Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  Most of all, she went out of her way to provide them with the kinds of experiences that would expand their understanding of what was possible in their lives. With a leader as creative as Mrs. Jackson, Troop 11 was never inhibited by its modest resources. Rather than sitting down with the Girl Scout manual and going through the badge requirements as if it were simply a weekend version of a social studies class, she turned working toward those cheerfully embroidered green patches into an adventure, taking them on three-mile “country” hikes in local parks or field trips to the crab factory to learn more about what their parents did for work. For the hospitality badge, Mary arranged for the troop to attend an afternoon tea at the Hampton Institute Mansion House, a grand residence now occupied for the first time by a black president, Alonzo G. Moron. Mrs. Moron received the girls in high style, attended by a staff composed of students from the school’s Home Economics Department. It was a sight the girls never forgot: an impeccable black staff in a fabulous house, serving a well-heeled black family. Not even the movies could compare with the glamour of that afternoon.

  Once at a troop meeting at Bethel AME, Mary was leading her charges in a rendition of the folk tune “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” complete with a pantomime of a slave working in the fields. It was a well-worn tune, one that she had sung before without much consideration. That day, however, the lyrics (“We’re gonna jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton!”) and the shucky-jivey routine that accompanied it struck her like a bolt of lightning.

  “Hold on a minute!” she said suddenly, interrupting the performance in mid-verse. The girls watched Mrs. Jackson, startled. Mary stood silent for a long moment, as if hearing the song for the first time. “We are never going to sing this again,” she told them, trying to explain her reasoning to the surprised youngsters. The song reinforced all the crudest stereotypes of what a Negro could do or be. Sometimes, she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions.

  It was a powerful moment for the girls of Troop 11. Mary didn’t have the power to remove the limits that society imposed on her girls, but it was her duty, she felt, to help pry off the restrictions they might place on themselves. Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status—none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions. You can do better—we can do better, she told them with every word and every deed. For Mary Jackson, life was a long process of raising one’s expectations.

  When Levi Jr. turned four, Mary Jackson filed an application with the Civil Service, applying both for a clerical position with the army and as a computer at Langley. In January 1951, she was quickly called up to work at Fort Monroe as a clerk typist. The job involved typing, filing, distributing mail, making copies—nothing more exotic than her previous work, but because of the sensitive nature of the documents that passed through the office, she was required to get a secret security clearance. The United States’ anxiety over the threat posed by the Soviet Union had increased steadily since the end of World War II, and escalated in 1949 when the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb. One of the documents that circulated at Fort Monroe was an army plan to be executed in the case of an atomic attack.

  The rivalry between the onetime allies exploded into open war-by-proxy along the border between North and South Korea in 1950, making the stakes of the new conflict concrete for most Americans, and for the NACA. Over Korean skies, Russian fighter planes “too fast to be identified”—the near supersonic MIG-15—attacked American B-29 Superfortress planes. “Russia Said to Have Fastest Fighter Plane,” ran the headline of a 1950 Norfolk Journal and Guide article. The Americans had led the way through the sound barrier with Chuck Yeager at the helm of the X-1, but by 1950, the NACA reckoned that “the Russians expended at least three times the man power in their research establishments” than what the United States budgeted. Again the NACA angled to benefit from increased international tension, handing Congress a proposal to double its agency-wide employment level from seven thousand in 1951 to fourteen thousand in 1953.

  The long list of job vacancies published in the Air Scoop was reminiscent of the boom times of the last war and buttressed America’s vow that it would not back down before any rival in the heavens. With its many new facilities coming into operation, the laboratory again cast its net for the female alchemists who could turn the numbers from testing into aeronautical gold. With Mary’s abilities, it was no surprise that Uncle Sam decided she would be of better use as an NACA computer than as a military secretary. After three months at Fort Monroe, she accepted an offer to work for Dorothy Vaughan.

  In the eight years that had elapsed since Dorothy Vaughan had taken the same trip on her first day of work, the fields and remaining forest of Langley’s West Side had filled in with roads, sidewalks, and the laboratory’s characteristic low redbrick buildings, an aeronautical village brimming with inhabitants. A gigantic 295-by-300-foot hangar, also known as Building 1244, the largest structure of its kind in the world, sheltered the laboratory’s fleet of research aircraft, including the X plane series, the offspring of Chuck Yeager’s sound-barrier-breaking X-1. The feat of smashing through the sound barrier scored a Collier Trophy, the aeronautics industry’s most prestigious award, for Yeager, Lawrence Bell—whose company, Bell Aircraft, produced the X-1—and John Stack, Langley’s assistant director, who had championed the plane’s development as a research tool. More importantly, breaching that physical barrier opened researchers’ minds to the wider spectrum of powered flight’s possibilities, and its challenges. As a plane accelerated from high subsonic speeds to low supersonic speeds, passing through the unsteady “transonic” region between Mach .8 and Mach 1.2, the simultaneous presence of subsonic and supersonic flows caused buffeting and instability. Aerodynamicists sharpened their pencils to understand the sudden changes in lift and drag on a plane flying at transonic speeds, because the transonic regime served as the waiting room for any vehicle seeking to supersede the speed of sound. The telltale sonic boom indicated that the plane had pushed through the volatile transonic region into the state of smoother, all-supersonic flows.

  With Mach 1 achieved, engineering imaginations broke free of all previous speed limits. While maintaining its efforts to wring out improvements in subsonic flight and address the complexities of transonic flight, the NACA mounted a concerted effort to take what it had learned from the experimental planes and use it to design military production aircraft capable of supersonic flight. “For America to continue its present challenged supremacy in the air will require that it develop tactical military aircraft that will fly faster than sound before any other nation does so,” John Victory, the NACA’s long-serving executive secretary, said in the Journal and Guide article. The most visionary of the brain busters pined for the day when a pilot could take one of their creations for a hypersonic joy ride: Mach 5 or faster. The details of something mysteriously known only as Project 506 was revealed in 1950 to be a hypersonic wind tunnel, with a test section of just eleven inches, but capable of subjecting models to wind speeds close to Mach 7. That test facility, and a large complex under construction called the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, which would be capable of wind tunnel tests up to Mach 18, tipped the agency’s interest in flight so fast that it could occur only at the limits of Earth’s atmosphere. The vacuum spheres being built to power the tests in the Gas Dynamics Laboratory—three smooth-metal sixty-foot-diameter globes and a one-hundred-foot corrugated sphere towering over its siblings—would become one of the most recognizable landmarks on the Virginia Peninsula.

  The same day that Mary Jackson started her job at Langley—April 5, 1951—a New York federal court handed down a death sentence against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a New York couple accused of spying for the Russians. The Cold War wasn’t happening just in the skies above Korea or in a Europe that was being divided into a Soviet-allied East and a US-friendly West. The Rosenberg trial sparked fears inside the United States th
at living throughout the country were communist sympathizers plotting to overthrow the government. Official propaganda films like He May Be a Communist warned Americans that their neighbors might have thrown in their lot with the Reds. Even friends and family could be secret Communists, alerted the film, the kind “who don’t show their real faces.” The Rosenberg trial was all the evidence many citizens needed that their country had been infiltrated by radicalized agents of the Soviet Union.

  At Langley, the Rosenberg trial and its repercussions hit a little too close to home. An engineer named William Perl, who had worked at Langley until he transferred to the NACA laboratory in Cleveland in 1943, was accused of stealing classified NACA documents and funneling them to the Soviet Union via the Rosenbergs. Among the secrets allegedly leaked by Perl were plans for a nuclear-powered airplane and the specs for a high-speed NACA airfoil. Some even believed that the high T-shaped tails on the MIGs that were shooting down American pilots over Korea were based on NACA designs. Perl was eventually tried and cleared of the espionage charges, but he was convicted of perjury for lying about his association with the Rosenbergs.

  The FBI had begun laying the groundwork for the case in the late 1940s, interrogating Langley employees about their knowledge of Perl and his possible conspirators. Federal agents terrified staffers by showing up unannounced at their homes in Hampton and Newport News, ringing the doorbell in the evenings to ask questions. The FBI tracked down former Langley engineer Eastman Jacobs, known for his left-leaning sympathies, and interrogated him at his new home in California. They spent hours questioning Pearl Young, who had left the agency in the late 1940s for a job teaching physics at Penn State. The Stability Research Division, where Dorothy Hoover worked, was a particular target, as Perl had been a member of the group before leaving for Cleveland.

  The investigation tapped into veins of anti-Semitism that flowed just under the racial prejudice at the laboratory and in the community. Quietly, some laboratory employees complained about the “New York communist people” and the “practically impossible New York Jews” recruited to work at Langley. A Jewish computer who had invited her Negro college roommate down to Virginia for a weekend visit caused a scandal. The progressives of the Stability Research group, regardless of their actual political practices, were certainly open to accusations of subversion for their embrace of “dangerous” ideas like racial integration, civil rights, and equality for women.

  Investigators looked into rumors that engineers in Stability Research and a “black computer” with whom they were friendly had been caught burning the loyalty forms President Truman had required all civil servants to sign after 1947. In 1951, Air Scoop published a long list of organizations that the government had labeled totalitarian, Communist, or subversive, the clear message that affiliation with any of them might jeopardize one’s job. Around the same time, Dorothy Vaughan’s relative, Matilda West, possibly the black computer accused of disloyalty, was fired from her job at the laboratory. West was an outspoken advocate for black empowerment and one of the leaders of the local NAACP. The NAACP wasn’t included on the government list, but it had long been a target of the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. With the Rosenberg trial casting a shadow on the NACA and its security practices, and with the agency’s growing budget requests under the microscope in Congress, the lab’s administrators may have decided that having a “radical” black computer on staff was a headache they just didn’t need.

  It was a dismissal that would shake West Computing to its core, with possibly career-damaging implications for Dorothy Vaughan as well. The Red scares and Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s destroyed reputations, lives, and livelihoods, as Matilda West’s situation proved. The fear of Communism was a bonanza for segregationists like Virginia senator Harry Byrd. Byrd painted the epithet “Communist” on everyone and everything that threatened to upend his view of “traditional” American customs and values, which included white supremacy. (One sequence in the film He May Be a Communist not so subtly showed a dramatized protest march in which participants held signs reading END KKK TERROR and NO WAR BASES IN AFRICA.)

  Having the courage to criticize the government carried serious risks, and once again, the champions of Negro advancement had to engage in the delicate two-step of denouncing America’s foreign enemies while doing battle with their adversaries at home. Even A. Philip Randolph, an avowed socialist who preached a fiery sermon in favor of fair employment and civil rights legislation in front of a packed audience in Norfolk in 1950, was careful in his speeches to denounce Communism as antithetical to the interests of the Negro people.

  Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and W. E. B. Du Bois were among the black leaders to draw a connection between America’s treatment of its Negro citizens and European colonialism. They traveled abroad and made speeches declaring their solidarity with the peoples of India, Ghana, and other countries that were in the early days of new regimes as independent nations or pushing with all their might to get there by agitating against their colonial rulers. The US government went so far as to restrict or revoke these firebrands’ passports, hoping to blunt the impact of their criticism of American domestic policy in the newly independent countries that the United States was eager to persuade to join its side in the Cold War.

  Foreigners who traveled to the United States often experienced the caste system firsthand. In 1947, a Mississippi hotel denied service to the Haitian secretary of agriculture, who had come to the state to attend an international conference. The same year, a restaurant in the South banned Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi’s personal doctor from its premises because of his dark skin. Diplomats traveling from New York to Washington along Route 40 were often rejected if they stopped for a meal at restaurants in Maryland. The humiliations, so commonplace in the United States that they barely raised eyebrows, much less the interest of the press, were the talk of the town in the envoys’ home countries. Headlines like “Untouchability Banished in India: Worshipped in America,” which appeared in a Bombay newspaper in 1951, mortified the US diplomatic corps. Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal.

  Newly independent countries around the world, eager for alliances that would support their emerging identities and set them on the path to long-term prosperity, were confronted with a version of the same question black Americans had asked during World War II. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America’s model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them?

  The international audience, and their opinion of US racial problems, were beginning to matter—a lot—to American leaders, and concern for their opinion influenced Truman’s 1947 decision to desegregate the military through Executive Order 9981. At the start of the Korean War, the Tan Yanks remaining in active service in the US Air Force were called up to serve as a part of an integrated squadron.

  At the same time, Truman issued Executive Order 9980, sharpening the teeth of the wartime mandate that had helped bring West Area Computing into existence. The new law went further than the measure brought to life by A. Philip Randolph and President Roosevelt by making the heads of each federal department “personally responsible” for maintaining a work environment free of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. The NACA appointed a fair employment officer to enforce the measure and settled into the habit of responding to a quarterly questionnaire, relating its activity with respect to its growing numbers of black professional employees.

  “The laboratory has one work unit composed entirely of Negro women, the West Area Computers, which may fall into the category of a segregated work unit,” wrote Langley’s administrative officer, Kemble Johnson, in a 1951 memo. “However, a large percentage of employees are usually detailed to work in non-segregated units for periods of one week to three months.
Members of this unit are frequently transferred to other research activities at Langley, where they are integrated into non-segregated units. The same promotional activities are available to the West Area Computers as to other computers at Langley.”

  Supersonic aircraft and missiles were determining the course of the Cold War, but so too would “science textbooks and racial relations.” The West Area Computers were ammunition for both fronts of the conflict, yet they were one of the best-kept secrets in the federal government. Among the middle-class and black professional community of southeastern Virginia, however, word traveled like wildfire: Mrs. Vaughan’s office is hiring. Christine Richie heard about West Computing in the Huntington High School teachers’ lounge. Aurelia Boaz, a 1949 Hampton Institute graduate, got the word through the college grapevine. It seemed that every black church on the peninsula had at least one member who worked out at Langley. Applications were passed along at homecoming tailgates and choir rehearsals, at the meetings of Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha sororities and the Newsome Park PTA. Mary Jackson was connected to so many computers in so many different ways that the only surprising thing about her arrival at Langley was that it had taken so long.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN