Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  The Goddard computers also sent the flight controllers their projection of the remainder of the voyage. Where was the capsule compared to where they had calculated it to be at the given time? Was it too high, too low, too fast, too slow? The output included a constantly updated time for retrofire, the moment when the capsule’s rockets had to be fired in order to initiate its descent back to Earth. Retrofiring too soon or too late would bring the unlucky astronaut back down far afield of his navy rescuers.

  The engineers had actually taken the IBM 7090 and the orbital equations for a test drive on two prior occasions: once for Mercury-Atlas 4, an orbital flight using a mechanized astronaut “dummy” as a passenger, and then with the trained chimpanzee Enos at the controls of MA-5. Enos’ flight was ultimately successful, but it faced computer glitches and communications dropouts (in addition to more serious problems with the capsule’s cooling system and a faulty electrical wire). To mention that the stakes increased dramatically with a person on board was an understatement (if disaster did befall John Glenn, one secret military document proposed blaming it on the Cubans, using it as an excuse to overthrow Fidel Castro). Katherine Johnson, suffice it to say, was very nervous about the momentous task she had been handed.

  For the entire project to succeed, each individual part of the mission—the hardware, the software, and the human—had to function according to plan. A breakdown would be immediate and potentially tragic, and broadcast live on television. But Katherine Johnson, like John Glenn, was not prone to panic. Like him, she had already gone through a simulation of the job in front of her. The moment that had arrived, despite the time pressure and the frenzy of activity surrounding her, felt somehow inevitable. Katherine Johnson’s life had always seemed to be guided by a kind of providence, one that was unseen by others and not fully understood by her, perhaps, but obeyed by all who knew her, the way one obeys the laws of physics.

  Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations. Instead of sending her numbers to be checked by the computer, Katherine now worked in reverse, running the same simulation inputs that the computer received through her calculator, hoping that there would be “very good agreement” between her answers and the 7090s’, just as had been the case when she originally ran the numbers for the Azimuth Angle report. She worked through every minute of what was programmed to be a three-orbit mission, coming up with numbers for eleven different output variables, each computed to eight significant digits. It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work. At the end of the task, every number in the stack of papers she produced matched the computer’s output; the computer’s wit matched hers. The pressure might have buckled a lesser individual, but no one was more up to the task than Katherine Johnson.

  February 20 dawned with clearing skies. No one who witnessed the events of the day would ever forget them. One hundred thirty-five million people, an audience of unprecedented size, tuned in to watch the spectacle as it unfolded on live television. Many Langley folks joined the Space Task Group down at Cape Canaveral to see the flight in person. Katherine sat tight in the office, watching the transmission on television.

  At 9:47 a.m. EST, the Atlas rocket boosted Friendship 7 into orbit like a champion archer hitting a bull’s-eye. The insertion was so good that the ground controllers cleared Glenn for seven orbits. But then, during the first orbit, the capsule’s automatic control system began to act up, causing the capsule to pull back and forth like a badly aligned car. The problem was relatively minor; Glenn smoothed it out by switching the system to manual, keeping the capsule in its correct position the same way he would have flown a plane. At the end of the second orbit, an indicator in the capsule suggested that the all-important heat shield was loose. Without that firewall, there was nothing standing between the astronaut and the 3,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures—almost as hot as the surface of the Sun—that would build up around the capsule as it passed back through the atmosphere. From Mission Control came an executive decision: at the end of the third orbit, after the retrorockets were to be fired, Glenn was to keep the rocket pack attached to the craft rather than jettisoning it as was standard procedure. The retropack, it was hoped, would keep the potentially loose heat shield in place.

  At four hours and thirty-three minutes into the flight, the retrorockets fired. John Glenn adjusted the capsule to the correct reentry position and prepared himself for the worst. As the spaceship decelerated and pulled out of its orbit, heading down, down, down, it passed through several minutes of communications blackout. There was nothing the Mission Control engineers could do, other than offer silent prayers, until the capsule came back into contact. Fourteen minutes after retrofire, Glenn’s voice suddenly reappeared, sounding shockingly calm for a man who just minutes before was preparing himself to die in a flying funeral pyre. Victory was nearly in hand! He continued his descent, with the computer predicting a perfect landing. When he finally splashed down, he was off by forty miles, only because of an incorrect estimate in the capsule’s reentry weight. Otherwise, both computers, electronic and human, had performed like a dream. Twenty-one minutes after landing, the USS Noa scooped the astronaut out of the water.

  John Glenn had saved America’s pride! That he’d had to stare death in the face to do so only increased the power of the myth that was created that day. An audience with the president, a ticker-tape parade in New York, seventy-two-point newspaper headlines from Maine to Moscow. America couldn’t get enough of its latest hero. Even the Negro press cheered Glenn’s accomplishment. “All of us are happy to call him our Ace of Space,” wrote a columnist in the Pittsburgh Courier.

  Nowhere, perhaps, was the hero’s welcome as warm as in Hampton Roads. Thirty thousand local residents turned out on a blustery day in mid-March to fete the men they had adopted as hometown heroes. Not since the end of the last war had Hampton seen such an exuberant celebration. Glenn rode in the lead vehicle of the fifty-car parade carrying the Mercury astronauts and their families and the top leadership of NASA. The motorcade departed from Langley Air Force Base and traced a twenty-two-mile route through Hampton and Newport News: along the shipyard, over the Twenty-Fifth Street Bridge, down Military Highway, with throngs standing on the sides of every thoroughfare. The procession passed by Hampton Institute, cheered on by Katherine Johnson’s daughter Joylette and Dorothy Vaughan’s son, Kenneth. Tiny Christine Darden stood on tiptoe to see over the exuberant crowds.

  The parade ended at Darling Stadium, the namesake of the oyster magnate whose creative entrepreneurship had brokered the land deal with the federal government for the Langley laboratory a half century before. Glenn ascended to the podium, grinning broadly as he stood behind a sign reading SPACETOWN, USA. The people of Hampton and Newport News beamed with pride. With the heart of the space program shipping out for Houston, the celebration was tinged with melancholy, but the cities of the Virginia Peninsula were determined to commemorate their legacy as the birthplace of the future. The city of Hampton changed its official seal to depict a crab holding a Mercury capsule in its claw, adopting the motto E Praeteritis Futura: Out of the past, the future. Military Highway, the town’s main drag since Hampton’s days as a war boomtown, got a new name: Mercury Boulevard.

  John Glenn was a bona fide hero, but he wasn’t the only one being cheered. Word of Katherine Johnson’s role in Glenn’s successful mission began making the rounds in the black community, first locally, then farther afield. On March 10, 1962, a glamorous Katherine Johnson, bedecked in pearls and an elegant suit that would have made Jackie Kennedy proud, smiled from the front page of the Pittsburgh Courier. “Her name . . . in case you haven’t already guessed it . . . is Katherine Johnson: mother, wife, career woman”! (Below the feature on Katherine Johnson, another headline inquired: “Why No Negro Astronauts?”) The newspaper recounted the lady mathematician’s background
and accomplishments with pride, detailing the report that sent Glenn’s rocket cone whizzing through the sky. Katherine accepted the recognition graciously: all in a day’s work.

  She and some of the engineers turned out for the parade, enjoying the celebration, allowing themselves, perhaps, just a sliver of pride in having been a part of such an achievement. They watched for a while but didn’t tarry long. It was fine to celebrate past accomplishments, but there was nothing more exhilarating than getting back to work on the next thing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  America Is for Everybody

  America Is for Everybody,” proclaimed the US Department of Labor brochure that landed on Katherine Johnson’s desk in May 1963. On the cover, a black boy of eight or nine, barefoot and dressed in a striped short-sleeved shirt and worn dungarees, sat on the ties of a dusty railroad track, his apparent circumstances and open-faced glower a rebuke to the promise of the title. Inside, President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson waxed poetic in statements about the Negro’s epic hundred-year journey up from slavery. Photos of black employees who “occupied positions of responsibility” at NASA, all of them involved with the space program, accompanied the text. At NASA’s High-Speed Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base—the place where pilot Chuck Yeager first cracked through the sound barrier in 1947—engineer John Perry manned an X-15 simulator. Mathematicians Ernie Hairston and Paul Williams conferred on “orbital elements, capsule position, and impact points” at Goddard. One picture showed Katherine Johnson sitting at her desk at 1244, pencil in hand, “analyzing lunar trajectories and computing trip time to the Moon and return to Earth by a space vehicle.” The document, created by the Labor Department to commemorate the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, certainly also served as another propaganda tool for the US government to improve its image on racial relations. What could provide greater evidence of America’s growing commitment to democracy for all than the hard-at-work photos of Katherine Johnson and the seven other NASA employees—all men—profiled in the booklet? The resonances and dissonances of the images in the book were sharpest there at Langley, ten miles from the point where African feet first stepped ashore in English North America in 1619, less than that from the sprawling oak tree where Negroes of the Virginia Peninsula convened for the first southern reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. In a place with deep and binding tethers to the past, Katherine Johnson, a black woman, was midwifing the future.

  Katherine wasn’t the only one working with purpose in 1963: so was the grand old man of the civil rights movement, A. Philip Randolph. As Gordon Cooper brought Project Mercury to a successful conclusion in 1963 with a twenty-two-orbit flight, Randolph made plans for another march on Washington. Unlike 1941’s ghost rally—the march that never happened, the impetus for Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 opening federal jobs to Negro employees—Randolph was going to see this one through. Working with activist Bayard Rustin, allied with Martin Luther King Jr., Randolph brought together a group that would come to be seen as the pantheon of leaders from the most energetic phase of the civil rights movement, including Dorothy Height, John Lewis, Daisy Bates, and Roy Wilkins.

  The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was held August 28, 1963, attracting as many as three hundred thousand people to the nation’s capital. Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez all took to the stage, musical witnesses to the idealism, hope, and persistence of a movement that drew its strength from its desire to force America to live up to its founding principles. Marian Anderson sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” her rich contralto flowing like honey over the massive gathering, mesmerizing the crowd just as she had Dorothy Vaughan and her young children at Hampton Institute in 1946. The morning schedule was interrupted with news that was cause for grief, reflection, and a kind of sober hope: ninety-five-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois had died early that morning in Ghana, the country he had adopted as his home after battling the State Department to keep his American passport. From his birth in 1868, Du Bois’ life bridged the years of Reconstruction and the twentieth-century movement. Mary MacLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, Charles Hamilton Houston, and so many more had built their life’s work on Du Bois’ foundation. Now, it was time to pass the torch again.

  Thirty-four-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ascended the platform to address the crowd, easing into his prepared remarks. Then Mahalia Jackson, sitting behind King on the podium, shouted out “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” King pushed his written speech aside, gripped the lectern with both hands, and gave his country seventeen of the most memorable minutes in its history. There was America before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and there was America after; King’s message would ever after remind all the citizens of the nation that the Negro dream and the American dream were one and the same. Backstage at the march at the end of the day, seventy-four-year-old A. Philip Randolph was speechless, the tears in his eyes the only adequate expression of what it meant to him to see this day come to pass.

  It’s doubtful that Randolph ever knew how directly the 1941 March on Washington influenced the group of people whose work was the lifeblood of America’s space program, but back at the Langley Research Center, a handful of black women could testify to the connection. “Dear Mrs. Vaughan: Our records indicate that you recently completed 20 years of Federal Government service,” wrote Langley’s director, Floyd Thompson, in the summer of 1963. A gold-and-enamel lapel pin adorned with a ruby was to be bestowed upon her at the center’s annual awards ceremony, which recognized employees hitting milestones of service with the center.

  Against the odds and contrary to their expectation when they first walked through the doors at Langley, the women of West Computing had managed to turn their wartime service into lasting and meaningful careers. By the standards of their parents and grandparents, and compared to many of their contemporaries, they had reached the mountaintop. Despite their progress, however, there was still work left to do at Langley. Breaking out of the paraprofessional status of computer or math aide presented a challenge for all women, more so for the black women. Of all the black employees working in research at Langley in the early 1960s, there were still only five categorized as engineers and sixteen with the title of mathematician. In a letter to NASA administrator James Webb, Langley’s director, Floyd Thompson, lamented that “very few Negroes” were applying for open science and engineering positions at the laboratory. “There is no doubt that one of the reasons they do not apply is that they do not believe that the living conditions in the area would be favorable to them because the Langley Research Center, which is completely integrated, is situated in a community where social segregation based on color is still practiced to a certain extent.”

  With an all-out need for technical expertise to feed the space program, and with continued pressure from the federal government to remove race-based barriers in its organization, Langley redoubled its recruitment efforts, casting a wider net at black colleges that had turned out generations of black math and science graduates, like Hampton Institute, Virginia State University in Petersburg and its branch campus in Norfolk, North Carolina A&T, and other schools in nearby states. Many in the generation of Negro students who came of age in a decade defined by Brown v. Board of Education and Sputnik—the ones who in the future would be known as the civil rights generation—were drawn into the engineering profession for the “economic and social mobility” that was the result of the national demand for technical skills. Most of them were southerners; for them, there was no need to adjust to living conditions that they had known all their lives. In the mid-1960s, with “dreams of working at NASA,” greater numbers of black college students found their way to Langley. Many of them were taken under the protective wing of Mary Jackson, who, like an ambassador, helped the recruits find places to live and settle into their jobs. She and Levi opened their house to them if they needed a home-cooked meal, or simply a place to go when they felt homesick. Mary and the other black e
mployees at Langley tended the new recruits as carefully and lovingly as if they were a garden. Unlike the women who started in West Computing after years of teaching, the new generation was coming to research early in their careers—early enough that they’d have time to stretch out and see where their talent might take them.

  One Sunday in 1967, after services at Carver Presbyterian Church, Katherine Johnson spied a new face in the crowd, a young woman who had come to the church with her husband and two young daughters. Always among the first to welcome new parishioners, Katherine strode forward and offered her hand in welcome. “I’m Katherine Johnson,” she said. “Yes, I know,” said Christine Darden, “you’re Joylette’s mother.” Though she hadn’t seen her for many years, Christine had met Katherine once at an AKA sorority barbecue hosted at the Johnsons’ home.

  Christine hadn’t set out to find a job in aeronautical research. In the spring of 1967, as she ticked off the days to graduation from her master’s degree program at Virginia State University, she had visited the school’s placement office in order to apply for professor positions at Hampton Institute and Norfolk State. “We wish you’d been here yesterday,” said the placement officer, “because NASA was interviewing.” The woman handed Christine an application for federal employment. “Fill this out and bring it back tomorrow.”

  Christine’s application was received enthusiastically; a follow-up phone call from Langley’s Personnel Department turned into a day of interviews and then a job offer as a data analyst in the Reentry Physics branch. She reported first to former East Computer Ruby Rainey, then to former West Computer Sue Wilder. Christine commuted from Portsmouth for a short time before moving her family to Hampton after Sue Wilder tipped her off to a house for rent in her neighborhood. Once on the peninsula, Christine saw Katherine Johnson and many of the other former West Computers on a regular basis. They hosted card parties and invited her along, introducing her to the black community in Hampton and Newport News. Despite spending four years at Hampton Institute, she had rarely left the campus and came to the city as a virtual stranger. The network of older women helped her settle quickly in her new town.