You Oughta Know #3: Capt Christina "Thumper" Hopper

by Symphony, WAOD Contributor
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U.S. Air Force Capt. Christina Hopper is, to her knowledge, one of two Black female fighter pilots in the Air Force. She is also the first and only Black female F-16 Fighting Falcon instructor pilot at Luke Air Force Base (AFB) in Arizona and the first female Black F-16 pilot to fight in a war, flying about 50 missions in Iraq.
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Hooper's squadron was already in the area when the Iraq War kicked off. "Sure enough, while we were there, they basically froze everybody that was in theater and said we were going to stay there until Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off," she recalls. "Once the war kicked off, we were flying anywhere from two to three times a day, so it really added up fast."
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As the child of two Air Force veterans, Hopper didn't think she would follow in her parents' footsteps but before her freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin she talked with an Air Force recruiter and decided to join the Air Force ROTC.
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Discipline along with the integrity and core values of the Air Force were instrumental in Hopper's decision to stick with the ROTC program. Along with her commander's decision to allow her to balance the program with her activity as a competitive swimmer.
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She began her freshman year in the premed program and studying psychology. She thought that perhaps she'd be a doctor in the Air Force, but she decided after her freshman year that premed wasn't for her but she stuck with the psychology major, considering that military intelligence might be a good route to take. In her junior year, her ROTC commander talked to her about becoming a pilot.
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She applied for a pilot slot in her junior year. She qualified and began training. "I just trusted that if God wanted me to do this, he would give me the ability and the skill to go and do it," she said.
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Hopper earned four Air Medals and one Aerial Achievement Medal in the war. Three of the Air Medals were for the amount of time she spent flying in combat, and one of them was for flying through rain and blowing sand and completing her mission despite her aircraft being struck by lighting and losing her jet's anti-aircraft warning system. The Aerial Achievement Medal was also for combat hours flown, but the hours weren't sufficient to earn another Air Medal.
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Her husband Aaron is also an Air Force pilot.
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Read more about Capt Christina "Thumper" Hopper, and here, and here.
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Read about Air Force fighter pilot Shawna Rochelle Ng-A-Qi
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Encourage a girl to put her head in the clouds, and the rest of her body too!
Very Important Pilots, LLC

Girls With Wings

Generate LIFT

Flight Training Adventure Camps

Women in Aviation International

Space Camp

NASA Camp Kennedy Space Center

You Oughta Know #3: Sylvia Harris

by Symphony, WAOD Contributor


At the age of 40 Sylvia Harris won her first race at Hawthorne Park on December 1 of this year. She entered a sorority of female African American jockeys who have won a Thoroughbred race.

Harris' age isn't the only obstacle she overcame. How about the fact that she had never been on a horse until the age of 35. Her love of riding didn't develop five years before her historic win. As a young girl growing up in Sonoma County, California her love of horses blossomed.

Her parents discouraged her from a career in horse racing and she instead went on to college. After two years of school she had the first of her three children and was forced to support a family as a single mother.

The next twenty years were anything but easy. She spent her time between Virginia and Florida where she bounced from low wage job to low wage job and eventually found herself on welfare. Harris attributed many of her problems to her bipolar disorder. She was diagnosed at the age of 19. It made it hard for her to provide for herself and her family.

1999 was rock bottom. Harris was homeless in Orlando. "I was homeless for two months," Harris said. "I lived out of my car. It was awful. For the first time I didn’t have any family around me. I just didn’t care anymore. Really, the only thing I cared about was who was serving lunch at the nearest soup kitchen."

In 2005, on her way to Canada, she ran out of money and was stranded in Chicago. She met a trainer and eventually got her shot as a jockey when she was introduced to another trainer.

One of the mounts that Harris got was Wildwood Pegasus. On Nov. 7, she guided the 4–year-old gelding to a third-place finish. Wildwood Pegasus had been winless in seven starts since his new owner claimed him in May.

Less than a month later, on her 17th mount, Harris got her first win.

Read about pioneer Cheryl White who appeared on the cover of JET magazine in 1971.
Read about Shayla Wilson, an Olympic 2012 equestrian hopeful.
Read about Patricia Kelly and Ebony Horsewomen, Inc.

SonRise is a Calif-based nonprofit volunteer-based organization that makes a positive difference for children and youth who are challenged with social, emotional and or physical stress.

You Oughta Know: Cassandra Carter

by Symphony, WAOD Contributor


Meet Cassandra Carter. At 18 years old she is preparing for the 2008 release of her second book. Her first novel, "Fast Life," was published in July as part of the "Tru" series from Kimani Press, a division of Harlequin that focuses on African-American young-adult fiction.
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She started "Fast Life" when she was just 14, after a dream. And the young teen followed her gut instinct, "I woke up and - I hate telling people this because it makes me sound crazy - but I heard a voice ... saying, 'Cassandra, you should write a book about that.' So I created this character. It was about this girl and she's ... got to go and move real quick, and everything else just kind of came."
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By the age of 15 the book was complete and it was her grandmother who not only supported her but encouraged her to get it published. Carter gave the book to her uncle, who is in the book business, and he thought highly of her work so he passed it on to a friend who was a literary agent.
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That second book, "16 Isn't Always Sweet," is due for publication in March, and she is working on a sequel to "Fast Life." She is even flirting with the idea of making "Fast Life" a series around its heroine Kyra Jones.
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Last words from Cassandra: "They say that people who are successful at creative ventures like this are the ones who've been doing it since they were born, and that's me right there, so I'm willing to take the risk."
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Find out more about Cassandra and her work at: Amazon, Barnes and Noble and her Myspace page.
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Its never too early to encourage a child to pursue a passion. Encourage a young girl to express herself through the written word with the following sites:

Scriptito's Place
Midlink Magazine
Writing Den
The Young Writer's Club
Girls Write Now (New York City)

You Oughta Know: Dr. Calandra Tate

by Symphony, WAOD Contributor


This blog was created in order to "combat the destructive portrayals of African American women in popular culture". Everyday, cloaked in anonymity, Black women around the world combat those negative and destructive images that permeate society's view of 'the Black woman'.


They fight these images with their intelligence, perseverance, loyalty, strength, vision, creativity, passion, and ambition. Their success should not be invisible. Instead, it should be celebrated.


On Fridays we will combat the negative portrayals of Black women with positive, successful, inspiring and fabulous Black women who excel in industries from the Arts to Zoology and everything in between.


Lets celebrate!

Dr. Calandra Tate, Ph.D. graduated from Xavier University and went on to earn her doctorate in applied mathematics from the University of Maryland in College Park this month. With her achievement Dr. Tate joins a distinguished and small group of Black women. According to The National Science Foundation 4,300 doctorates in mathematics and statistics were awarded in the 8 years between 1998-2005, only 48 were earned by African-American women.


She teaches statistics and probability at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) through a special assignment with her employer, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in Aldelphi, Md. It is at the research lab where she thought of her dissertation topic - “An Investigation of the Relationship Between Automated Machine Translation Evaluation Metrics and User Performance on an Information Extraction Task”.


Tate started her freshman year at Xavier University pre-med but before the year's end switched to mathematics. At the same time she was wooed by the language department to become a French major. She studied French since grade school and was an exchange student in France between her junior and senior years of high school.


While at Xavier, Tate was active in student government and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. Her senior year, she received two coveted Xavier awards: the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Award for community service and the Mother Agatha Ryan Award for exemplifying the spirit and standards of the school through “reverence, personal integrity, loyalty, service and scholarship.”


Read more about Dr. Calandra Tate here.


GIRLS AND SCIENCE: There is an abundance of career opportunities in the science and technology industries. Girls are turned off to and discouraged by science and math at early ages. If a young woman wants to participate in those industries it is important a love of science is fostered early. She may not choose a career in math or science but if she is frustrated at an early age the choice won't be hers to make.

Read this article from the Orlando Sentinel: Fewer women choosing careers in computer science.


Below are some Web sites dedicated to encouraging and empowering girls in the science field.

Girls Go Tech
Sally Ride Science
Girl Start
Techbridge Girls
Women in Tech (Hawaii)
Three Guineas Fund
Expanding Your Horizons
Girls and Science
Alberta Women's Science Network

In addition to "You Ought to Know" Fridays. We Are pleased to announce that we have two new WAOD contributors: Deidra from Black and Missing is the new WAOD Weeping Wednesdays Contributor- She'll be covering all of the tragic and horrific crimes we have been bombarded with. We'll all cry together on Wednesdays to keep the blog from turning into a crime blotter. I will be forwarding all of your crime story tips to Mz Deidra or you can submit them directly to her- let her know its for WAODWW or WW on WAOD.

We also want to welcome Tami from the blog What Tami Said, we haven't quite defined her role yet, but she is currently hard at work on a project for Black History Month. If you know of an African American woman who has done something"historic" contact Tami over at WTS and offer a suggestion. Welcome to WAOD Deidra and Tami!

Sincerely,

Gem2001(WAOD's Benevolent Dictator)