Marjorie Lee Browne Essay

Marjorie Lee Browne, born 9 September 1914 in Tennessee, was one of the first black women to receive a doctorate in mathematics. Her mother passed when Browne was two years old; as such, she was raised by her stepmother, Lottie, and father, Lawrence Johnson Lee. Her father was a railway postal clerk with a zeal for mathematics, which was shared with his children. Her high school years were spent in LeMoyne High School, a private Methodist school established after the Civil War in order to offer education for African-Americans. She pursued higher education at Howard University and graduated cum laude in 1935 with a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics. Later, she applied to a graduate program at the University of Michigan, which was one of the
Her primary focus was on “modern math” and the encouragement of mathematical education for people of color and women. Afterwards, Browne taught and researched for thirty years at North Carolina Central University (known as North Carolina College at the time) as a principal investigator, mathematics section coordinator, and lecturer. For a quarter decade, she was the only one in the department to possess a Ph.D.
She saw the importance of computer science early on and wrote a $60,000 grant to IBM in order to bring a computer to NCCU in 1960, which was one of the first computers in academic computing, and likely the first at a historically black educational institution. Browne received the first W.W. Rankin Memorial Award from the North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics in 1974 for her work in mathematics education. After Marjorie Lee Browne passed on 19 October 1979, some of her students established a trust fund in her name at North Carolina Central University, which sponsors a scholarship that is also in her name and the Marjorie Lee Browne Distinguished Alumni Lecture