It was a part of her nature that some of the other black employees at Langley found mysterious, even vexing. How could she be so dismissive of the racism in their workplace, however passive, when her very entry to the laboratory had been under segregated circumstances? Katherine Goble’s genuine comfort with the white men she worked with allowed her to be herself with them, no mask required. When the Supreme Court announced the Brown v. Board of Education verdict ending legalized school segregation in 1954, she and the engineers had a long conversation about it, talking about the matter forthrightly rather than avoiding it the way a driver swerves to keep from hitting a fallen tree in the road. (“We decided we were all for it,” she remembered.) Perhaps as much as Katherine’s expectation that she should be treated as the equal of the engineers she worked with was her willingness to treat them as equals—to acknowledge that their intellect and curiosity matched hers, that they were bringing to the professional relationship the same sense of fairness and respect and goodwill that she was—that paved the way for her ultimate success.
Jimmy Goble’s death cleaved Katherine’s life in two parts. They had walked side by side through graduate school and marriage, children and the move to Newport News. Now, at just thirty-eight years old, she found herself a widow and a mother, but also a professional still in the early days of realizing her long-held dream. Jimmy wouldn’t be there to see it come to its fruition, but with love, support, and a belief in her talent, he had escorted her to the threshold, and she would carry his spirit and their memories forward. And so Jimmy Goble’s death at the end of 1956 wasn’t so much an end as an intermission. All that had come before would connect to all that was to come. In January 1957, Katherine’s daughters went back to school, and she went back to work: the second act of her life was about to begin.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Angle of Attack
By the 1950s, Dorothy Vaughan was also looking forward to a time of change, imagining an era when she and the other computers who wore skirts would be forced to concede ground to the inanimate computers that were redefining the technological frontier. As much as any other profession, aeronautical engineering embodied the restlessness and technological progress that characterized what was already being dubbed the American Century. Jet engines were replacing propellers. The fulfillment of Mach 1 fed the appetite for Mach 2. Supersonic begat hypersonic. Curiosity would not be sated until the mechanical finches that were now so abundant around the globe had evolved to fly to the limits of the atmosphere.
With the complexity that attended the relentless advance of aeronautical research came the need for a new machine. In 1947, the laboratory bought an “electronic calculator” from Bell Telephone Laboratories, an investment in the ongoing need for transonic flight research. Modeling flight at transonic speeds was a particularly knotty problem, because of the subsonic and supersonic winds that passed over the plane or model simultaneously. Aerodynamic equations describing transonic airflows might contain as many as thirty-five variables. Because each point in the airflow was dependent on the others, an error made in one part of the series would cause an error in all the others. Calculating the pressure distribution over a particular airfoil at a transonic speed could easily take a month to complete for the most experienced of mathematicians. The Bell calculator accomplished the same task in a few hours.
No one would confuse the women who used mechanical calculators to process research data with the room-sized electronic devices that performed the same function. Langley put a former East Computer named Sara Bullock in charge of a group dedicated to using the squat, gunmetal-gray block to solve engineers’ equations. Already considered superior to the University of Pennsylvania’s pioneering ENIAC computer, the Bell used paper punch tapes as input and chugged along at two seconds per operation. The whole building shook when it ran, but it generated answers sixteen times faster than the human computers, with the additional benefit that after the women went home for the day, the Bell could be left running overnight.
In the mid-1950s the center bought its first IBM computers—an IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch, then an IBM 650. Originally destined for the lab’s finance department, enterprising researchers soon appropriated the machines for their own purposes. One of the uses was to calculate a trajectory—a detailed flight path—for a hypersonic “rocket plane” called the X-15, an experimental vehicle engineered to fly high and fast enough to leave Earth’s atmosphere and reach the threshold of what was considered “space.”
The early data-processing machines weren’t paragons of reliability. They made mistakes, and engineers—or, more likely, the human (female) computers who worked for them—had to keep a close watch on machines’ output. “That’s not right!” “Let’s run it again!” engineers would say to the machine’s operators, just like John Becker had said to Mary Jackson. But even with the errors, the machines processed the transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flows and trajectory analyses in a way that surpassed the upper limits of human ability. In the 1950s, most of Langley’s test data was still processed by hand; the NACA’s entire research operation had evolved with the women’s work as its engine. Electronic computers were rare jewels, their million-dollar-plus price tags affordable only by large research universities and government institutions. And for all their advantage in speed, the computers could still process only one job at a time. The devices chug-chug-chugged around the clock, but competition for computing time on the machines was fierce.
Only the most shortsighted, however, failed to recognize that electronic computers were around for the long haul. Electronic data processing machines brought otherwise unattainable power and efficiency to the research process. There was no reason to think that they wouldn’t continue to poach more tasks that were currently completed by hand. Evolution occurred in scientific progress as it happened in nature: a positive trait was passed along, then proliferated; obsolete characteristics withered away, and the technology and the organization evolved into something new. Propeller research, for example, had been one of Langley’s most important lines of inquiry from its inception through the lead-up to the war. By 1951, the Propeller Research Tunnel was declared obsolete and demolished, and the engineers that had staffed it were left to find a new specialty or retire.
The female mathematicians’ job security wasn’t immediately threatened by the machines, but Dorothy Vaughan perceived that mastering the machine would be the key to long-term career stability. When Langley sponsored a series of computation courses to be held after work and on weekends, Dorothy wasted no time enrolling. She encouraged the women in her group to do the same.
“Integration is going to come,” she told her employees. The blurring of the color lines could put her and her reports in a position to qualify for the desirable jobs that were sure to open for people who were experts in managing the electronic computers. To keep moving forward, they needed to take advantage of every opportunity to make themselves as valuable as possible to the laboratory.
Scientific progress in the twentieth century had been relatively linear; social progress, on the other hand, did not always move in a straight line, as the descent from the hopeful years after the Civil War into the despairing circumstances of the Jim Crow laws proved. But since World War II, one brick after another had been pried from the walls of segregation. The Supreme Court victories opening graduate education to black students, the executive orders integrating the federal government and the military, the victory, both real and symbolic, when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Negro baseball player Jackie Robinson, were all new landings reached, new corners turned, hopes that pushed Negroes to redouble their efforts to sever the link between separate and equal decisively and permanently.
Farmville, the town that Dorothy left behind in the 1940s, had become in the 1950s a microcosm of America’s struggle over integration in its public schools. In the thirteen years since she’d left Moton High School, the deficient building had passed from being merely overcrowded to packed beyond rea
sonable measure. In 1947 the state constructed tar paper shacks on the school’s lawn (the students called them “chicken coops”) in an attempt to squeeze 450 students into a school built for 180. In 1951, one of the school’s decrepit school buses crashed, killing five students. One of the victims was the best friend of Barbara Johns, the sixteen-year-old niece of Farmville native and renowned civil rights activist Vernon Johns, who, at the time of the accident, was a preacher at a church in Montgomery, Alabama.
The grief that washed over Barbara Johns gave way to anger, then took hold in her as a hunger for justice that would not be denied. In April 1951, the same month Langley promoted Dorothy Vaughan to the head of West Area Computing, Barbara Johns organized her fellow students in a walkout, imploring them to take a public stand against the abysmal conditions at the school; she stood strong, leading the charge through the opposition and fear of many parents and teachers. Dorothy’s nieces and nephews were among the strikers. At the time, none of them could have foreseen the consequences of the dominoes that the courageous teenagers set in motion in 1951: Barbara Johns’ campaign to attend a school that equaled the standards of white Farmville High attracted the attention of Virginia lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, who then joined forces with Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief counsel. Marshall consolidated the Moton students’ suit with four others around the country into the US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 decision that banned segregation in all public schools in the United States of America. Black Americans sent up a cheer of jubilation, and the ruling provided momentum and hope to grassroots civil resistance and social movements throughout the land. “Not Willing to Wait: NAACP Leaders Want Integration ‘Now!’ ” declared a Norfolk Journal and Guide headline.
Waiting, though, was exactly what Virginia’s leading politicians, starting with Senator Harry Byrd, had in mind. “If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that, in time, the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South,” Byrd said in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. Virginia’s resistance to the ruling would, over time, be more intransigent and longer lasting than that of any other state. When Dorothy and the other West Computers signed up for computation classes in the 1950s, they registered to attend at Hampton Institute. Langley offered on its premises a series of lectures on aerodynamics, open to all comers. It held one engineering course on-site, which some of the black employees attended. It had set up a classroom on the air force base, a cooperative venture with George Washington University, presumably available to all employees. Nearby College of William and Mary extended its classrooms to Langley employees. Newport News High School held night classes. Langley managed so many courses in so many places that it often seemed like a university itself.
Hampton High School was the seat of the University of Virginia’s Extension School, and the most significant of Langley’s campuses. In the evenings, the city’s only public high school taught laboratory employees everything from sewing to dynamic model design, bookkeeping to machine shop theory. It even hosted an Americanization class, helping foreign employees prepare for the citizenship test. Most of the classes covered math, science, and engineering. The lineup included courses like Differential Equations, a core part of the engineering curriculum, and higher-level math, such as Theory of Equations.
But the high school was off-limits to the city’s Negro children, who were still sent to Phenix High School, Mary Jackson’s alma mater. In 1953, a Negro lawyer named William Davis Butts had gone before the Hampton school board to decry Phenix’s “inadequate gymnasium and library” and to demand that the city “terminate the ‘undemocratic and expensive dual system.’ ” The board, deferring to the state segregation law, declared his pleading moot. As Hampton’s schools remained segregated for its schoolchildren, the UVa Extension Program rebuffed Langley’s black employees. More than a decade after the first West Computers headed to Hampton Institute for wartime ESMWT classes, Langley’s black professionals still relied on the august black college for professional training and career advancement.
Across the country, the United States debated the quality of its schools, concerned with how American students matched up to the Soviets in math and the sciences. The imperative to raise the general level of technical proficiency had only grown stronger as the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union grew more inflamed. While the discussion in World War II had centered on using white women in engineering and science, the 1950s debate had expanded to a broad discussion of the participation of Negroes in the technical fields as well. Virtually every review of the situation questioned how much desperately needed brainpower was being squandered by the intentional neglect of America’s Negro schools.
Kaz Czarnecki wasn’t about to leave brainpower on the table. He only learned of Mary Jackson’s double major in math and science after he made her the offer to join the Four-foot SPT group. Even so, without having reviewed her résumé, something about her gave him the idea that she was both qualified and the right fit for the job. He was white, male, Catholic, and a Yankee. She was a black woman from the South, a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It would have been easy for each of them to look past the other, to see the outside and assume that they could have nothing in common. But what Kaz Czarnecki intuited, and what the years would bear out, was this: Mary Jackson had the soul of an engineer.
From the beginning, Czarnecki had put Mary at the controls in the wind tunnel, showing her how to fire up the tunnel’s roaring sixty-thousand-horsepower engines (the noise from years of work in the tunnel eventually damaging Mary’s hearing). He showed her how to work with the mechanics to correctly position a model in the test section. One test required Mary to clamber onto the catwalk of the wind tunnel, measuring how rivets disrupted the airflow over a particular model. Another involved turning the tunnel’s Mach 2 winds on a series of sharp-nosed metal cones to discover the point at which the smooth air flowing over the cones became turbulent. The research had application to the design of missiles, of great interest as the United States sought to gain every possible military and technological advantage over the Soviet Union. The results of the work would come to fruition in 1958, in Mary’s first report, coauthored with Czarnecki: “Effects on Nose Angle and Mach Number on Transition on Cones at Supersonic Speeds,” published in September 1958.
It wasn’t long before Mary’s new boss suggested that she enroll in the laboratory’s engineer training program; her ability and her passion for the work were abundantly clear. Most important, she now had a sponsor, a mentor willing to make her career and prospects for advancement his responsibility. The majority of Langley’s female professionals had spent their time at the laboratory classified as computers. Some, like Dorothy Vaughan and Dorothy Hoover, made the grade as mathematicians from day one; others earned the designation over time. In the mid-1950s, a woman named Helen Willey led a successful charge to have every female computer with a math degree upgraded to mathematician, a title that automatically applied to men with the same credential. Regardless of this gain, nearly all the women still worked at the behest of an engineer. It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians. Engineers gave direction to the craftsmen who made the wind tunnel models and to the technicians and mechanics who manipulated the models. It was the engineer who faced the firing-squad editorial review board to defend the collective effort represented by the research report, and it was the engineer who took the victory lap when the report was published.
Most of the country’s top engineering schools didn’t accept women. Kitty O’Brien Joyner, the laboratory’s only female engineer from the time Pearl Young left until the middle of the 1950s, had been forced to sue the University of Virginia to enroll in the school’s all-male undergraduate engineering school in 1939. As for black female engineers,
there weren’t enough of them in the country to constitute a rounding error. In 1952, Howard University had had only two female engineering graduates in its history. Being an engineer, Mary Jackson would eventually learn, meant being the only black person, or the only woman, or both, at industry conferences for years. Kaz’s endorsement put Mary on the engineering track, essentially promising a promotion when she successfully completed a few core courses. For Mary, differential equations were the first step. Actually, it was not that simple. The first step was to get permission to enter Hampton High School. If Mary had applied for a job as janitor, the doors to the school would swing wide open. As a professional engineer-in-training with a plan to occupy the building for the nefarious purpose of advancing her education, she needed to petition the city of Hampton for “special permission” to attend classes in the whites-only school.
Mary was seeking to make herself more useful to her country, and yet it was she who had to go hat in hand to the school board. It was a grit-your-teeth, close-your-eyes, take-a-deep breath kind of indignity. However, there was never any doubt in Mary’s mind that it must be done. She would let nothing—not even the state of Virginia’s segregation policy—stand in the way of her pursuit of the career that had rather unexpectedly presented itself to her. She had worked too hard, her parents had worked too hard; a love of education and a belief that their country would eventually heed the better angels of its nature was one of their great bequests to their eleven children.
The City of Hampton granted Mary the dispensation. The pass gave her access to the classes, though it did not make them broadly available to others. Whatever pain securing the permit exacted, it was more than offset by the victories lying in wait. She began her coursework at Hampton High School in the spring of 1956.
Mary Jackson had passed by the old Hampton High School building too many times to count. The local landmark was located in the middle of the city, not far from her home downtown. Her night school classmates were the same daytime colleagues she had known for five years, but it was only natural that she should be anxious at the thought of meeting them on the other side of the physical, emotional—and legal—threshold she was about to cross. Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the shock that awaited her when she walked through the long-closed door.
Hidden Figures Page 16