Affirmative Action

Lynne C. Bracker, Ph.D.
Senior Manager, Manager of Systems Engineering
Raytheon Missile Systems Company

By Garland L. Thompson

People with human resources titles often win awards for supporting affirmative action. But Dr. Lynne Bracker doesn't work in human resources at all. She runs a department with 100 engineers, staffing six major missile programs in the Air-to-Air and Land Combat product lines, a vital support for America's high-tech, go-anywhere military forces. 

Another distinction is that she grew up in the Deep South. The oldest of five children of parents who never had the opportunity to go to college, she used scholarships and worked her way through Auburn University, majoring in math.

The space program beckoned, and she helped NASA's Huntsville, Ala., lab build the onboard computer for the Saturn Apollo Moon mission. That sent her back to school for computers. In 1981, she became the first woman Ph.D. to graduate from the University of Arizona's nationally acclaimed program in computer science, and she has since published more than 40 technical papers and contributed to several edited textbooks.

At IBM, and later at Hughes Aircraft and Raytheon, she watched minority colleagues suffer discrimination in the communities where they lived and worked, and this had a powerful effect on her. A turn as a faculty loan representative at Jackson State University, in 1976, acquainted her with the talent pouring out of historically Black college and university technical programs, and Dr. Bracker became a coach and advocate for minorities entering her demanding field.

While managing her high-profile, exacting department, Dr. Bracker began a steady course of recruiting African Americans and other minorities to her company, and she and her husband became advocates for minority candidates enrolling in graduate programs in technology. She eagerly hired summer interns and graduates of HBCUs and has served as a mentor and advisor of new hires moving into what for them is a strange and different environment. 
At Raytheon, she has developed a reputation as the "go-to" manager in helping to build support for diversity programs and for personally leading the charge in recruitment of people of color from minority-serving institutions. She goes out of her way to encourage her employees to pursue graduate education and goes an extra mile to ensure corporate funding of their studies.

Garland L. Thompson is assistant managing editor of The Philadelphia Tribune and a member of the Black Engineer of the Year Awards Selection Panel. He can be reached at GThompson@ccgmag.com.