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NEVER MEANT TO SURVIVE A Black Woman's Journey An Interview with Evelynn Hammonds by Aimee Sands Aimee. What was it that sparked becoming a scientist in your mind? Evelynn. 1 thought I'd like to be a scientist when at nine 1 had my first chemistry set. 1had such a good time with all the experiments. 1wanted to know more, and 1 wanted to get the advanced Gilbert chemistry set so 1 could do more interesting experiments. A. Who gave you the chemistry set? E. My father. And he gave me a microscope a year later. 1 always had sets like that. 1had chemistry sets· or microscopes or building sets or race car sets or different kinds of project-kit things to build stuff. My father and 1 always spent some time together working on them, and he was always interested in what 1was finding out . . . figuring out. . .. A. When did you start doing science in school? E. We always had science in elementary school. The, you know, "go out and look at the plants," and the general basic (I guess in elementary school) science curriculum that I took along with everything else. I didn't think of taking more science courses than just the requirements until I was in high school. But 1really liked science, 1 always did. But my basic interest was that 1 wanted to go to a good college. So 1 wanted to have a good background to do that. And 1 felt that the more science and math 1 could take the better off I would be. So I started seriously ... I guess in my high school we had to take up through chemistry, but then 1 went on and took physics. We only had math up through trigonometry, but I begged my math teacher to let us have a pre-calculus class because 1 wanted to go on. And that pre-calculus class came about because in my junior year in high school 1 was accepted into a National Science Foundation summer program for high achievers in mathematics for high school students. So I spent the summer in Emory University studying math. There were three Black students in the program, and we were all just totally The phrase "never meant to survive" is from a line in the poem "A Litany for Survival" by Audre Lorde, published in A Black Unicorn (New York: Norton, 1978). 240 / Who Gets to Do Science? baffled by what was going on. We were taking a course in analytical geometry when we didn't know what analytical geometry was. We were taking an introductory course in group theory, and I can't remember the third course, but, some of the concepts it seemed all the other students had studied before and we hadn't studied at all, 'cause all three of us had gone to segregated high schools or recently integrated high schools. And it was a very painful experience because I felt that I was as smart as the other kids, the white kids in the class, but I had this gap in my background. I didn't know what to do about it, how to go and find the information I didn't have, and I didn't know how to prove I was still good, even though I didn't understand what was going on in class. A. Did you know what the gap was even called? What you were missing? E. No, I didn't have any words for it. It was just very painful. The three of us sort of haunted the libraries trying to find the books that would help us understand what was going on. It was supposed to be a summer program, so we were supposed to have fun, but the three of us weren't having fun at all. We were miserable and scared, and wondered if we were going to make it. And I was also completely angry at my parents and at my teachers that I'd had at my high school, who I felt hadn't pushed me and hadn't given me the right preparation. And that was the beginning for me to begin to understand that I'd had a deficient education ... because I'd gone to predominantly Black schools, that that deficiency showed up most strongly in math and science. So it made me angry and made me start looking over what had happened to me. A. What did you see? E. I...

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