Dr. Ellen Lauri Ochoa was born on May 10, 1958 in Los Angeles, California to Joseph, a manager of a retail store, and Rosanne, a homemaker. Her paternal grandparents immigrated from Sonora, Mexico to Arizona and later to California where her father was born. Dr. Ochoa was the middle child of five.
Dr. Ochoa graduated from Grossmont High School in El Cajon in 1975. She received a bachelor of science degree in physics from San Diego State University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1980. She went on to Stanford University where she earned a master of science degree and a doctorate in Electrical Engineering in 1981 and 1985, respectively.
In 1985, Dr. Ochoa applied for the NASA Astronaut Training Program. Although she was rejected, she decided to get a pilot’s license. She was certain she would enjoy flying and believed it might help build her resume for NASA. She applied again in 1987, but was once more turned down.
Undeterred, Dr. Ochoa joined NASA in 1988 as a research engineer at Ames Research Center and moved to Johnson Space Center. Finally, in 1990, on her third application to the NASA Astronaut Training Program, she was accepted.
In 1993, Dr. Ochoa became the first Latina woman to go to space when she served on the STS-56, a nine-day mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. A mission specialist and flight engineer, she has flown in space four times. She served as payload commander on STS-66, and was mission specialist and flight engineer on STS-96 and STS-110 in 2002. Dr. Ochoa was in Mission Control during the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and was one of the first personnel informed of Columbia's disintegration.
Beginning in 2007, after retiring from spacecraft operations, Dr. Ochoa served as Deputy Director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, helping to manage and direct the Astronaut Office and Aircraft Operations. On January 1, 2013, Dr. Ochoa became the first Latinx person and second female director of the Johnson Space Center.
Ochoa has received many awards among which are NASA's Distinguished Service Medal (2015), Exceptional Service Medal (1997), Outstanding Leadership Medal (1995) and Space Flight Medals (2002, 1999, 1994, 1993). In 2017, she was inducted into the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame, and in 2018, she was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame.
Ochoa is also a classical flutist and played with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, once receiving the Student Soloist Award. She lives in Texas with her family.
To read more about Dr. Ochoa’s tremendous life and legacy, please visit:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Ochoa, https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/about/people/orgs/bios/ochoa.html, and https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.biography.com/.amp/astronaut/ellen-ochoa.
Footage of Dr. Ochoa can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G40G1q1I7u8.
Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Chloe Anthony (“Toni”) Wofford Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. She was the second of four children of working-class parents, George Wofford, a shipyard welder, and his wife, the former Ella Ramah Wofford, née Willis. When Morrison was two years old her family’s home was set on fire by their landlord while she and her family were in it. “People set our house on fire to evict us,” Morrison later told an interviewer. Morrison went on to state that her father refused to be intimidated by racially motivated hostility.
Morrison’s parents encouraged her early interest in literature, which encompassed Austen, Flaubert and Tolstoy. Her father instilled in her a sense of heritage and language by sharing with her traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and anecdotes he had heard growing up in the south. This nurtured Morrison’s interest in narrative and the African-American folklore tradition.
Morrison graduated with honors from high school and studied humanities at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1955, she earned an MA in English at Cornell University. Thereafter, she taught at Texas Southern University in Houston, and then Howard University. In 1964, after a divorce, Morrison left her position as a professor and moved to New York with her two young sons to join Random House as an editor in the fiction department. She would go on to become the first Black woman senior editor at Random House, a position she held for 20 years. One of her achievements there was, in her own words, developing “a canon of black work” in the fiction genre. In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream.
Eventually, Morrison began writing and publishing fiction pieces of her own. She authored 11 novels, as well as children’s books and essay collections. Her best-known works are the novels The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987) and the nonfiction volumes Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and Remember (2004).
In 1989, following the success of Beloved, Morrison was appointed professor of humanities at Princeton University. She also served as a visiting professor at Yale University and Bard College.
In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American woman to be selected for this distinction, and the first Black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize in any category.
A quotation from Morrison’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech provides an appropriate epitaph: “We die,” she said. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
To read more about Ms. Morrison’s tremendous life and legacy, please visit: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/06/toni-morrison-obituary, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison. Footage of Ms. Morrison can be viewed at: https://nyti.ms/2lwJZ5a.
In 1912, African-American entrepreneur Willa Bruce and her husband Charles moved from New Mexico to California and bought beachfront property in the strand area of Manhattan Beach for $1,225. Mrs. Bruce wanted to create an area where African Americans could enjoy the ocean. The couple established a resort and named it Bruce’s Beach in honor of Mrs. Bruce.
Under Mrs. Bruce’s leadership, the development included a bathhouse and dining house for African Americans, whose access to public beaches was highly restricted at the time. Before the establishment of Bruce’s Beach, African Americans were not permitted to access the beaches in that region because of racially discriminatory laws and real estate practices. Mrs. Bruce proclaimed to the Los Angeles Times in 1912: “Whenever we have tried to buy land for a beach resort we have been refused. But I own this land and I’m going to keep it.”
By 1920 African Americans who regularly frequented Bruce’s Beach and had moved into the neighborhood surrounding the beach were subjected to harassment by white neighbors and assault by Ku Klux Klan members who set fires or planted liquor on site during Prohibition to get them arrested. In 1924, the Manhattan Beach City Council initiated eminent domain proceedings claiming that Bruce’s Beach property was needed for a public park, despite having recently built Live Oak Park nearby. The Bruces sued the city, but unfortunately the resort was torn down. By 1929, the Bruces settled the case for much less than they had originally sought in the lawsuit. A park was not established until the late 1950s or early 1960s.
In 2006, due to the efforts of Manhattan Beach Councilman Mitch Ward, the city’s first African-American councilman, the property was officially renamed Bruce's Beach. After years of advocacy by the Bruce family descendants and community leaders, in April 2021, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve returning Bruce’s Beach to the family’s descendants. The property to be returned was estimated to be worth $75 million at the time. In June 2021, the California State Senate approved a bill to return the property to descendants of the Bruces. Legislation that prevented the county from transferring or selling the property was eliminated in September 2021 through the legislative approval process. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the legislation later the same month.
Despite not having the land returned to her during her lifetime, Willa Bruce’s vision and entrepreneurship benefitted countless African American residents of her time. She was a trailblazer in the field of commercial real estate and her legacy lives on.
To read more about the life and legacy of Willa Bruce and Bruce’s Beach, please visit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/bruce-family-manhattan-beach.html, and https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-tragic-history-of-las-black-family-beach-havens.
