Marjorie Lee Browne

Marjorie Lee Browne was born on the ninth of September 1914 at Memphis, Tennessee, the daughter of Lawrence Johnson Lee — a Black railway postal clerk of the Illinois Central Railroad and an amateur mathematician of the Memphis Coloured Schools — and Mary Taylor Lee, who died when Marjorie was two. She was raised by her father and her stepmother Lottie Taylor Lee — both schoolteachers — in the Black middle-class Memphis of the inter-war period.

She was placed at the LeMoyne-Owen College preparatory programme at Memphis and at the Howard University at Washington, D.C., completing the bachelor’s in mathematics at Howard in 1935 cum laude. She took the master’s in mathematics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1939 — among the first Black women to take the master’s in mathematics from the institution.

She taught between 1939 and 1949 at the Wiley College at Marshall, Texas as an instructor of mathematics — the historically Black college of east Texas — while taking the doctoral studies at Michigan in summers.

She completed the doctor of philosophy in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1949 — the third African American woman to receive the doctorate in mathematics, after Euphemia Lofton Haynes at Catholic University (1943) and Evelyn Boyd Granville at Yale (also 1949 — Granville graduated a few months before Browne). The Browne dissertation, On the One Parameter Subgroups in Certain Topological and Matrix Groups, was supervised by George Yuri Rainich.

She was hired in September 1949 by the North Carolina College for Negroes — subsequently North Carolina Central University — at Durham as associate professor of mathematics and rose by 1951 to chair of the Department of Mathematics. She held the chair for nineteen years until 1970.

She was the principal Black mathematician of the post-war American South across the 1950s and the 1960s — the only Black woman holding a doctorate in mathematics with a sustained university-departmental chair appointment in any American institution south of the Mason-Dixon line during the period.

She took the National Science Foundation Fellowship for study at Cambridge University, England in 1952–1953 — at the principal English topology school of the period — and at Columbia University in 1957–1958. She was a member of the National Association of Mathematicians, the American Mathematical Society, and the Mathematical Association of America.

She wrote and published across the 1950s and the 1960s four standard mathematics-pedagogy textbooks for the North Carolina Central University mathematics curriculum.

She was awarded in 1974 the first W. W. Rankin Memorial Award for Excellence in Mathematics Education at North Carolina Central University.

She was the principal personal mentor of two of the Department of Mathematics students who became prominent later mathematical figures of the post-Civil-Rights generation — Joseph A. Battle and William Massey (then a Howard undergraduate she counselled by correspondence).

She died at Durham, North Carolina on the nineteenth of October 1979 of complications of a heart attack, at sixty-five.

She is honored here as the principal Black woman mathematician of the post-war South.