Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  An enduring symbol of American boyhood (girls weren’t allowed to race until the early 1970s), the All-American Soap Box Derby mixed good old American whiz-bang ingenuity with family fun. The competition had started as a Depression-era distraction, a way to create something out of nothing when nothing was what most people had. Over the years, it had taken hold at the grassroots, and in 1960 Levi was one of fifty thousand boys gearing up to compete in local races around the country. Not surprisingly, the peninsula embraced the competition with zeal. Parents who spent their days designing, building, fixing, and operating machines of transportation signed their sons up and gave free rein to their own tinkering instincts. They got to spend time with their children and let the parental mask slip just a bit, giving their offspring a glimpse of the curious child they themselves had once been. Officially, the derby was the boy’s show, from building the car to crouching inside it on race day. Parents (usually fathers; Mary was one of the very rare derby moms) were supposed to stand back and offer only advice, but it was usually hard to tell who savored the engineering project more, the parent or the child.

  Like craftsmen in a medieval guild, the NASA engineers hoped that one day their children would decide to take up the mantle of the profession they held so dear. Their workplace was pleasant and safe, their colleagues were smart and interesting, and over the course of the twentieth century, engineers had seen the fruits of their labor transform every aspect of modern life in ways that seemed unimaginable even as they were happening. They wouldn’t get rich, but an engineer’s salary was more than enough to crack into the ranks of the comfortable middle class. So they served as laboratory assistants for science projects and turned the kitchen table into an honors calculus class. They held their offspring captive until the last homework problem was solved correctly, adolescent insolence and tears be damned.

  No NASA father had anything on Mary Jackson. Building a soap box derby car was an apprenticeship in engineering, and the earlier a kid got started, she knew, the more likely they were to fall under its spell. She pushed Levi (and his teachers) to allow him to take the most challenging math and science classes he could handle, and she coached him on his science projects. His eighth-grade project, “A Study of Air Flow in Scaled Dimensions,” scored third place in his school’s annual science fair.

  “Soapbox what?” some neighbors and Bethel AME parishioners and Girl Scout troop members had asked when Mary told them about her and Levi’s mechanical exploits. The first challenge many blacks faced in participating in something like the All-American Soap Box Derby was finding out about it in the first place. Starting early in the year, Chevrolet placed advertisements in Boys’ Life magazine, the official publication of the Boy Scouts, exhorting youngsters to put in their bid for fun, fame, and adventure by getting their cars in tip-top shape before racing season rolled around in the summer. Levi, who was a member of Bethel AME’s Boy Scout troop, might have read about the derby even if it hadn’t been part of the watercooler conversation at his mother’s office, but the message had a hard time finding its way to less well-connected ears.

  Harder than getting the message, perhaps, was acting on it when you got it. Entering the derby was tantamount to believing you had a shot at victory, as much (or more) for the parents as for the racer. The electrified fence of segregation and the centuries of shocks it delivered so effectively circumscribed the lives of American blacks that even after the current was turned off, the idea of climbing over the fence inspired dread. Like the editorial meetings in 1244, like so many competitive situations large and small, national and local, black people frequently disqualified themselves even without the WHITES ONLY sign in view. There was no rule keeping a Negro boy from entering the race, but it took a lot of gumption for him to believe that he might win, and even more to accept a loss as a failure that had nothing to do with his race.

  Mary, however, was determined to clamber over every fence she encountered and pull everyone she knew behind her. The deep humanitarianism that was her family inheritance had taught her to see achievement as something that functioned like a bank account, something you drew on when you were in need and made deposits to when you were blessed with a surplus.

  Langley, full of talented people with varied interests, was a bonanza of recruits for her many volunteer activities. Coworkers got used to finding Mary standing quietly at their desks, enlisting them in her latest attempt to apply the engineer’s values of discipline, order, and progress to the social sphere. Girls, she believed, needed particular attention; it wasn’t lost on her that the derby, while open to black boys, would have rejected her daughter’s application because of her gender. Mary’s promotion to engineer gave her an unusual vantage point. Despite the relatively large group of women now working at the center, most female technical professionals, black and white—even someone as gifted as Katherine Johnson—were classified as mathematicians or computers, ranked below engineers and paid less, even if they were doing the same work.

  Mary made common cause with the black employees working at Langley and at other places in the industry. She and Katherine Johnson and many others were core members of the National Technical Association, the professional organization for black engineers and scientists. Mary made every effort to bring students from Hampton’s public schools and from Hampton Institute into the Langley facilities for tours, to get an up-close and personal look at engineers at work. She organized an on-site seminar for career counselors at Hampton Institute so that they might better steer their students into job opportunities at Langley. If she got word that Langley was hiring a new black employee, she went out of her way to make phone calls to find him or her a place to live, just as she had done when she was secretary of the King Street USO.

  But Mary also cultivated allies among the white women she worked with. Emma Jean Landrum, another member of Langley’s tiny engineering sisterhood, sat a couple of desks away from Mary in the Four-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel office. Emma Jean was valedictorian of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s class of 1946, working her way through school serving meals in the dining hall and grading papers for professors. Like so many of the women at Langley, Emma Jean had been recruited by Virginia Tucker. In the years since, Emma Jean had produced several research reports as a part of the Unitary Plan Tunnel team; she then transferred to the Four-foot SPT office, where she became another of Kaz Czarnecki’s frequent collaborators. She, like Mary Jackson, had become an engineer in 1958.

  When Mary asked Emma Jean to participate in a career panel in 1962, organized by the local chapter of the National Council of Negro Women, she readily agreed. An all-black group of junior high school girls paid close attention to Mary and Emma Jean’s joint lecture, entitled “The Aspects of Engineering for Women.” Afterward, Emma Jean entertained the girls with a slideshow from a trip she had recently taken to Paris and London. Their appearance together in front of the group—Mary, petite and black, and Emma, white and nearly a foot taller—made as powerful a statement on the possibilities of the engineering field as their actual presentation. Not only did the girls receive firsthand evidence that women could succeed in a traditionally male field; in Mary and Emma’s collaboration, they saw that it was possible for a white workplace to embrace a woman who looked like them.

  Serving as the leader of Girl Scout Troop No. 60, now one of the largest minority troops on the peninsula, was always at the top of Mary’s list of volunteer activities. However, she was becoming impatient with the segregation that mandated a separate council for black scouts, and she began campaigning for one organization overseeing all the scouts. When nominations circulated to fill Virginia’s two slots for the Girl Scouts’ national conclave in Cody, Wyoming, Mary lobbied to send her young assistant troop leader Janice Johnson, who had developed into a capable right hand and a leader in her own right. This would be Janice’s first time in an integrated setting—her first time away from her hometown, in fact—but Mary believed she would be up for the challenge and
find it an invaluable experience.

  Mary also knew that a native of a place so flat it was practically underwater would need a leg up before hiking for days in the rarefied altitude of the Wyoming mountains. So Mary enlisted the help of Helen Mulcahy, a former East Computer who had transferred to Langley’s technical editing department. Mary asked Helen, an aficionado of the outdoors, to take Janice trekking with a full backpack, first on Buckroe Beach, then up into Virginia’s Shenandoah mountains. It wasn’t exactly the most rigorous training for an excursion at five thousand feet, and Janice didn’t earn any badges for her hiking, but she held her own in the camp and returned with tales for her young charges and a head full of dreams of a life beyond her Tidewater home.

  With each passing year, it seemed that the work Mary loved and the community service that gave her life meaning were becoming one and the same. She earned her engineering title through hard work, talent, and drive, but the opportunity to fight for it was made possible by the work of the people who had come before her. Dorothy Vaughan had had a positive impact on her career and on the phenomenon-in-waiting that was Katherine Johnson. Dorothy Hoover had shown that a black woman was capable of the highest level of theoretical aeronautical research. Pearl Young, Virginia Tucker, Kitty Joyner—Mary stood on those white women’s shoulders too. Each one had cracked the hole in the wall a little wider, allowing the next talent to come through. And now that Mary had walked through, she was going to open the wall as wide as possible for the people coming behind her.

  On Saturday morning, July 3, an enthusiastic crowd of four thousand people crowded along both sides of Twenty-Fifth Street in Newport News, kicking off their Fourth of July holiday weekend. The weather was Virginia summer at its best: clear, warm, just enough of a breeze to keep the crowd from overheating, not too breezy to interfere with the outcome of the peninsula’s tenth annual soap box derby. Contestants for the first heat of the day wheeled their vehicles to the starting line at the summit of the Twenty-Fifth Street Bridge. Everything receded into the distance as the pilots settled into their cars—the view of the C&O piers and the shipyard below, the sound of the energetic crowd, the faces of family and friends who had come to cheer them on—everything except the feel of the vehicle confining their gangly limbs and the desire to be the first car to cross the finish line. Officials weighed and inspected each car and then held a lottery to determine the positions in the first heat. At the crack of the starter’s pistol, the pint-sized pilots released their brakes, hunched down into their homemade roadsters, and willed their cars down the hill. The race was an all-day affair, heat upon heat of anxious and eager adolescent boys soldiering on through wobbly wheels, broken axles, driver error, parental disappointment, and photo finishes.

  Mary Jackson could see the air moving around the racer just as clearly as if she were looking at a Schlieren photograph taken in a wind tunnel. Levi’s car was well made; the only adjustment it required between heats was “a drop of oil on each wheel bearing.” Mary and Levi Sr. and four-year-old Carolyn held their breath as Levi Jr. got into position for the final heat. It seemed like an eternity, but at the end, Mary and Levi Sr. shouted in delight: their son had finished first, saving his best time for the heat that mattered most. Wearing a black-and-white crash helmet and the official race T-shirt, Levi Jr. sailed across the line at a relatively blazing seventeen miles per hour. His family fell upon him in a crush of hugs and celebration. To the inquiring and surprised local reporters who came to hear from the winner of the Virginia Peninsula Soap Box Derby, Levi Jackson confided the secret of his victory: the slimness of his machine, which helped to lower the wind resistance. What do you want to be when you grow up? the Norfolk Journal and Guide reporter must have asked. “I want to be an engineer like my mother,” Levi said.

  The spoils of the win were eye-popping: a golden trophy, a brand-new bicycle, and a spot at the national All-American Soap Box Derby in Akron, Ohio, as the official representative of the Virginia Peninsula. There Levi would face off against pilots from around the country, in front of seventy-five thousand fans, on a track where the racers could dash along at speeds exceeding thirty miles per hour. There he would be the only occupant of his aerodynamic buggy, but he’d have a community of people riding along on his shoulder. Levi Jackson was the “first colored boy in history” to win the peninsula’s soap box derby. Virtually the moment he crossed the finish line, the donations started rolling in from the Bachelor-Benedicts, the Phoebus Elks, the Beau Brummell Social Club, the Hampton Women’s Service League, half a dozen local black-owned businesses, and each of Hampton’s three largest black churches to help defray the costs of the local hero’s trip to Ohio. Another Black First for the books! If a black kid could take home the soap box derby trophy, what else might be possible?

  Achievement through hard work, social progress through science, possibility through belief . . . when Levi reached out and took hold of the first-place trophy, Mary witnessed, in one proud and emotional moment, the embodiment of so much that she held dear. Of course, Mary also knew that her son was a ringer; the two of them had been building to win. Brain busters’ kids were supposed to come out on top in a race like this, even if the brain buster was a woman, or black, or both. Being part of a Black First was a powerful symbol, she knew just as well as anyone, and she embraced her son’s achievement with delight. But she also knew that the best thing about breaking a barrier was that it would never have to be broken again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Degrees of Freedom

  In February 1960, as NASA pushed forward with reliability tests on the Mercury capsule, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical, a black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the segregated lunch counter in the town’s Woolworth’s and refused to move until they were served. The following day, the “Greensboro Four” had become a group of twenty activists. On the third day, sixty students converged upon the Woolworth’s, and by the fourth, three hundred had joined the demonstration. Participating were students from Bennett College, an all-black women’s college in Greensboro, as well as white students from Guilford College and the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina. Within a week, the protests, inspired by the nonviolent actions of India’s Mahatma Gandhi, spread to other cities in North Carolina, and then crossed the borders into Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The students started calling their protests “sit-downs” or “sit-ins.” The prison sentences that often attended their activism did nothing to quell their ardor. “Dear Mom and Dad: I am writing this letter tonight from a cell in the Greensboro jail. I was arrested this afternoon when I went into a lily-white lunch room and sat down . . .” wrote a young Portsmouth woman who attended North Carolina A&T. Like a match on dry kindling, the sit-ins set aflame Negroes’ smoldering, long-deferred dream of equality with a speed and intensity that took even the black community by surprise.

  Hampton Institute was the first school outside of North Carolina to organize a sit-in. On the campus, many students had come into contact with one of the early icons of a mobilization that seemed to be gaining national momentum. Five years earlier, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress and NAACP member, refused to yield her seat on a city bus to a white man, galvanizing the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy. A ferocious backlash against Parks ensued: she received death threats, and both she and her husband, Raymond, were blacklisted from employment in Montgomery. The president of Hampton Institute reached out to Parks, offering her a job as a hostess at the university’s faculty dining room, the Holly Tree Inn. Parks accepted, arriving on campus in 1957 and working at the restaurant into 1958.

  When the sit-ins came to Hampton, Christine Darden was an eighteen-year-old Hampton Institute junior carrying a double course load. Her father had insisted that she earn a teaching certificate as a backup plan for her pursuit of a career in the sciences. Christine found herself captivated by the incipient activist movement, and despite carrying a full seme
ster of courses in math and physics and extra classes in teacher education, she found time to join the protests, which eventually swelled into marches of more than seven hundred. Students walked across the Queen Street Bridge to downtown Hampton and converged on the lunch counters at Woolworth’s and Wornom’s, the local drug store. They quietly occupied the stores, some sitting at tables reading and working on homework assignments, until the owners shut down their establishments in the middle of the afternoon. The next month, five hundred students staged a peaceful protest through downtown Hampton. An outspoken group of thirteen movement leaders held a press conference with local newspapers. “We want to be treated as American citizens,” they told the reporters. “If this means integration in all areas of life, then that is what we want.”

  Christine also decided to join the voter registration drives organized at Hampton, walking door-to-door in black neighborhoods along Hampton’s Shell Road and Rip Rap Road, imploring black voters to register in time to make their voices heard in the November 1960 presidential showdown between the Republican, Vice President Richard Nixon, and the Democrat, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

  Despite its unyielding advocacy of Negro economic empowerment, Hampton Institute’s stance on integration had always been of the go-slow variety, wartime president Malcolm MacLean being a notable exception. Now, with a black president at the helm for the first time, even Hampton succumbed to the zeitgeist of the era. Dorothy Vaughan’s eldest daughter, Ann, who had left Hampton Institute in 1957, returned in the fall of 1959 to finish her degree. The campus she came back to was alive, breathless even, with the possibility of significant and permanent social change. One rumor that spread like wildfire through the network of energized students—a rumor that seemed wholly improbable, but which took root until it was accepted as fact—was that the astronauts were contributing to the students’ organizing activities. The astronauts represented everything that mainstream America held dear—and they’re with us, the students marveled. The very idea, that those buzz-cut middle-American boys were standing, however surreptitiously, with the Negro student activists! The fact that the rumor couldn’t be confirmed did nothing to dampen its power. At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible.