Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  Getting hired by the laboratory as a professional mathematician had been an important and groundbreaking stride for the black women—for all of Langley’s women, of course. Their employment represented an expansion of the very idea of who had the right to enlist in the country’s scientific workforce. From the beginning of the computing pools, the women easily hurdled the engineers’ expectations, raising the bar as they did it. As the days of World War II receded into memory, so did the expectation that riveters and gas station attendants and munitions experts and, yes, even mathematicians would, or even should, be female. And yet, away from public view, one of the largest concentrations of professional female mathematicians in the United States stayed on the job, their identities wedded to their professions.

  The defense machine’s hunger virtually assured them of a job through retirement. Advancement, however, would require a different plan of attack. It was a concept easily grasped, empirically proven, but far from simple to execute: if a woman wanted to get promoted, she had to leave the computing pool and attach herself to the elbow of an engineer, figure out how to sit at the controls of a wind tunnel, fight for the credit on a research report. To move up, she had to get as close as she could to the room where the ideas were being created.

  With East Area Computing gone, West Area Computing was boxed in on two fronts. Not only was the group all black, it was also the only stand-alone all-female professional section left at the laboratory, and by the late 1950s, that had become an anachronism. The black men, like Thomas Byrdsong and Jim Williams and Larry Brown, certainly had to spar with racial prejudice, but they started their Langley careers with all the privileges of being a male engineer. And although the lacunae of computing pools attached to PARD and Flight Research and the plethora of tunnels were also staffed and supervised by women, those women, including the newly integrated black computers, reported directly to researchers, and they were closely tethered to the work and the status of the male engineers whose spaces they shared. Like Virginia Tucker before her, Dorothy Vaughan now presided over an appendix, still attached to the research operation but whose function had attenuated over time.

  Dismantling East Computing had been a simple matter of operations, of supply and demand and expedience. When that pool’s numbers grew too small to warrant maintaining a section, the laboratory simply distributed the stragglers into other sections and passed their outstanding assignments along to West Computing. But as long as “West Computer” was still the unspoken code for “Colored Computer,” the decision to draw the curtain on Dorothy’s group would require more nuanced consideration.

  The progress that the black women had made in the last fourteen years was unmistakable. Demand for their mathematical abilities had opened Langley’s front door to them, and the quality of their work had kept them at their desks. Through the familiarity that came with regular contact, they had been able to establish themselves not as “the colored girls” but simply “the girls,” the ones engineers relied upon to swiftly and accurately translate the raw babble of the laboratory’s fierce machines into a language that could be analyzed and turned into a vehicle that cut through the sky with grace and power.

  True social contact across the races was well nigh impossible, yet within the confines of their offices, relationships cultivated over intense days and long years blossomed into respect, fondness, and even friendship. The colleagues exchanged Christmas cards with one another, asked after spouses and children. An engineer’s wife gave Miriam Mann’s daughter a shiny new penny to put in her shoe on her wedding day. The employees came together for extracurricular activities based at the laboratory: in 1954, Henry Reid appointed Chubby Peddrew to serve as one of the directors of Langley’s inaugural United Fund Drive. The Activities Building was the site of club meetings and branch get-togethers, an end run around the embarrassment and difficulty of finding a venue in the town that would accommodate a racially mixed group. The Negro employees began attending centerwide events such as the annual Christmas party; one season, Eunice Smith volunteered as a Santa’s helper. Every year, Dorothy Vaughan’s children counted the days until the laboratory’s giant picnic, where they could romp and play with the other kids and eat their fill of grilled hot dogs and hamburgers.

  The social and organizational changes occurring at Langley were buoyed by the civil rights forces gathering momentum in the country. A. Philip Randolph, implacable in his advocacy of voting rights and economic equality, was actively working with younger organizers, principally the minister of a Montgomery, Alabama, church named Martin Luther King Jr. King and a fellow pastor named Ralph Abernathy had helped organize a boycott of the city buses after a fifteen-year-old student named Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old seamstress, were both hauled off to jail for refusing to yield their seats in the “white” section of the bus. As with the legal case of Irene Morgan, the woman arrested in Virginia’s Gloucester County in 1946 for the same infraction, the battle over integration on Montgomery buses eventually won a hearing in front of the Supreme Court. Once again America’s highest court ruled segregation illegal. The controversy over the bus boycott vaulted the young Dr. King into the national headlines as the leader of the civil rights movement.

  Langley Air Force Base and Fort Monroe moved forward to integrate the housing and the schools on their bases; as federal outposts, they were bound to comply with federal law. The state of Virginia, on the other hand, hoisted the Jim Crow flag even higher. In the years following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Senator Harry Byrd’s antipathy toward the law had swelled into a countering movement—Massive Resistance—and he marshaled every resource at his political organization’s disposal to build a firebreak against integration. Byrd Machine politician J. Lindsay Almond assumed the governorship and the party line in January 1958. “Integration anywhere means destruction everywhere,” Almond inveighed in his inaugural address, his words a dark mirror of Lyndon Johnson’s anxious commentary on Sputnik. Claiming to be the front line of defense for the entire South and its “way of life,” the southern Democrats who ruled the state passed a package of laws that gave the legislature the right to close any public school that tried to integrate. “How can Senator Byrd and [Virginia] Congressman Hardy be so distressed one minute about our lagging behind the Russians in our missile program and the next minute advocate closing the schools in Virginia?” demanded one Norfolk Journal and Guide columnist.

  Supporters of integration and segregation faced off with growing intensity: in 1956, the NAACP filed lawsuits in Newport News, Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Arlington, with the aim of forcing each of those Virginia school districts to integrate. The Byrd cronies retaliated by diverting taxpayer money to fund whites-only “segregation academies,” private schools founded to circumvent integrated public schools. The no-go situation in the Virginia schools was evidence of just how difficult it was going to be to pull out the roots of the caste system that had defined and circumscribed virtually every interaction between whites and those considered nonwhite since the English first set foot on the Virginia coast. “While integration waits to be born, the ‘separate but equal’ education of the Negroes marks time,” wrote journalist James Rorty in Commentary Magazine.

  That so many West Computers managed to find opportunity as they rotated into new positions at the lab certainly relieved some of the pressure for Langley management to take a more active hand in the matter of integration. Langley might easily have continued its organic approach to desegregation, ending West Area Computing only after the last of the women had found a new home with an engineering section, like grade school kids waiting to be picked for a kickball team. Driven by the pragmatic sensibility of the engineers, management had naturally tacked toward a policy of benign neglect with respect to the bathroom signs and lunchrooms, neither enforcing compliance with the rules nor eliminating them altogether. It might have taken years longer before the unseen hand that had been vanquished by Miriam Mann in the lunchroom in the early 19
40s would take the next step and pry the riveted aluminum COLORED GIRLS signs off Langley’s bathroom doors. But by leapfrogging the United States into space, the Russians had turned even local racial policy into fodder for the international conflict. In forcing the United States to compete for the allegiance of yellow and brown and black countries throwing off the shackles of colonialism, the Soviets influenced something much closer to Earth, and ultimately more difficult than putting a satellite, or even a human, into space: weakening Jim Crow’s grip on America.

  “Eighty percent of the world’s population is colored,” the NACA’s chief legal counsel Paul Dembling had written in a 1956 file memo. “In trying to provide leadership in world events, it is necessary for this country to indicate to the world that we practice equality for all within this country. Those countries where colored persons constitute a majority should not be able to point to a double standard existing within the United States.” It would take a lot more than a shiny Soviet ball and the threat of international disdain to completely break the Byrd organization’s commitment to racial segregation. As far as the segregationists were concerned, racial integration and Communism were one and the same and posed the same kind of threat to traditional American values. Yet those charged with mounting the American offense in space saw strength in countering the Russian value of secrecy with its opposites—transparency, democracy, equality—and not a simulacrum.

  Though many competitors within the US government were vying to lead the space effort—among them the US Air Force, the US Naval Research Observatory in Washington, DC, and Wernher von Braun and the Germans who ran the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama—it was the NACA that was chosen as the repository for all of America’s disparate space operations. The NACA—civilian and innocuous, abundant in engineering talent—was the perfect container. In October 1958, with Mother Langley as the nucleus, the US government fused all the competing operations, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, into the NACA. The expanded mission called for a new name: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

  The NACA was quiet, obscure, and largely overlooked. NASA would be high-profile, high-stakes, and scrutinized by the world. The work done by the NACA nuts was hidden behind the more public operations of the military services and commercial aircraft manufacturers. NASA was chartered “to provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities,” with all failures and tragedies of the endeavor laid bare to the citizenry and broadcast through the influential young medium of television. With the world watching, the new organization carrying the American banner into space would have to be “clean, technically perfect, and meritocratic, the bearer of a myth.”

  The transition from the NACA to NASA didn’t change Langley’s facilities significantly, nor did it require drastic changes in the laboratory’s staff. But the shift in attitude and in public responsibility at the laboratory were as distinct in character as the golden age of aeronautics of the 1950s would be from the space-age 1960s. The quirky place where upstart engineers competed to “bootleg” their own projects with the knowing wink of their supervisors, where a central laboratory had grown organically into a culturally cohesive organization of five thousand had, from October 1957 to October 1958, become a high-profile bureaucracy with ten research centers and ten thousand employees.

  As the Space Act of 1958 made its way through Congress, trailing behind it the sheaves of legal documents and memoranda required to bring NASA to life, one memo quietly circulated at what was soon to be renamed the Langley Research Center, authored by Langley’s assistant director, Floyd Thompson, dated May 5, 1958, officially ending segregation at Langley.

  “Effective this date, the West Area Computers Unit is dissolved.”

  As the clock ticked down on the NACA, only nine West Computers remained in the pool: Dorothy Vaughan, Marjorie Peddrew, Isabelle Mann, Lorraine Satchell, Arminta Cooke, Hester Lovely, Daisy Alston, Christine Richie, Pearl Bassette, and Eunice Smith. With one terse line of text, NASA crossed a frontier that had not been breached by its predecessor. The memo heralded the end of an era, the swan song of the Band of Sisters. The story of West Area Computing—how Dorothy Vaughan and her colleagues found their way to Langley, the tragedy and hope of World War II, the tyranny of the signs in the Langley cafeteria and on the bathroom doors, the women’s contributions to one of the most transformative technologies in the history of humankind—would get passed along as family lore, but leave barely a fingerprint in the histories of the black men and women who fought for progress in their communities, of the women who pushed for equality for their gender in all aspects of American life, or of the engineers and mathematicians who taught humans to fly. For the rest of their lives, the former West Computers reminisced with one another and with the East Computers and the engineers they worked with. They told tales at the retirement parties that crowded their calendars in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, but with the modesty characteristic of women of their generation, they were reluctant to describe their achievements as anything more than “just doing their jobs.”

  The end of the West Area Computing section was a bittersweet moment for Dorothy Vaughan. It had taken her eight years to reach the seat at the front of the office. For seven years after that she ruled the most unlikely of realms: a room full of black female mathematicians, doing research at the world’s most prestigious aeronautical laboratory. Her stewardship of the section had supported the careers of women like Katherine Goble, who would ultimately receive her country’s highest recognition for her contributions to the space program. The standards upheld by the women of West Computing set a floor for the possibilities of a new generation of girls with a passion for math and hopes for a career beyond teaching. Just as the original NACA-ites would forever hold on to their identities as members of that venerable organization, the black women would always feel an allegiance to West Area Computing, and to the woman who led it to its final day, Dorothy Vaughan.

  Dorothy was forty-eight years old in October 1958, with more than a decade of work still stretching out before her. Her older children, so tiny when she had first come to Hampton Roads, were now entering college. The younger boys were adolescents following fast in the path of their older siblings. Her work at Langley had enabled her to make good on her promise to her children and their futures. With their educations on track and a house of her own in her name—the Vaughans also left Newsome Park, in 1962—there was nothing stopping Dorothy from making the final years of her career about her own ambitions.

  “She was the smartest of all the girls,” Katherine Goble would say of her colleague, years into her own retirement. “Dot Vaughan had brains coming out of her ears” (and Katherine Goble knew from brains). Dorothy was proud of the way she had navigated through the days of racial segregation, proud of whatever small share she might claim in contributing to the demise of that backward practice. She had watched the women of West Computing, along with the others at the laboratory, take flight within the NACA’s research operations; together, they proved that given opportunity and support, a female mind was the analytical equal of its male counterpart. But despite knowing for many years that this day would eventually come, and having done everything within her power to bring it about, the victory she savored as the memo circulated was tempered with disappointment. Progress for the group meant a step back for its leader; Dorothy’s career as a manager came to an end on the last day of the West Area Computing office.

  Dorothy had never been one to linger over the past; the decade waiting in the wings promised to be one of the most interesting ever witnessed at the laboratory. For better or worse, Langley’s fresh start was giving Dorothy Vaughan a fresh start as well. She would now begin life at the new agency as she had started her career at the NACA: as just one of the girls.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Outer Space

  This is not science fiction,” wrote President Eisenhower, in the preface to a fif
teen-page document entitled Introduction to Outer Space. Prepared by the President’s Advisory Committee on Science in March 1958 as a primer on spaceflight, the brochure laid out the scientific principles of travel beyond the Earth’s atmosphere in terms a layperson could understand. “As everyone knows, it is more difficult to accelerate an automobile than a baby carriage,” read one passage. It also made the case for why a space program—and its enormous price tag—was in the interest of every American, offering four arguments for the public’s consideration. National defense and global prestige, of course, were the two concerns that had moved the reverie of space travel from the purview of novelists and eccentrics to the country’s number-one priority. The only thing that rivaled Americans’ fear of the Soviet Union’s incipient prowess in the heavens was their wounded national pride.

  Thirdly, space exploration would bring an unprecedented opportunity to expand the body of human knowledge about the universe, prompted the pamphlet. Sputnik launched smack in the middle of the International Geophysical Year, and experts around the world fantasized over the cornucopia of data that might be harvested by a satellite or solar system–faring probe, a mechanical, electrical proxy for their own inquisitive eyes.