Holding the Line

When I was a kid my dad showed us the movie Gettysburg. We watched as the 20^th Maine Regiment took their position on the far left flank. Colonel Joshua Chamberlain was told that he and his troops had one goal: “Hold the line.” If the 20^th fell, the Confederate Army would be able to circle around and overwhelm the Union troops, likely winning the battle that is now widely recognized as the turning point of the Civil War.

As the Confederate troops battered the left flank and it looked like his troops would be overtaken, Chamberlain, who just two years earlier was a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, ordered his troops to draw their bayonets. His men charged downhill, met the Confederates…and held the line.

Ida B Wells was an investigative journalist in Memphis in the Jim Crow era. When her friends were murdered by a white mob for operating a successful grocery store, Wells decided to expose the truth about lynching in America. She challenged the myth that the black people being lynched were rapists and criminals and instead asserted that the motives behind lynchings were largely economic and political.

Wells collected the data and proved her findings in fourteen pages of statistics in The Red Record. Even after her newspaper office was burned down and her own life was threatened, she continued speaking out and raising awareness in America and England, fundamentally changing the debate around lynching in the United States.

When man landed on the moon it was partly because of a woman sitting at her computer. Margaret Hamilton led the software team that wrote the code for the Apollo missions. Hamilton realized at one point that the software for the display system was synchronous—it would not allow one display to interrupt another. But what if there was an emergency? She wanted the software to be able to interrupt a normal display and to be able to tell the astronauts what the emergency was and what their options were in response.   

Hamilton was told it couldn’t be done. The algorithm was impossible. She stayed up all night, solved the “impossible” problem and the new software was installed. Minutes before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, alarms went off in the lunar lander and Mission Control had to make a decision whether or not to go on. Had they not known the reason behind the alarm they may have aborted but the codes on Hamilton’s display told them that there was just a switch in the wrong position. Mission Control said, “Go” and 500 million people watched a human being walk on the moon.

A professor, a journalist, a computer scientist…they are the extraordinary and ordinary people who have changed our world. It makes me wonder who it will be today. I think it’s best if we all strive to live like it could be us and therefore take heed of the examples of their conviction. They saw what was true and what was necessary and, facing naysayers, angry mobs and charging men with muskets…they held the line.