Every time your phone tells you where you are, it is using a mathematical model of the shape of the Earth. A Black woman from rural Virginia spent decades building that model by hand, and almost nobody knew her name until she was in her eighties. Gladys West. She grew up in a sharecropping family in Dinwiddie County and understood early that the alternatives were the tobacco fields or the factory. She finished top of her high school class, which came with a scholarship, and took it. Her work was satellite geodesy: taking the raw data coming down from orbit and using it to compute, correction by correction, the true irregular shape of the Earth. Not a sphere. Not even a neat ellipsoid. A lumpy thing with gravitational highs and lows. That model is the foundation the Global Positioning System sits on. You cannot locate a point on a surface until you know precisely what the surface is. She did this for decades, largely unremarked, and retired in 1998. She was recognised in 2018, when her sorority mentioned her biography at a function and someone realised what was in it. The Air Force inducted her into its Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. She earned a PhD in her seventies.

She stood in an Alabama courtroom in 1963 and refused to answer the prosecutor. Not because of the question. Because of the name he used. He called her Mary while every white witness that day was called Mr, Mrs or Miss. She told him her name was Miss Hamilton, and that she would answer when she was addressed that way. The judge held her in contempt, fined her fifty dollars, and jailed her. She appealed. Alabama's Supreme Court upheld it. So the NAACP took it to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1964 the Court reversed — in a short unsigned opinion. A courtroom may not address a Black witness with less courtesy than a white one. It is known in the law as the Miss Mary case. Think about what she actually did. She was already a civil rights worker in a dangerous state. She could have answered, finished her testimony and gone home. She spent time in jail over one word of address — and made it a federal rule for every courtroom in the country.

Eleven years before Rosa Parks, a 27-year-old woman refused to give up her bus seat in Virginia. She was on her way to see a doctor. She had just lost a baby. Irene Morgan. July 1944. When the sheriff came aboard with a warrant, she tore it up and threw it out the window. When he grabbed her, she kicked him. She was arrested and she paid the fine for resisting — but she refused, flatly, to pay the fine for the seat. Her case went to the Supreme Court of the United States. Thurgood Marshall argued it. In 1946 the Court ruled that segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional. Nineteen forty-six. Nine years before Montgomery. The ruling was mostly ignored on the ground, which is why the Freedom Riders had to go and physically test it years later — but the law was already on her side, because she had put it there. She lived to 2007. She got a Presidential Citizens Medal at 84 and went back to school in her sixties for a degree. A woman going to a doctor's appointment after losing a child changed federal law. You just were never told her name.