Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  Katherine Johnson invited Christine to join the choir at Carver. If Katherine and Eunice Smith took time off work to sing for a funeral at the church, Christine often came along. Christine also ran into Katherine at local sorority activities. For many years, Katherine and Eunice Smith traded off serving as president and vice president of AKA’s Newport News chapter, overseeing a busy schedule of events like the organization’s annual picnic and the many scholarship fund-raisers that were a core part of the sorority’s mission. Katherine Johnson was involved in so many civic and social associations—the Peninsula League of Women, which hosted an annual debutante ball for young black women; the Altruist Club, a middle-class social organization—that folks came to expect to see her broad smile and firm handshake wherever the professional set of the black community gathered. Even the brainy fellas in the office at 1244 knew that when the CIAA tournament came to town—the premier basketball event for black colleges—Katherine’s desk would be empty, as she never missed her annual courtside date with Eunice Smith, the two rabid hoops fans having the time of their lives cheering for their favorites.

  Christine Darden and Katherine Johnson got to know each other well outside the office, but they never had the chance to work together. Christine visited Katherine in her office a couple of times, but it would be years before Christine knew more about the full scope of her friend’s mother’s work. The press surrounding Katherine Johnson’s role in John Glenn’s flight had made her something of a celebrity in the local community and among the small national network of black engineers and scientists, but she remained modest about her work. “Well, I’m just doing my job,” she would say, implying and I’m assuming that you are, too.

  Of course, while Katherine took the accolades in stride, she never took the work for granted. Not a morning dawned that she didn’t wake up eager to get to the office. The passion that she had for her job was a gift, one that few people ever experienced. That did make her special, she understood, and it bonded her to the engineers at work as strongly as social and charity activities bonded her to the women in her sorority. Together they shared the secret language of pericynthion altitudes and orbital planes and lunar equators. They experienced the indescribable joy of seeing their endeavors coalesce with those of the hundreds of thousands of other people now involved in the space program, the collective effort so much greater than the sum of the individual parts that it began to feel like a separate being. They also grieved together when all their best-laid plans were destroyed in the February 1967 electrical fire on board the Apollo 1 command module, which was on the launchpad in Cape Canaveral for testing. Fire flashed through the interior of the craft, and the three astronauts inside—Ed White, Roger Chaffee, and Gus Grissom of the Mercury Seven—perished instantly.

  The tragic end of Apollo 1 shook NASA to its core. The astronauts weren’t hundreds of thousands of miles away when the accident happened; they were on the ground, within feet of the ground crew and the engineers, and yet they still died. The road to the stars was a rough one, and the Apollo team needed no reminder of the risk. They redesigned the spacecraft, fixing flaws that had been exposed by the disaster and redoubling their focus on every possible detail of the next nine missions, each a step in the stairway to the Moon. The ascent to the Moon landing was predicated on the belief that each cell in the body of the space program was both individually superb and seamlessly connected to the cells around it.

  Two vehicles and 238,900 miles: three days there and three days back. Twenty-one hours on the surface of the Moon for two astronauts in the lunar lander, while the service module circled the heavenly body in a parking orbit. Katherine knew better than anyone that if the trajectory of the parked service module was even slightly off, when the astronauts ended their lunar exploration and piloted their space buggy back up from the Moon’s surface, the two vehicles might not meet up. The command service module was the astronauts’ bus—their only bus—back to Earth: the lander would ferry the astronauts to the waiting service module and then be discarded. If the two vehicles’ orbits didn’t coincide, the two in the lander would be stranded forever in the vacuum of space.

  The leadership of the Space Task Group set a risk standard of “three nines”—0.999, a criterion requiring that every aspect of the program be projected to a 99.9 percent success rate, or one failure for every thousand incidences. The astronauts, former test pilots and combat veterans accustomed to riding with the shadow of death on every flight, put themselves in NASA’s hands. They were prepared to give their lives to the mission, just as they had been prepared to give their lives as pilots, but they would just as soon trust that the brain busters had done their math and that by the rule of three nines, their unprecedented flight to the Moon would be less risky in fact than a Sunday drive in their Corvettes.

  Katherine Johnson, for her part, was determined to make this happen. She arrived at the office early, went home in the late afternoon to check on her girls, and then came back in the evening, maintaining a schedule of fourteen- or sixteen-hour days. She and engineer Al Hamer collaborated on four reports between 1963 and 1969, some of them written to work out the all-important lunar orbits, others asking the question, What if? What if the computers went out? What if there was an electrical failure on board the spacecraft and the astronauts needed to navigate back home by the stars, like the mariners of a simpler age? As the years of the 1960s slipped by, it seemed that Katherine was increasingly at the office late at night, the hours passing like minutes as she and Hamer refined calculations and made rough drafts of diagrams for their reports.

  One morning on the way to work, Katherine literally fell asleep at the wheel, waking up shaken but unhurt by the side of the road. She was so absorbed with the problem of keeping the astronauts safe on their round trip to the Moon that she was making herself vulnerable to the most mundane kind of risk. She had to keep pushing, however. Each year, NASA made progress toward converting the theoretical concepts of how to reach the Moon into operating practice. Each mission closed the distance, brought the fruit closer to their grasp. But this last step, with its complicated dance between the Moon and the lander and the waiting command module, was the most complicated. Katherine Johnson had given her best to her part of the grand puzzle, of that she was sure. The day was soon coming when the world would see if her best, if the brainy fellas’ best, if NASA’s best, was good enough.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  To Boldly Go

  In July 1969, a hundred or so black women crowded into a room, their attention commanded by the sounds and grainy images issuing forth from a small black-and-white television. The flickering light of the TV illuminated the women’s faces, the history of their country written in the great diversity of their features and hair and skin color, which ranged from near-ivory to almost-ebony, hues of beige and coffee and cocoa and topaz filling in between. Some of the women were approaching their golden years, the passage of time and experience etched in their faces and bearing. Others were in the full bloom of youth, their eyes like diamonds, reflecting a bright future. They convened around the shared purpose of the advancement of women like them, and to use their collective talents for the betterment of their community. From up and down the East Coast, and even farther afield, they had come together for the weekend, though the time they shared in each other’s company would forge lifetime friendships.

  Their presence at the conclave tipped them as members of the top echelon of the race, though in fact many of them were the daughters and granddaughters of the janitresses and washerwomen and domestic servants whose backbreaking work had funded thousands of college educations and bankrolled down payments on homes, who supported America’s great economic pyramid even as it pinned them in place with its weight. They, the legacy of those women, had spent their lives in varying degrees of distance from their country’s great pageant, standing on the side of the stage, even though there was virtually no aspect of their lives that had not been touched by those big sweeps, no part of the
grand story that did not include them in some way.

  Throughout the day, as the women conducted their meeting, their interest in the marathon drama unfolding on the television had waxed and waned, groups of them perching in front of the screen to get the latest updates before heading off to focus on the day’s agenda. But as the day grew long, more of them were drawn in, gazing into the television—into the void of space, into their own hearts, trying to make some meaning of what they were watching. The women who watched joined with their fellow Americans in a moment of consonance, the roulette of emotions in the room—pride, elation, impatience, awe, resentment, patriotism, suspense, fear—replayed in differing mixtures in living rooms and meeting places around the United States. In fact, the unprecedented episode they witnessed on that Saturday night they shared with a total of six hundred million people around the world: all standing in front of the same window, all observing the same thing at the same time.

  Out of that global audience, four hundred thousand NASA employees, contractors, and military support watched with particular interest, seeing in the craft that approached the Moon the measure of a screw, the blueprint of a hatch, the filament in a circuit, the fulfillment of a promise made by a president who hadn’t lived to see it carried out. They dotted the globe, those who had worked on Project Apollo, those who had made possible the day that had come. They clustered around displays and switchboards and dials and computers, monitoring every heartbeat of the spacecraft that had slipped out of the influence of its home planet and was now being enticed by the gravitational pull of the Moon. Most of them joined their friends and families in gathering around the televisions as well.

  Among the black women watching the television, far from Mission Control, tucked away at a resort in the Poconos, Katherine Johnson divided her attention between the weekend leadership conference being held by her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and the fortunes of the Apollo 11 astronauts on their way to becoming the three most solitary beings in the history of humanity. As she watched the delicate dance of physics that propelled the Apollo capsule forward toward the Moon, her mind’s eye superimposed equations and numbers upon each stage of the craft’s journey, from launch to Earth orbit, from translunar injection to lunar orbit.

  The intensity of the last few days at Langley had been matched only by the extreme heat that had enveloped the peninsula. It was nearly 96 degrees in Hampton that Saturday morning in July 1969 when Katherine and a car full of sorority members hit the road for the Poconos. It had been too hot to think, too hot to sleep, too hot to do anything except seek refuge anywhere you could find it, until the temperature ticked back down from intolerable to just bearable. The weekend escape had offered a break from both office and climate, each mile north taking her farther away from the steam heat that had held the area hostage for the last few days. Passing Washington, DC, she could breathe a little easier; by the time they crossed from Maryland into the foothills of Pennsylvania, the fever had broken, the air outside was crisper, the sky bluer and higher, the milder climate a reminder of her native West Virginia.

  The Hillside Inn, perched on a grassy rise like an oversized farmhouse, was the perfect setting for the flock of pink-and-green-clad women who had convened for a weekend of planning and friendship. The sorority had tapped the most promising young women from collegiate chapters around the country so that they might learn from seasoned members like Katherine how best to organize the service projects that were at the core of their mission and activity. They talked about fundraisers for scholarships to black colleges, literacy campaigns, and voter registration drives. The kind of projects undertaken by the chapters around the country ranged from modest and one-off to sophisticated operations: one AKA chapter in Ohio ran a full-time job training center in one of the city’s black communities.

  The women doubled and tripled up in Hillside’s thirty-three rooms, taking in the expanse of green and mountain views that were part of the region’s iconic appeal. The inn’s rustic luxury fulfilled the sorority’s need for a quiet, reflective setting for their meeting. But it also boosted their racial pride: the Hillside Inn was the only resort in the Poconos with black owners. Albert Murray, a successful New York lawyer, had bought the land with his Jewish business partner in 1954. A year later the partner died, and Murray and his wife, Odetta, decided to use the property for a hotel. At the time, most resorts in the Poconos barred Negroes and even Jews, maintaining policies every bit as inflexible as the legal segregation of the South. The Hillside welcomed all guests, and most particularly wanted to provide upwardly mobile blacks with the same kind of vacation experience their white counterparts enjoyed.

  The Hillside advertised in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Pittsburgh Courier, and Ebony; with its swimming pool and expansive 109-acre estate, it delivered on its promise of understated luxury. And of course, it distinguished itself with the things that the black sororities and social clubs and family reunions making the pilgrimages up Route 609 never would have found at the other retreats, even if they’d managed to get past the bellman—delights like the hearty southern-style home cooking. Three times a day, Katherine and her sorors sat next to each other family style in the inn’s dining room, laughing and talking and debating over grits for breakfast, ribs and golden-fried chicken for lunch and dinner, and sweet potato pie and peach cobbler for dessert. The youngsters who staffed the dining room—all of them students at black colleges in the South, a conscious choice on the part of the Murrays—were constantly exposed to Hillside’s professional class of patrons, examples in the flesh of what they might aspire to in their own lives.

  Katherine loved the exacting standards of the women in the sorority; their shared desire to do things of value for other people, their fierce commitment to cultivate and display the best of the black community, served to deepen their personal bonds. They’d had to learn to work together to accomplish their goals, something that had served Katherine and the rest of the women well in their careers. The sorority had been a constant in her life since her days as a fifteen-year-old freshman at West Virginia State; she had spent more weekends than she could remember attending sorority activities or meetings.

  Katherine and the other women relaxed in each other’s company in the intimate setting, enjoying it even more for the many years that the experience had been denied them. It was not yet so long ago since Katherine’s father, Joshua, and Dorothy Vaughan’s husband, Howard, had worked together, attending to the needs of the jet set at the Greenbrier, not so many summers past since Katherine herself had staffed the grand hotel’s antiques store and served as a private maid to wealthy guests. It was just yesterday, it seemed, that she was the precocious adolescent learning to hold her own with the kitchen’s French chef and making conversation with the president’s brother and the other lofty guests who dropped in on the resort as part of their nomadic social circuit.

  Those well-heeled people had all responded to something in the young bespectacled woman, something that gave them the feeling that she had a great future. Who among them would have ever imagined, however, that Katherine’s future, and their country’s future, and the future, as imagined by the likes of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, would converge to be one and the same? Yet four days earlier, on July 16, 1969, fifty-year-old Katherine Johnson had been part of that group of insiders when the three-hundred-foot Saturn V rocket boosted the Apollo 11 craft and its three human occupants down the road to history.

  Mission Control set the candle on fire at 9:37 a.m., early enough for the East Coast brain busters to take in the big event and get to work, then spend the rest of the day getting the color commentary. If the space shots hadn’t exactly become commonplace since Alan Shepard’s first foray, they happened often enough for talking heads like CBS’s Walter Cronkite to wield the jargon of max Q and apogee and trans-Earth injection with the same nonchalance as the flight operations crew in the trenches of Mission Control. Still, the broadcasters knew—everyone in the audience knew—that even with twenty-si
x manned flights under NASA’s belt, this was different, and they struggled to come up with superlatives to capture the moment. Cronkite gushed unabashedly, putting the magnitude into the context of the great machines of war and transportation that had transformed the American century: the mighty Saturn V rocket consumed the equivalent of ninety-eight railroad cars’ worth of fuel; it propelled a craft that weighed as much as a nuclear submarine with the equivalent thrust of 543 fighter jets. The United States would spend $24 billion on Apollo, in order to plunge the sword into the heart of the Soviet Union’s ambitions in space.

  Not everyone shared Cronkite’s exuberance. All that money—and for what? many wondered. So much money spent so that between 1969 and 1972 a dozen white men could take the express train to a lifeless world? Why, Negro women and men could barely go to the next state without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, and service stations that wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the bathroom. Now they wanted to talk about a white man on the Moon? “A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the Moon,” rapped performer Gil Scott-Heron in a song that stormed the airwaves that year.

  At the beginning of the decade, the space program and the civil rights movement had shared a similar optimism, a certain idealism about American democracy and the country’s newfound drive to distribute the blessings of democracy to all its citizens. On the cusp of the 1970s, as the space program approached its zenith, the civil rights movement—or rather many of the goals it had set out to achieve—were beginning to feel as if they were in a state of suspended animation. There were real and shining triumphs, certainly: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 pried Jim Crow’s legal grip off the country’s workplaces, modes of transportation, public spaces, and voting box. But the economic and social mobility that had been held hostage by that legal discrimination remained stuck.