In 1966 she became the first black person to receive a PhD from the University of Georgia and went on to be a leading voice for diversity in science and math education. She was old.
Ron McBay said his mother had diabetes and normal pressure hydrocephalus, a form of dementia.
After the University of Georgia desegregated in 1964, Dr. McBay went to school there to get his PhD in mathematics. She was one of the few black students on the campus and she was studying math or science with a few other women.
None of that deterred her. She was the first black student to receive a PhD in mathematics from the university, and she was also the first woman to receive a PhD in mathematics. She chose to teach at the historically Black school in Atlanta instead of joining the faculty at the university.
Zerotti Woods, a mathematician at the University Applied Physics Laboratory, said in an interview that it was not always a good time to be an African-American mathematician. I don't know what in the world she would do it when she did.
Dr. McBay was the dean of student affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s. She faced the challenge of bringing more students from underrepresented minorities into science, technology, engineering and math, both at her university and in higher education.
A 1981 study found that Black students at M.I.T. were twice as likely to fail a course as their white counterparts. She argued that black students couldn't take advantage of the informal networks that helped white students succeed.
In 1974 an advertisement for IBM appeared in the magazine.
Quality Education for Minorities was funded by M.I.T. and the Carnegie Corporation to understand why Black students weren't better represented in those disciplines.
Many people already knew that the educational pipeline was broken, and that improving BlackEnrollment required a wholesale rethinking of education from kindergarten through 12th grade.
The introduction to the report states that educational opportunities for most minority youth lag behind the chances, choices and performance of the nonminority. The present system of education learning in a mass education for mass production model is not up to the demands of the 21st century.
Dr. McBay took a leave of absence to run a spinoff of the M.I.T. project, the Quality Education for Minorities Network. She found her calling as an advocate for students of color after her two-year project ended up consuming the rest of her career.
She helped them get into graduate programs and fostered them once they arrived. She taught students how to apply for grants and invited them to sit on review panels.
If she believed in you and saw you had a strong work ethic, there was nothing she wouldn't do for you, according to a mathematician at Spelman. She pushed you to new heights.
On May 4, 1935, in a small town in the southwest corner of the state, a young woman named Shirley Ann Mathis was born. She was raised by her mother and father, but her father was largely absent from her life.
Showing a gift for numbers from an early age,Shirley excelled in math contests, besting students much older than she was. She graduated with a degree in chemistry at the age of 19 after attending a college in Augusta, Ga.
She received her master's in chemistry and mathematics at Atlanta University in 1957 and her PhD in mathematics a year later.
She attended classes with Henry McBay, a renowned chemistry professor, at Black Morehouse College. They married in 1954.
A colleague of Dr. McBay said that it was not a good time to be an African-American mathematician.
The husband of Dr. McBay died in 1995. She is survived by her two sons, Ron and Michael.
Despite her love for chemistry, Dr. McBay decided against a career in chemistry and went to the University of Chicago to study mathematics.
She found the stress of living far away from her family too much when she had two sons. She decided to transfer to the University of Georgia after she heard Ron call her mother-in-law "Mama." Ron was left in the care of her mother-in-law.
After teaching at Spelman for nine years, she created the college's Division of Natural Sciences and built the math department into a powerhouse. More Black women with doctorates in science and engineering have undergraduate degrees from Spelman than any other institution.
The early 1970s saw a rapid increase in Black students in higher education, and Dr. McBay was determined to make the most of it, especially in math and science.
She left Spelman in 1975 to work for the National Science Foundation, where she developed and ran a program to help minority-focused institutions improve their course offerings and research capacities. She moved to M.I.T. five years later.
Dr. McBay sounded alarm bells about the growing inequalities in the country's primary and secondary schools, a problem that continues to deepen, even though she was focused on opening up college- and graduate-level opportunities for students of color.
She wrote in the journal Issues in Science and Technology in 2003 that the resegregation of U.S. education would ensure continued domination by nonminorities. It will reinforce myths about superiority. It will further erode the hopes and dreams of a rapidly growing and younger portion of our population, a population upon which America's future well-being depends.
