In one sense, the story of Lovenia Deconge Watson (b. 1933) is the story of thousands of bright young Black women, born in the South in the 1930s, exhibiting gifts early on and struggling through a myriad of limitations to continue learning. And yes, Watson is certainly a thinker of a piece with those who dared the odds, and made it, not only to success on a local level, but to a national level of renown. But she is also very much a figure of profound uniqueness, one possessing both the willingness to make the great leaps of faith needed to start something new, and the practical turn to sustain them.
That ability, to think big ideas, and minutely execute them, was something developed at an early age, through a Louisiana childhood that always kept her on her toes. Born October 4, 1933 to Adina Rodney Decone and Alphonse Deconge, Lovenia’s early years were circumscribed by the limitations put on Black families in the South during that era, but were richly full of adventures of her own, and her siblings’, making. They fished and foraged in snake and alligator infested waters, had close calls along the railroad tracks, and formed ever new familial combinations as brothers and sisters left home and returned again, creating fresh family dynamics with each shuffle.
In the midst of all this was Lovenia. Born late in the year, she was consistently the oldest person in her class, a problem compounded by the fact that the school that she attended had two kindergarten classes, called primer and high primer, so that by the time she entered 1st grade she was eight years old, and light years ahead of her classmates academically. She amused herself by reading the primers and math books of her older siblings, so that when she hit the school system, she had the curriculum virtually memorized.
In 1946, the family moved from New Roads (population 2,800 at the time) to Baton Rouge (pop 34,700), but at that point Lovenia was in New Orleans, where she had volunteered to help her sister for a year in caring for her child. While in sixth grade in New Orleans, she met the teacher who changed her life by challenging her. Recognizing that Lovenia was smart, but also was skating by on skills learned long ago, she gave her a copy of Heidi as her first foray into reading literature for the pure pleasure of it. Lovenia discovered not only did she love reading, but loved learning things that were challenging, from diagramming out sentences to working through tough math problems. Rarely was the young woman without a book from that time forward.
She rejoined the family in Baton Rouge, and attended Francis Xavier Catholic School for the seventh and eighth grades. She had long had the intention of taking holy vows after finishing her eighth grade year. She both believed she had a unique calling for the life of a nun, and knew that, outside of religious schools, education for Black children beyond middle school in Louisiana was all but unheard of, and in some places was illegal. Brown v. Board of Education was still five years away when Lovenia entered the convent of the Sisters of the Holy Family in 1949, and it wouldn’t be until another six years after that that the state backed down from its resistance to the Supreme Court decision and passed anti-discrimination in education legislation. As it was, joining the sisters gave her the ability to attend St. Mary’s Academy, where she devoured math, English and history books, and took her vows at last at the age of eighteen.
While she was at St. Mary’s, her father passed away at the age of 57. A former veteran of the First World War, and something of a jack of all trades around town, he had made a respectable income, which it was now fell upon Lovenia’s mother to compensate for. Fortunately for Lovenia, though this sudden change in the family’s financial situation might have meant the end of her education, her own years of studiousness served her in good stead, and she was offered a scholarship that allowed her to attend Seton Hill College in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Here, she took all the classes she was allowed, regularly maxing out the twenty two units permitted by the university, on her way to a double major (French and Mathematics) and a triple minor (English, Psychology, and History).
Engaging academically, these years were nonetheless challenging personally. In her psychology class, her teacher lectured that there were three classes of human beings, and that Black people belonged to the lowest of them, an assertion that Lovenia instantly challenged, to the peril of her grade in the class. She was one of only two Black students on campus, and at first the mathematics department actively discouraged her from attempting math as a course of study, doubting the ability of a Black woman to understand the material of upper division math courses. Later, when she showed that she not only understood, but excelled, at the material, the department found one reason after another for denying her the Honors status that she had earned, an oversight the college did not correct until 2009, when it presented her with its Distinguished Alumni Award.
From 1959 to 1961, she taught 11th and 12th graders at Holy Ghost High School while academically she continued her studies through an NSF grant that she received to work on a Master’s degree at Louisiana State University. Here, because of segregation, she lived alone on the fourth floor of the Lady of the Lake Hospital, prevented even from eating meals at the same time as the white students there. She received her Master’s degrees in French and Mathematics in 1962, and was scheduled to go on with PhD studies there, but the persistent discrimination she faced caused her to seek a more tolerant school, and after a brief stint at Tulane, she went to St. Louis University in 1964, earning her PhD in 1968, becoming the 9th Black woman to earn a PhD in Mathematics, and the first in Geometry.
After earning her doctorate degree, she taught at Loyola University for three years, the first Black professor of Mathematics there. The students were of a high caliber, and stimulating to teach, but Deconge was disturbed by the fact that none of them were Black, that she had received this fine education, but was not sharing the gift of what she had learned with the community from which she had sprung, and at the end of her time at Loyola in 1971 she accepted a position at Southern University, a Historically Black University where, with some small interruptions, she remained until her final retirement in 2004. These were turbulent times, and at one point Deconge faced down a demonstration in her classroom that demanded that she stop teaching and the students stop learning as part of their protest. She stood her ground, telling them that they certainly had the right to protest, but did not have the right to interfere with other people’s freedom of choice - she had the right to choose to teach, and her students had the right to choose to learn. The protesters soon left, and the class resumed.
Meanwhile, on a spiritual level, Deconge was in a state of turmoil. While still firm in her faith in the Christian god, the further into the higher ranks in her holy order that she she ascended, the more she saw of the internal politics, the selfish ambitions of the most elevated members, and the resistance to any change for the better, and the more she felt in doubt about her place going forward. She asked for a year’s break to think about her future in the institution she had given her life to for the last quarter of a century, and when she returned she was shunned by her sisters, and made the decision to renounce her holy orders. Seeking a whole new life truly on her own for the first time, she took a job with Rockwell International in Anaheim in 1976, using Fortran to create programs that would distinguish different marine sounds for use on the Poseidon submarines. Though the experience of independence was exhilarating, the pace of private industry was exhausting, and she made the decision to return to Southern University, where she became a full professor in 1983 (the same year she married Roy Watson after a whirlwind year’s romance), and chaired the Math Department from 1985 to 1995, her reforms there earning the department a selection by the Mathematical Association of America as one of seven Model Math Departments in the country.
In between running the department and teaching, she authored two textbooks seeking to make advanced geometry concepts available to people with a spottier background in traditional geometry, and in 1995, upon stepping down from her position as Chair, she took up more responsibility as the Director of the Center for Minorities in STEM at SU. She attempted to retire in 1998, and again in 2002, but the university kept calling her back to take up new duties, only accepting her final retirement in 2004.
By that point, Lovenia Deconge Watson had done a bit of everything there was to do in the world of education. She had taught middle school, high school, and college. She had travelled to Belize (Summer of 1970 and 1971) to teach methods in the New Mathematics to teachers there. She had been an administrator and educational reformer, working to introduce more practical and hands-on teaching methods into the mathematics curriculum, and had authored her own textbooks to bring higher math within the grasp of the ordinary student. She had mentored and advised three generations of students, fighting against racial and gender prejudices even when all of the power lay with her opponents.
And all the while, there has been family. Through a series of ailments that threatened her life, her wide array of nieces and nephews have all gathered around her, taking turns to support and spend time with her, to offer a helping hand and a ready ear out of appreciation and love for the woman who had made helping her fellow man the watchword of her career and her life, and if we owe our thanks to Dr. Watson for her years of service and example of educational zeal, we owe them as well to all those family members who have given her well-deserved comfort in her years of retirement.
FURTHER READING:
Dr. Watson’s family was kind enough to provide me with a copy of her memoirs for the purposes of putting together this article, which helped immensely to fill in some of the gaps left by other accounts. I had originally come across her life in Wini Warren’s indispensable Black Women Scientists in the United States (1999), and a 2017 interview with her for The History Makers is available here for those wanting yet more detail!
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