Malone-Mayes, Vivienne Lucille

Impact on the world

Earned her PhD in mathematics from the University of Texas in 1966, becoming the fifth African American woman in U.S. history to hold that degree, after having been personally taught at Fisk University by Evelyn Boyd Granville, already profiled in this collection, alongside fellow Fisk student Etta Zuber Falconer, also already profiled here; that same year, Baylor University hired her as its first-ever Black faculty member, in what she and colleagues called a genuinely striking twist of fate, since Baylor itself had explicitly rejected her own 1961 application to study there on segregationist grounds, a rejection letter spelling out the university's race-based policy that she kept for the rest of her life.

Life & background

Born in Waco, Texas in 1932 to two educator parents, Malone-Mayes first became aware of segregation as a preschooler after mistakenly drinking from a whites-only water fountain, an incident her mother responded to by physically pulling her back and explaining, in words Malone-Mayes recalled decades later in a 1987 interview, that this was simply how the world worked and there was nothing to be done about it; she grew up to decisively reject that resignation. She entered Fisk University at 16 intending to study medicine, but switched to mathematics after studying under Evelyn Boyd Granville and noted desegregationist mathematician Lee Lorch, earning her bachelor's and master's degrees there before chairing mathematics departments at Paul Quinn College and Bishop College. In 1961, seeking further graduate coursework, she applied to Baylor University and was rejected explicitly because of her race, a decision she later called, with some irony, a blessing in disguise, since it pushed her instead toward the University of Texas, which federal desegregation law already required to admit her; she attended as the only Black student and only woman in her cohort, was barred from teaching, could not attend mathematician R.L. Moore's lectures, and could not join off-campus departmental gatherings held at a coffee shop legally prohibited from serving Black customers under Texas law. She completed her PhD in 1966 with a dissertation on asymptotic analysis, and that same year, with Baylor newly integrated, the university hired her as its first-ever Black faculty member, assigning her to the very institution that had rejected her application five years earlier; she went on to a 28-year Baylor career, becoming a full professor, winning the student body's Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year award in 1971, and serving as the first Black person elected to the Association for Women in Mathematics' executive committee. Her father had once been caught at the edge of the infamous 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in downtown Waco, an event whose photographs became known nationally as the 'Waco Horror' and helped galvanize public opposition to lynching; Malone-Mayes carried that family history alongside her own documented experiences of exclusion throughout a career she used deliberately to mentor Black and female students navigating the same mathematics field that had once tried to shut her out entirely. She retired in 1994 due to declining health and died of a heart attack the following year at 63; in 2019, Baylor unveiled a bronze bust of her likeness, the first sculpture of any female professor or alumna on its campus.

Sources

1. MacTutor History of Mathematics; Baylor University Media and Public Relations; Waco History; Wacoan Magazine; African American Registry; University at Buffalo Mathematics Department archive