03/20/2026
Women Herstory Month
Raye Montague designed a Navy warship in 18 hours that took engineers two years by hand. Then she left a mock birth announcement on her boss's desk. He had given her the assignment hoping she'd fail.
Three hundred and seventy-five dollars. That is what Raye Montague paid for a 1949 Pontiac she did not know how to drive.
She had the salesman drive it to her house because she could not get it off the lot herself. She had never once sat behind a wheel with the engine running, but she needed that car the way a person needs oxygen when the room is running out of air.
Her boss had just told her the only way she would ever get promoted was if she agreed to work the midnight shift, and there were no buses running at that hour. The man who gave her the condition knew it.
So Raye Montague taught herself to drive. She left her house at ten o'clock at night and crept through the streets of suburban Maryland, barely touching the gas pedal, gripping the steering wheel with both hands.
By midnight, she would arrive at the David Taylor Model Basin in Carderock, where the United States Navy tested its ship designs. She had been sitting next to a UNIVAC I computer for over a year, watching Ivy League engineers run a machine she was not allowed to touch.
She got the promotion and went back to working days. Then she spent the next decade and a half quietly, relentlessly becoming the most important person in the room that nobody wanted to acknowledge.
What happened in 1971 is where this story turns into something no one saw coming. Not the Navy, not the engineers who had been failing for years to solve the problem Raye would crack in a single overnight session, and not even the President of the United States, who would hear about her work before he ever learned her name.
But before any of that, there was a submarine.
Raye Jean Jordan was born on January 21, 1935, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her father, Rayford Jordan, was not around for long, and her mother, Flossie Graves Jordan, raised her alone on income from a cosmetology business.
Little Rock in the 1930s and 1940s was a city of careful borders. The Ninth Street corridor was the center of Black life, a neighborhood that hummed with its own economy and its own pride, but beyond those blocks the Jim Crow South pressed in from every direction.
When Raye was seven years old, her grandfather took her downtown to see a captured enemy submarine on a traveling exhibit. She climbed down a small ladder into the hull, pressed her face against the periscope, and stared at the dials and mechanisms packed inside that steel tube.
She asked the man on board what a person needed to know to build something like this. He told her she would have to be an engineer, then told her she did not need to worry about that.
He meant it as a door closing. She heard it as a destination.
Her mother took her to the library that same week, and together they looked up what an engineer did for a living. Flossie Jordan was not a woman who let the world's low expectations become her daughter's ceiling.
She told Raye the truth plainly, the way a mother does when love means preparing a child for the weight she will have to carry. Three strikes, her mother said: you are female, you are Black, and you will have a segregated school education, but you can be or do anything you want, provided you are educated.
When the family moved to Pine Bluff after Flossie remarried a postal clerk, Raye found herself in a white neighborhood where she was not welcome. She walked past a white school she could not attend and enrolled instead at Merrill High School, a Black school that had been open since 1886.
Merrill used hand-me-down textbooks from the white school across town, but it had something no secondhand book could replace. Its teachers believed their students deserved more than the world was offering.
One of those teachers, Mrs. Holiday, told Raye to aim for the stars, because at the very worst she would land on the moon. But Raye had a more immediate problem: Merrill required four years of home economics for girls to graduate, and Raye wanted shop class and calculus instead.
Her mother marched into the school and negotiated a deal. If Raye could pass the written home economics exam without ever taking the course, she could take shop.
Raye had a photographic memory. She passed the exam and picked up a wrench instead of a mixing spoon.
When it came time for college, the only school in Arkansas with an engineering program was the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and it did not admit Black students. So Raye enrolled at Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College in Pine Bluff, loaded up on every math and science course available, and graduated in 1956 with a business degree that was never the degree she wanted.
She moved to Washington, D.C., the same year and got a job with the Navy at the David Taylor Model Basin. They hired her as a clerk typist, and her desk was positioned right next to the UNIVAC I, the first commercially available general-purpose computer in the country.
She was not allowed to touch it. She was told, in so many words, that "we" were not supposed to operate that computer, and the "we" was not subtle.
So she watched. She sat at her desk typing forms and studied every switch the engineers flipped, every sequence they followed, every code they punched into the machine.
She enrolled in night school for computer programming and kept her eyes open during the day. Then one morning, every engineer in the office called in sick.
Raye needed her data tapes, and the computer was sitting there, silent and waiting. She walked over, started throwing switches in the order she had memorized, and ran the machine by herself.
Her supervisor happened to walk by while she was at it. That was the beginning.
They promoted her, grudgingly, to work on engineering projects, but only on the night shift. That was when she bought the Pontiac for $375 and taught herself to drive it in the dark, creeping across the District of Columbia into Maryland with white knuckles and a business degree doing the work of an engineering credential nobody had been willing to give her.
By the mid-1960s, Raye Montague was a computer systems analyst at the Naval Ship Engineering Center. She was working alongside men who had graduated from Yale and Harvard, men who had worked on the Manhattan Project, and she was holding her own.
But holding your own in a system designed to keep you invisible means every promotion comes with a test that looks like a trap. Around 1970, her supervisor handed her an assignment.
Build a computer program that can design a ship, he told her, and gave her six months to do it. What he did not tell her was that his department had been trying to accomplish the same thing for years and had failed every time.
He was, by Raye's own account years later, a racist who gave her the assignment hoping she would fail. He wanted a reason to push her out.
She realized quickly that the existing computer system would need to be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch. The work would require long nights, but her supervisor told her he would not authorize overtime pay for any staff to help.
He added that she could not work at night without someone else present in the building. So she brought her mother and her three-year-old son, David, to the office.
She set the boy up in a corner and taught him how to punch computer cards. When he got sleepy, she laid him on a desk and covered him with a blanket while Flossie Jordan sat nearby.
Her daughter was tearing apart a government computer and rebuilding it to do something no one had done before. When her boss saw she was not going to quit, he relented and gave her a night crew.
She met the deadline. Word traveled up through the chain and reached President Richard Nixon, who was pressing the Navy to produce ships faster during the Vietnam War.
Nixon wanted to see what a computer-designed warship would actually look like, and he wanted it quickly. They gave Raye Montague a month to produce a complete rough draft of a naval vessel.
She called her team in on a Saturday morning, sat down in front of the system she had built, and started running the program. Eighteen hours and twenty-six minutes later, the computer's printer produced the full specifications for the FFG-7 frigate, the ship that would become the Oliver Hazard Perry class.
A process that had always taken two years on paper had just been completed overnight. It was done by a Black woman from Little Rock, Arkansas, who had a business degree and a Pontiac she bought because nobody thought she could learn to drive.
When her boss arrived at the office the following morning, the completed design was sitting on his desk. Next to it was a note, formatted like a hospital birth announcement.
Proud mother: Raye Montague. Gestation period: 18 hours and 26 minutes.
That birth announcement is the part of this story that most people never hear. They hear about the ship and the number, eighteen hours, and they marvel at the speed, but the announcement is where Raye Montague is most fully herself.
It is the sound of a woman who understood exactly what she had done and refused to let anyone else name it first. She had delivered something into the world, carried it through refusal and sabotage and nights spent rebuilding machines with a toddler asleep on a desk beside her.
She had mothered that ship into existence the same way her own mother had mothered her into possibility. Nothing but will and work and the absolute refusal to accept that the answer was no.
In 1972, the Navy awarded Montague the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, its third-highest honor. Her program became the standard for designing every ship and submarine in the fleet.
She went on to work on the carrier Eisenhower, the Seawolf-class submarine, and the Navy's first landing craft helicopter-assault ship. Her designs touched some of the most consequential vessels the country had ever built.
She became the first female program manager of ships in the history of the United States Navy, overseeing a staff of 250 and the procurement of computer-aided design equipment for more than 100,000 people. Her civilian rank was the equivalent of a Navy captain.
She briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff every month and taught at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. There was a meeting once, early in her time at that level, where she walked into the room and a male colleague said he would like a cup of coffee.
She looked at him and replied, so would I, be sure mine has cream and sugar. That was who she was, not angry, not pleading, just present in full every time someone tried to make her smaller than she was.
When Raye Montague retired in 1990 after thirty-four years with the Navy, they gave her a flag that had flown over Washington, D.C., along with a certificate stating it had been raised in her honor. She said afterward, in the way a person says something when they still cannot believe it, can you imagine that from a grateful nation.
She moved back to Little Rock in 2006 and spent her remaining years the way she had spent her working ones, in motion. She joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority activities, the American Contract Bridge League, mentored inmates through a re-entry program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and volunteered at the eStem Elementary Public Charter School.
In 2017, after the film Hidden Figures told the story of the Black women who made the space program possible, Good Morning America found Raye Montague and introduced her to the country as a real-life hidden figure. She was 82 years old, and the Navy had decorated her decades earlier, but the public had never known her name.
She died on October 10, 2018, of congestive heart failure, at Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock. She was 83.
In 2024, the Navy renamed a building at the Carderock facility where she had once crept through the parking lot in a Pontiac she could barely steer. It is now called the Raye Montague Center for Maritime Technology.
In 2025, the United States Mint released a dollar coin with her face on it, alongside the frigate she designed, the sea behind it gridded like an engineering draft. Her son, David, who had punched computer cards at age three while his mother built the future around him, co-authored a book about her life called Overnight Code.
Its dedication reads like something Flossie Jordan might have said. For anyone who needs to turn their obstacle into a challenging situation.
There is a version of American history that remembers the ships but not the hands that made them. There is a version that remembers the computers but not the woman who taught herself to run one by watching from her typist's desk.
Raye Montague left a birth announcement on her boss's desk because she understood something no award or promotion could capture. She had not just designed a ship, she had proven that the thing everyone said was impossible had been possible all along, and the only reason it had not happened sooner was that the people in charge kept standing between the machine and the woman who knew how to use it.
Eighteen hours and twenty-six minutes. That is how long it takes to change the course of naval engineering when you finally stop telling the person at the desk that she is not allowed to touch the computer.
I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you’d like to support the work, here’s the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating.
