By Adam Zewe | Press contact June 24, 2020
Humble and soft-spoken, Deborah Washington Brown would never have described herself as a trailblazer.
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| Deborah Washington Brown at her 1981 PHd. graduation ceremony at Harvard. She was elected to commencement marshal |
But as the first Black woman to graduate from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences with an applied mathematics Ph.D. in 1981, she shattered the racial and gender barriers that still plague technology fields today.
Brown was the first Black computer scientist to earn a Harvard Ph.D., and also one of the first Black, female computer scientists to graduate from a U.S. doctoral program.
Though she passed away on June 5 after a long battle with cancer, her achievements and legacy remain as an inspiration for those who have followed in her footsteps.
Brown’s story begins in Washington, D.C., where she was born on June 3, 1952. The youngest of four children, Brown’s mother worked as a hairdresser and her father was a taxi cab driver. Her parents, who had both grown up in the segregated south, worked hard to provide a better life for their children and encouraged Brown and her siblings to explore their passions.
From an early age, Brown was passionate about math and music.
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| Dr. Deborah Brown at her daughter's graduation ceremony. Laurel Brown graduated from Harvard Law School in 2005 |
“She was the family braniac,” her daughter, Laurel Brown, recalls. “One time, when she was a young girl, she and her siblings went with their uncle on a cross-country road trip. Their uncle was a bit of a spendthrift, so he designated my mother to be his human calculator. She was in charge of calculating the gas mileage and making sure he wasn’t spending too much money on the road trip. She always had this propensity for math and numbers.”
She may have had a knack for math, but her true love was the piano. Brown started playing classical music at age 6 and quickly blossomed into an accomplished pianist, winning numerous piano competitions throughout the Capital Area.
Deborah Washington Brown at her 1981 Harvard Commencement; she was elected to be a Commencement marshal.
After graduating from the National Cathedral High School in Washington, D.C., she was admitted into the New England Conservatory of Music to study classical piano. Brown traveled to New England, ready to pursue her passion at the storied institution, but her dreams were soon derailed.
“She never talked much about that time. I learned later that she overheard one of her teachers saying that they couldn’t expect much from her, especially given the fact that her father was a taxicab driver,” Laurel said. “So she dropped out. Her passion was music, and though her hopes had been dashed, since she was so good at math she enrolled at Lowell Tech instead.”
Brown graduated with honors, earning a bachelor’s degree in math from Lowell Tech in 1975, and a prestigious IBM Fellowship to help pay for her graduate studies. But Lowell Tech (now part of the University of Massachusetts Lowell) was not a traditional feeder for Harvard graduate programs.
Laurel still isn’t sure what motivated her mother to apply in 1974. more
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