02/09/2022
Black history is American history. Consuelo Stokes Milner was a boss. Overseeing a team of five in the 1960s, Milner ran top secret cryptography projects at the Naval Applied Science Laboratory.
Image 1: A black and white photo of Milner in glasses and a collared jacket standing in front of a wall-height computer system, looking at an open book in one hand and a rectangular technical instrument in her other hand.
Image 2: A black and white exploded-view diagram of a thermally stabilized crystal unit, used to control electrical activity in devices like radios and clocks, from one of Milner's patent applications.
Her story is referenced in "Race and Computing: The Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine," which describes how traditional archival records omit the full story of how Black technologists helped build the world of computers we now live in. Full disclosure: we haven't read this article in full because companies make it so difficult to freely access academic research by hiding it behind for-profit paywalls. Not that we're bitter about it.
