Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  Hampton High School was a dilapidated, musty old building.

  A stunned Mary Jackson wondered: was this what she and the rest of the black children in the city had been denied all these years? This rundown, antiquated place? She had just assumed that if whites had worked so hard to deny her admission to the school, it must have been a wonderland. But this? Why not combine the resources to build a beautiful school for both black and white students? Throughout the South, municipalities maintained two parallel inefficient school systems, which gave the short end of the stick to the poorest whites as well as blacks. The cruelty of racial prejudice was so often accompanied by absurdity, a tangle of arbitrary rules and distinctions that subverted the shared interests of people who had been taught to see themselves as irreconcilably different.

  It was the kind of thing Mary would shake her head about, laughing to keep from crying, with Thomas Byrdsong, a black engineer who had come to Langley in 1952. Byrdsong was a Newport News native who served in World War II in the Montford Point Marines, the first group of black men permitted to join that previously restricted branch of the American military. Another University of Michigan engineering grad who followed Jim Williams’s path to Langley, Thomas Byrdsong was a frequent guest at Mary and Levi Jackson’s welcoming dinner table, always pleased to sample Levi Jackson’s delicious home cooking and enjoy the warmth of an evening unwinding with the down-to-earth couple. There, they could talk Reynolds numbers and aeronautical shop and let their guard down about the challenges of their jobs. Being on the leading edge of integration was not for the faint of heart.

  Fresh out of the University of Michigan, Thomas Byrdsong had been assigned to a senior engineer in the Sixteen-foot Transonic Dynamics Tunnel named Gerald Rainey. Rainey instructed Byrdsong in the procedures for conducting his first test in the tunnel, assigning an experienced mechanic to assist his wet-behind-the-ears engineer. The mechanic, a white man with many years of service at the laboratory, sabotaged Byrdsong’s experiment by incorrectly affixing the model to its sting in the tunnel’s test section. The problem, and the cause of it, was obvious to Rainey as soon as he sat down with Byrdsong to review the test data, which had been contaminated by the mechanic’s vicious prank. Rainey upbraided the mechanic in Thomas Byrdsong’s presence. “You will never do that again to this man or anyone else, do you understand me?” Rainey shouted at the mechanic.

  As a son of the South, Thomas Byrdsong knew all too well the consequences that might befall a black man who openly expressed his anger in front of white people. He went out of his way to maintain a calm demeanor at work, but internalized anger came at a cost, and he took to frequenting the bar at the local Holiday Inn after work—one of the few integrated public places in the city—for a little liquid attitude adjustment before going home to his family.

  In general, the black men at Langley—in 1955, Lawrence Brown joined Jim Williams and Thomas Byrdsong—were more likely to run into the minefield of race than the women. Their impeccable manners and graciousness did not offer complete protection from the reactions some of the staff had to the presence of black men in professional positions at the laboratory. Most white engineers were cordial with the black men, even anxious to protect them against racist incidents, as Rainey had Byrdsong. It was from the blue-collar mechanics, model makers, and technicians, many of whom hailed from local “sundown towns” such as Poquoson, where blacks were not welcome, that they usually caught hell.

  Tall, brown-skinned, and unmistakably black, there would be no tiptoeing into the white bathrooms for Jim Williams and Thomas Byrdsong. Like Katherine Goble, however, they also figured a way to opt out of the segregated facilities. Each day at lunchtime they escaped to a black-owned restaurant just outside the entrance to the air force base for relief and a little home cooking, circumventing both the cafeteria and the Colored men’s bathroom at Langley.

  The events of the next few years would test the United States on every front: on secret battlefields in faraway countries, in the classrooms and voting booths of the South, in the halls of Congress and on the streets of Washington, DC. The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for control of the heavens and the earth was about to escalate in a way that would push the steely intellect of every single one of the brain busters on the NACA rolls to its limits. Each upheaval caused Americans of every background to ask themselves and each other, What are we fighting for? Black Americans knew, and they answered as they had each time their country called: for democracy abroad and at home. So they took up arms again: on the battlefields, in the classrooms and voting booths, in the nation’s capital—and in the offices of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Young, Gifted, and Black

  October 5, 1957, was the kind of day that never failed to delight Christine Mann, a rising senior at the Allen School for girls in Asheville, North Carolina. While the rest of her boarding school classmates still clung to the last precious moments of sleep, Christine left her dorm and headed to her daily job at the library, setting out the newspapers and magazines that the school received each day. As she walked across the campus, the world moved from shadow to sun, the purple-blue peaks that stood watch over the town shrugging off the mist that lent the Great Smoky Mountains their name. The light of day revealed fall’s early brilliance, chartreuse, gold, and orange leaves eclipsing the dark green of summer. The scarlet of the maple trees appeared in just a few brilliant spots; in a month’s time, the red would spread like a fever, dominating the landscape.

  Christine collected the periodicals left in the newspaper box and unlocked the library door. Her daily job of setting out the newspapers was simple but came with responsibility, as it meant that the faculty entrusted her with the keys to the library. The quiet time she spent alone there, a modest brick building filled with walnut furniture and fragrant with the must of old books, was the best part of her job. Every morning before the library filled with students, she perused the newspapers, taking in the events of the previous day.

  Since the beginning of the school year, newspapers around the country had bled with coverage of the crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. Nine black teenagers trying to integrate all-white Central High School had turned the state’s capital city into a military battleground. At the command of the governor, Orval Faubus, the Arkansas National Guard had been called out to prevent the black students from entering the school. Three days later President Eisenhower trumped the state, federalizing the state’s guard and sending in US Army troops to escort the nine through the school’s doors. The crisis unfolded over days, each morning a new installment, and always accompanied by photos that were as difficult to look at as they were to look away from: images of black students Christine’s age, their arms heavy with books, struggling to maintain composure as a phalanx of military men protected them from the screaming, spitting, bottle-throwing white crowd that surrounded them. All for wanting the key to what Central High School and the all-white schools across the South had kept locked away from black students like her. Christine allowed herself to walk in their shoes for a moment, wondering how she would deal with the taunts, the bottles, the epithets, and the humiliation. It would come as a relief to finish the article and find herself back in the haven of Allen’s library.

  As Christine read the Little Rock coverage, so did the rest of the country—and the world. In Europe, and in the capitals of Asia and Africa, people devoured the particulars of the Little Rock crisis. Photos of the black students being threatened with violence for the pursuit of education, along with the details of lynchings, subjugations, and other injustices issuing forth from the South, undermined the United States’ standing in the postwar competition for allies. No matter how hard the United States tried, despite the best efforts of its diplomatic corps and its propaganda machine, it seemed impossible to divert the eyes of the world from the ugliness unfolding in Little Rock and all of its implications for the legitimacy of American democracy. That is, until a Soviet
gambit changed the conversation.

  “Red-Made Satellite Flashes Across US,” printed the Daily Press in Newport News. “Sphere Tracked in 4 Crossings Over US,” ran the New York Times headline. It took no time for the mysterious name to pass from Soviet mouths to American ears: Sputnik. Radio Moscow announced a timetable, revealing exactly where the satellite would fly over Earth, and when. Christine had fallen asleep in one world and awakened in another. October 4, 1957, was the midnight of the postwar era, and the end of the naive hope that the conflict that was ended by an atomic bomb would give way to an era of global peace. The morning of October 5 was the official dawn of the space age, the public debut of man’s competition to break free of the bonds of terrestrial gravity and travel, along with all his belligerent tendencies, beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

  That morning of October 5, absorbing the impact of the initial headlines, Christine experienced a mix of emotions. Fear, certainly: she was just three years old when a B-29 Superfortress dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, forever linking the name Hiroshima with annihilation. She and her generation were the first in the history of the world to come of age with the possibility of human extinction as a by-product of human ingenuity. As hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union increased, it began to feel like a probability. Black-and-yellow triangular fallout shelter signs proliferated in public spaces, pointing the way to underground refuge from radiation. Christine dutifully submitted to civil defense drills at school, ducking and covering under her desk, practicing the maneuver that adults said would protect her and her classmates from that telltale flash “brighter than the sun.”

  While students and teachers hoped their desks and basements would stand up to the power of a nuclear blast, the country’s leaders also prepared for a possible attack—in high style. In one of the Cold War’s most unbelievable episodes, in 1959 President Eisenhower authorized the construction of a secret bunker deep under the Greenbrier hotel, the resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where Katherine Goble, her father, Joshua Coleman, and Dorothy Vaughan’s husband, Howard, had all worked. Dubbed “Project Greek Island,” in the event of an attack on Washington, DC, senators and congressional representatives were to be evacuated from the nation’s capital by railroad and delivered to the Greenbrier’s bunker. There was no room in the bunker for spouses or children, but it was stocked with champagne and steaks for the politicians themselves. The luxury underground fortress remained operational and ready to receive its political guests until a 1992 exposé by Washington Post reporter Ted Gup blew the operation’s cover.

  Initially, President Eisenhower tried to pooh-pooh the Russians’ “small ball in the air” as an insignificant achievement, but the American people would have none of it. Sputnik, some experts declared, was nothing less than a technological Pearl Harbor.

  For the third time in the century, the United States found itself trailing technologically during a period of rising international tension. On the cusp of World War I, the country’s inadequate supply of aircraft had given birth to the NACA. The mediocre American aircraft industry of the 1930s rose to preeminence because of the challenge of World War II. What would it take for the country to prevail against this latest threat? Sputnik was proof, American policymakers assumed, that the Soviet Union had intercontinental ballistic missiles—many of them, hundreds perhaps, with the power to hurl an atomic weapon at US cities. A new term began to make the rounds in policy circles, the press, and private conversation: the missile gap.

  Black newspapers and their readers wasted no time in making the link between America’s inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South. “While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,” opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its “Mississippiitis”—that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption—the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership. An editorial in the Cleveland Call and Post echoed that sentiment. “Who can say that it was not the institution of the Jim Crow School that has deprived this nation of the black scientist who might have solved the technological kinks delaying our satellite launching?” wrote the paper’s editor and publisher, Charles H. Loeb.

  But segregation couldn’t restrain Christine’s curiosity. Along with the anxiety that the Russians’ accomplishment provoked, Christine felt a sense of wonder, even a thrill, to see the skies above open so wide. The world beyond Earth had always been a mysterious place, silent, dark, and cold, the realm of magic and gods. Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist granted amnesty by the United States after World War II in exchange for helping the country build a dominant missile program, functioned as the nation’s head space cheerleader. A series of articles that von Braun contributed to Collier’s magazine in 1952—“Man Will Conquer Space Soon!”—presented space travel as the natural next step for the restless inhabitants of the Earth. American television viewers tuned in religiously to science fiction television programs like Space Patrol and Tales of Tomorrow. But Sputnik was anything but fiction, and it was happening today.

  Christine also took umbrage at the Soviets’ excursion into the heavens. From her core came the desire to rise up to meet the gauntlet they had thrown down. She was an American, after all, and the Russians were the enemy! We can’t let them beat us, she thought, echoing the sentiments of virtually every American citizen. It would take time for her to work it out, but somehow, even in those first moments of learning of the Soviet accomplishment, she believed that this was her fight too.

  The Soviet Union also thought it was Christine’s fight. Four days after launching Sputnik into orbit, Radio Moscow announced the addition of one more city to its timetable of destinations that would be overflown by their satellite: Little Rock, Arkansas.

  Three years earlier, before Christine’s parents had enrolled her as a student at the Allen School, another headline-making event had intruded upon her daily life. On May 17, 1954, she was still enrolled at the Winchester Avenue School in Monroe, North Carolina, her hometown. The principal of the school stepped into her eighth-grade classroom, interrupting the lesson with an announcement. “I just came to let you all know that the Supreme Court just ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, and you will be going to school with white students in the future,” he said. The same report that sparked conversation among Katherine Goble and her colleagues left Christine and her classmates agape.

  Located twenty-five miles down a winding road from Charlotte, Monroe, population seven thousand, was typical small-town South. Everyone in the Newtown neighborhood, where Christine lived, from the doctor to the street sweeper to the teachers at the Winchester Avenue School, was black. Most of the black men in Monroe earned their living working for the railroad line that ran through the town. Black women held jobs in the Monroe Cotton Mill or as domestic servants. Virtually everyone and everything white in Monroe, including the white school and white residents, such as future US senator Jesse Helms, son of a former fire chief, existed across the dozen or so railroad tracks that sliced through the town like a combine. How will we, thought the students at Winchester—with our rickety desks and dog-eared secondhand textbooks, our poorly equipped to nonexistent science laboratories—how could we compete with the white kids from the other side of the tracks?

  The principal spoke with such gravity that Christine and her classmates worried they might have to pack up their books and decamp for the other side of town at that very moment. Segregation was the only world they had known. Discrimination was the force that concentrated them in Newtown, that enrolled them in the Winchester school, that sent Christine’s parents to be educated at Knoxville College rather than the University of Tennessee. Discrimination they had come to expect, if not accept. But the prospect of integration planted
a new fear in the souls of Christine and fellow members of the Brown v. Board of Ed generation: that as blacks, they would not be good enough—smart enough—to sit next to whites in a classroom and succeed.

  Christine’s parents, Noah and Desma Mann (unrelated to West Computing’s Miriam Mann), were the products of the same Negro institutions and the same values—“education, honesty, hard work, and character”—that formed their contemporary, Dorothy Vaughan. In the early years of their marriage, the Manns traveled around Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina, moving from one teaching job to another. Desma left teaching to care for what would grow to become a family of five children. Noah Mann, eager to make enough money to cover his household’s costs and provide for his children’s future, eventually took a more lucrative job as a sales rep based out of the Charlotte office of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company, the same successful black-owned company that had underwritten the home loans of black home buyers in Hampton, including in Mimosa Crescent, Katherine Goble’s neighborhood.

  In 1943, the family settled in Monroe, the seat of Union County, Noah’s assigned sales territory. The position afforded the Manns a comfortable living, and they were one of the few black families in town who owned a car, a Pontiac Hydramatic, which Christine’s father used to go collect premiums from customers. Every day after work, Noah wheeled the big automobile into the driveway and asked his youngest daughter, “What did you learn today?” Sometimes Christine accompanied him on his rounds. When she was barely old enough to see over the windshield, Noah gave Christine driving lessons on quiet country roads. She loved it when her father taught her the tricks like priming the carburetor that would keep the temperamental machine on the road. Bold and curious, Christine learned to ride a bike by rolling at top speed down one of Monroe’s many hills, flying off in one direction like a daredevil at the bottom of the hill while the bicycle went banging off in another. Patching tires and adjusting the bike’s brakes with a coat hanger became important parts of her mechanical repertoire. Dolls interested her mainly for what was inside them; her mother would catch her tearing out their stuffing so that she could see what was making them talk.