Sincecombahee

Nine students walked into a public library in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961 and asked for books. The library was for white people. Their own library did not have what they needed. They sat down and read. They were arrested for breach of the peace. For reading. 27th March 1961. The Tougaloo Nine — Meredith Anding, James Bradford, Alfred Cook, Geraldine Edwards, Janice Jackson, Joseph Jackson, Albert Lassiter, Evelyn Pierce and Ethel Sawyer — students at Tougaloo College. They went first to the Black branch library and requested books that were not held there. Then they walked to the main public library on State Street and requested the same books. They were told to leave and go to the Black branch. They sat down at the tables and started reading. The police came. Breach of the peace. They spent about thirty-two hours in jail and were fined a hundred dollars each. The next day students at Jackson State held a prayer vigil for them and police broke it up with dogs and clubs. This is called the Jackson Read-In, and it is the first direct action of the Mississippi movement — before the Freedom Rides reached the state, before Medgar Evers's murder, before Freedom Summer. Nine students decided the opening move of the Mississippi civil rights movement would be requesting a book. The choice of target was not sentimental. A library is the purest possible demonstration. Nobody can argue that a library is about private property, or cleanliness, or protecting white women. It is a building full of public knowledge, paid for by everybody's taxes, that Black citizens were not allowed to enter. All nine finished their degrees. Several became teachers and professors. In 2011 Mississippi honoured them, fifty years on, in the state that had jailed them. The Jackson library is desegregated. One of the branches is named after Medgar Evers. Nine young people in good clothes, asking for a book.

Every time your phone tells you where you are, it is using a mathematical model of the shape of the Earth. A Black woman from rural Virginia spent decades building that model by hand, and almost nobody knew her name until she was in her eighties. Gladys West. She grew up in a sharecropping family in Dinwiddie County and understood early that the alternatives were the tobacco fields or the factory. She finished top of her high school class, which came with a scholarship, and took it. Her work was satellite geodesy: taking the raw data coming down from orbit and using it to compute, correction by correction, the true irregular shape of the Earth. Not a sphere. Not even a neat ellipsoid. A lumpy thing with gravitational highs and lows. That model is the foundation the Global Positioning System sits on. You cannot locate a point on a surface until you know precisely what the surface is. She did this for decades, largely unremarked, and retired in 1998. She was recognised in 2018, when her sorority mentioned her biography at a function and someone realised what was in it. The Air Force inducted her into its Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. She earned a PhD in her seventies.