Today In Black History
Yvonne Young Clark, "First Lady of Engineering" at Tennessee State University
Issue #546 Today In Black History, Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Today’s Black History WOW!
Yvonne Young Clark (her nickname was “Y.Y.”) was the first woman to earn a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Howard University, the first woman to earn a Master’s Degree in engineering management from the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, and the first woman to serve as a faculty member in the College of Engineering and Technology at Tennessee State University.
Yvonne Young was born in 1929 in Houston, Texas, and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Her father, Dr. Coleman Milton Young Jr., was a physician/surgeon, and her mother, Hortense Houston Young, was a librarian and journalist for the Louisville Defender. Her brother, C. Milton Young, III, became a physician. As a child, she had a love for building and fixing things but was not allowed to take mechanical drawing classes at school because she was a girl.
After receiving numerous job rejections due to her gender, Yvonne Young worked at Frankford Arsenal Gauge Labs in Philadelphia before moving to the Electronic Tube Division of RCA in Montclair, New Jersey. She was 25, and she designed electrical equipment with 18 male colleagues.
Yvonne Young married William F. Clark Jr., a biochemistry teacher at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1955.
Mrs. Clark became the first female member of the Tennessee State University mechanical engineering department, joining the faculty in 1956.
Affectionately called “TSU’s First Lady of Engineering,” Yvonne Young Clark taught mechanical engineering for 55 years in the College of Engineering and Technology, where she also served twice as chair of the mechanical engineering department.
Yvonne Young Clark received numerous awards throughout her lifetime including the Women of Color Technology Award for Educational Leadership by U.S. Black Engineers, the Distinguished Service Award by the Tennessee Society of Professional Engineers, the President’s Distinguished University Award from TSU, and the Mechanism of the Year Award.
She encouraged women to become engineers and reported in 1997 that 25 percent of the students in the mechanical engineering department were female. She retired from Tennessee State as a professor.
Yvonne Young Clark died at her home in Nashville on January 27, 2019.
Today In Black History
- In 1866, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a civil rights bill that later became the 14th Amendment.
- In 1969, the Black Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in Boston, Massachusetts, electing Dr. C. Eric Lincoln as its first president.
- In 1997, Pamela Gordon became the first woman sworn into office as the prime minister of Bermuda.
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