My mother-in-law died last week. She would have turned 97 in July. And I am sitting with a particular kind of grief — the kind that is also gratitude, also inheritance, also the quiet recognition that the woman who first taught me how to raise millions of dollars did it when I was 22 years old and still in college. She pulled out a yellow legal pad, wrote out the bones of what should go into a grant proposal and handed me a framework I have used for the past 30 years.
She came to the United States from Jamaica in her 20s, a National Science Foundation Fellow pursuing her master’s degree. When she arrived at the institution that admitted her — which I shall not name, out of respect for her tradition of responding to any mention of it with a firm “boo, hiss” — they were more horrified that she was a woman than that she was Black.
Apparently, her name had led them to expect a man. What they got instead was a Caribbean woman with a STEM fellowship and no intention of being diminished.
That was 70 years ago. She became a math teacher, then an administrator in New York City’s public schools. She was a Black woman in STEM before we had the acronym. She was a hidden figure, not because she helped put rockets into the sky, but because she spent a career making sure other people’s children could reach higher than anyone expected.
At one point in her career, she led a substantially Latino school where most students were from the Dominican Republic. She secured a grant from Citibank to send her teachers to the DR — not for vacation, but so they could understand the culture of the children they were educating. Decades before “culturally responsive pedagogy” became a conference buzzword, this Jamaican-born educator was writing grants to make it happen.
When she retired in the early 1990s, Citibank offered her a $250,000 a year position to lead their professional development. She turned it down because she wanted to rest. I remember my husband’s disbelief when she told us several years into her retirement. But she had earned that choice, and she made it on her own terms.
I think about her now as I navigate Women’s History Month in 2026. My mother-in-law is past, present and future for me. She is the past: a generation of Black women who built institutions and families with resources that should have been insufficient but never were. She is the present: that legal pad outline is still the framework behind every grant proposal I write. Tens of millions of dollars raised, traced back to a lesson she gave me, a 22-year-old college student. And she is the future, because her youngest granddaughter, my daughter Naima, wants to be a rocket scientist. A Black girl in STEM, carrying forward a lineage she may not fully understand yet, but is already living.
I run Project REAP, a national nonprofit creating pathways into commercial real estate for underrepresented professionals. I teach at Berklee College of Music. I consult with cultural institutions on sustainability. In each of these roles, I am building on what she taught me—not just the mechanics of a grant, but the conviction that you build things for people even when no one is watching.
My mother-in-law raised two brilliant children, both Ivy League graduates and, like her, mathematics majors. The math ran through that family like a river. Her son, my late husband, took his mathematics degree to Wall Street and became a chief technology officer at a major firm. Her daughter became a physician. My father-in-law — a Boston-born philosophy undergraduate turned librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library, a man whose vocabulary sent me to the dictionary after nearly every conversation — was her equal partner in building this. Their daughter’s daughters — their oldest granddaughters — are now Ivy League graduates themselves. The line holds.
With her passing, the matriarch is gone. She was preceded in death by her husband and by her son, and so this loss carries the weight of every loss before it. The woman who modeled what it looked like to be brilliant and practical, ambitious and rooted, is no longer here to tell the stories herself. Which means the rest of us must tell them.
That is what Women’s History Month means to me this year.
It is not abstract. It is a Jamaican woman with a STEM fellowship and a yellow legal pad. It is the grant outline I still use. It is my younger daughter literally reaching for the stars because someone before her proved that a Black woman could walk into a room that did not expect her and refuse to leave. The women who built the table rarely got to sit at it, but they built it so well that the rest of us can.
To my fellow institution builders, to the women raising families while raising funds, to every Black woman holding something together this month: look behind you. There is a lineage.
And look ahead. Someone is watching you the way I watched my mother-in-law — taking notes, learning the outline, getting ready to build.
Taneshia Nash Laird is an associate professor of African Studies at the Berklee College of Music.
