General RIP Thread

“I looked through the periscope and saw all these dials and mechanisms,” she recalled years later. “And I said to the guy, ‘What do you have to know to do this?’ ”

His response: “Oh, you’d have to be an engineer, but you don’t have to worry about that.”

The clear implication was that as a black girl she could never become an engineer, let alone have anything to do with such a vessel.

She would go on to prove him very wrong.

The girl who faced racism and sexism in the segregated South, where she rode in the back of the bus and was denied entry to a college engineering program because she was black, became an internationally registered professional engineer and shattered the glass ceiling at the Navy when she became the first female program manager of ships. She earned the civilian equivalent of the rank of captain.

In a breakthrough achievement, she also revolutionized the way the Navy designed ships and submarines using a computer program she developed in the early 1970s.

It would have normally taken two years to produce a rough design of a ship on paper, but during the heat of the Vietnam War Ms. Montague was given one month to design the specifications for a frigate. She did it in 18 hours and 26 minutes.

At the height of her career, she was briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff every month and teaching at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. Many of her ship designs are still in use.

Ms. Montague was one of a number of black women who, starting in the 1930s, performed invaluable, highly technical work for the United States government but who, working behind the scenes, were invisible to the public — and often to their colleagues.

She died of congestive heart failure on Oct. 10 at a hospital in Little Rock, Ark., her son, David R. Montague, said. She was 83.

Although she was decorated by the Navy, Ms. Montague, who retired from the service in 1990, was not acknowledged publicly until 2012, when The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote an in-depth profile of her.

She was not recognized nationally until the publication in 2016 of “Hidden Figures,” Margot Lee Shetterly’s best-selling account of the black female mathematicians at NASA who facilitated some of the nation’s greatest achievements in space. Their acclaim was amplified later that year when the book became an Oscar-nominated movie.

The Navy honored Ms. Montague as its own “hidden figure” in 2017. She was inducted into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame this year.