User:Rubyrae123/Yvonne Clark

Early life and Family
Yvonne 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, the granddaughter of Joshua Houston, was a librarian and journalist for the Louisville Defender. Both of her parents were graduates of Fiske University. Her brother, C. Milton Young, III, became a physician. As a child she had a love for building and fixing things. She decided to pursue engineering because of a childhood dream of becoming a pilot.

Education
Yvonne Clark's aspirations to become a pilot led her to pursue an engineering path in high school, but the mechanical drawing teacher did not allow her to enroll in the class at school because she was a girl. Clark circumvented this setback by enrolling in a summer course with a different teacher. She took an aeronautics class in high school and joined the school's Civil Air Patrol, where she learned to shoot and had flying lessons in a simulator. In 1945 she graduated from high school in just two years, at age 16, and spent the next two years studying at Girls Latin School in Boston. Clark was accepted to the University of Louisville but was unable to attend due to segregation. Clark then became the first woman to earn a degree in mechanical engineering from Howard University, where she was captain of the cheerleading squad and the only female in her mechanical engineering class of almost entirely returned World War II veterans. After she graduated in 1951, she found that "the engineering job market wasn't very receptive to women, particularly women of color."

Clark was the first African-American woman to earn a master's degree in Engineering Management from Vanderbilt University in 1972, after having sent the first African-American students to their engineering department earlier. Her thesis was titled "Designing procedures for materials flow management in major rebuild projects in the glass industry."

Personal life[edit]
Yvonne Clark is known for her achievements as an engineer and teacher, her family attribute some of her exceptional ability to persevere through adversity or her "rhino skin" to growing up with a congenital stutter.

Yvonne Young married William F. Clark Jr., a biochemistry teacher at Meharry Medical College, in 1955. Her husband was originally from Raleigh, North Carolina. They had a son in 1956 and a daughter in 1968. Her daughter, Carol Lawson, interviewed Clark for the Society of Women Engineers in 2007. Her son Milton Clark is currently fundraising to publish a book and motion picture about his mother. Yvonne Young Clark died at her home in Nashville on January 27, 2019.