless.