Katherine Johnson is the most recognized of all the NASA human computers, black or white. The power of her story is such that many accounts incorrectly credit her with being the first black woman to work as a mathematician at NASA, or the only black woman to have held the job. She is often mistakenly reported as having been sent to the “all-male” Flight Research Division, a group that included four other female mathematicians, one of whom was also black. One account implied that her calculations singlehandedly saved the Apollo 13 mission.
That even Katherine Johnson’s remarkable achievements can’t quite match some of the myths that have grown up around her is a sign of the strength of the vacuum caused by the long absence of African Americans from mainstream history. For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity. The power of the history of NASA’s black computers is that even the Firsts weren’t the Onlies.
No one is more in agreement with this point of view than Katherine Johnson. It was from her descriptions to me in interviews of the West Computing office that I first had an inkling of just how many black women might have worked at Langley. I first heard Dorothy Vaughan’s name from Katherine, and no one—not even the brainy fellas—merited more of Katherine’s admiration than Dot Vaughan. Of Margery Hannah, West Computing’s first supervisor, who eventually joined Katherine’s branch, she said, “She was extremely smart, and she didn’t get half the credit she deserved.” She enjoyed bragging about Christine Darden’s accomplishments more than she wanted to talk about her own work. “I never go into a school without mentioning Christine,” she told me. She is generous in her appreciation of other people’s talents in the way of someone who is in full command of her own gifts. As much as Katherine Johnson’s technical brilliance, it’s her personal story and her character that shine on us like a beacon. What could be more American than the story of a gifted little girl who counted her way from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to the stars? That along the way she equaled the prowess of an electronic computer, becoming a brainy, female John Henry, only served to burnish her myth. She is charismatic and self-possessed, cool under pressure, independent-minded, charming, and gracious. Her unencumbered embrace of equality, applying it to herself without insecurity and to others with the full expectation of reciprocity, is a reflection of the America we want to be. She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
But perhaps most important, Katherine Johnson’s story can be a doorway to the stories of all the other women, black and white, whose contributions have been overlooked. By recognizing the full complement of extraordinary ordinary women who have contributed to the success of NASA, we can change our understanding of their abilities from the exception to the rule. Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent. Like the men they worked for, and the men they sent hurtling off into the atmosphere, they were just doing their jobs. I think Katherine would appreciate that.
For Mary Jackson, who remained steadfast in her pursuit of the ideals of the Double V—for African Americans and for women—the years following the Moon landing would be a time of change and choice. “Rockets, moon shots, spend it on the have-nots,” Marvin Gaye sang in his 1971 anthem “Inner City Blues,” addressing the quagmire that was Vietnam, an economy beset by inflation, and most of all, the isolation, anger, and economic despair of blacks living in Detroit, Washington, DC, Watts, and Baltimore. In the 1960s, it had felt possible that the idealism of Camelot, the Great Society, and the civil rights movement, those inheritors of the Double V, might finally wash away the poverty and injustice that had plagued America since its founding. As the decade drew to a close, it became apparent that the dream of Dr. King that had rung out over the Lincoln Memorial was actually the explosive dream deferred of Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem.” “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” . . . In Newsome Park, there was dwindling evidence of the hopefulness that Eric Epps had displayed when he dedicated the development’s community center in 1945. The spaceflight revolution had solidified Katherine Johnson’s and Dorothy Vaughan’s positions in the middle class, but the neighborhood they and Eunice Smith and many others left behind was more and more like a poor island, cut off from the jobs and schools that would help them make the same leap the West Computers had made.
And that was before getting to “pollution, ecological damage, energy shortages, and the arms race,” the gremlins of the century’s technological revolution. Instead of creating unifying hope, an expansive space program was “salt on the wounds of the country’s more Earthbound concerns,” wrote NASA historian Robert Ferguson. As early as 1966, President Johnson, the space program’s biggest political champion, began looking at NASA as a “big fat money pot” that he could drain to ease a budget strapped by social programs and Vietnam. With the Moon landing achieved, the victory over the Soviet Union in hand, there was no urgency to push beyond Project Apollo, whose last two missions narrowly escaped cancellation.
The press surrounding the end of the Apollo program was clamorous, but the cancellation of another program also garnered headlines. In 1972, the United States decided to cancel its supersonic transport program, the SST, which many aerodynamicists had hoped would give them an “Apollo moment,” a glorious, high-profile display of their technology. The expensive program raised the hackles of those concerned about its negative impact on the Earth’s ozone layer, but it was the sonic boom “carpet” that swept across the landscape as the plane passed overhead that really inflamed public opinion. Reports claimed that shock waves from the high-speed commercial planes were “frightening residents, breaking windows, cracking plaster, and setting dogs to barking.” Some purported that the invisible menace had even caused the “death of pets and the insanity of livestock.” Local authorities received complaints of broken windows and traumatized animals, and calls to police surged as citizens reported unidentified blasts that came literally out of the clear blue sky.
The supersonic and hypersonic transport machines dreamed up in the 1950s and 1960s would have to wait, although in the 1970s Langley did turn much of its focus back to NASA’s first A: aeronautics. “In 1969 alone, there were 57 certified American airlines, which carried approximately 164 million originating passengers and some 20 billion revenue ton-miles of freight,” NASA revealed in a 1971 publication. The aerodynamicists’ priorities for the new decade were less glamorous, but a necessary part of solving the problems that were the result of an increasingly mobile society. One of the problems that the center focused on was noise abatement: busy skies were often noisy skies, even without sonic booms. Another issue was efficiency. With increasing fuel prices, the aircraft industry shifted its priority from increasing speed and power to boosting efficiency in subsonic or low supersonic flight.
Langley announced a sweeping reorganization in 1970, decreasing its workforce to a total of 3,853 from its peak of 4,485 employees in 1965. For those who lived through the reorganization, announced in the form of a forty-seven-page avocado-green book that landed on employees’ desks at the end of September that year, it was in many ways a more jarring time than the period of transition from the NACA to NASA. Waves of RIFs and RIGs—Reductions in Force and Reductions in Grade—happened so frequently at Langley in the 1970s that they spawned a new verb, as in “John got riffed last week.” Those who did survive the RIFs felt a sense of betrayal at NASA’s significantly reduced ambitions. Not only were the brain busters not heading to Mars and the outer planets, but by December 1972, they had left their final footprints on the Moon. The summit of humanity’s knowledge crashed into low-orbit reality. The NASA of the 1970s was interested in “routine, quick-reaction and economical access to space.” The agency would never return to the glory of the Apollo y
ears. But despite the downsizing of everything—budgets, workforce, expectations—the will to explore the world beyond Earth’s atmosphere did not, would not, could not go away.
Mary Jackson managed to surf Langley’s turmoil even as the sections, branches, and divisions around her recombined with greater frequency, the work groups at the bottom of the organization chart transforming like shards in a great NASA kaleidoscope. The names changed—Compressibility, Aero-Thermo, Applied Theory, Large Supersonic Tunnels, Transonic Aerodynamics, High-Speed Aircraft, Subsonic-Transonic—but her partnership with Kazimierz Czarnecki remained a constant. She stayed focused on the research she had pursued since becoming an engineer in 1958: the investigation of the impact of roughness (such as rivets or grooves) on the surface of a moving object on the boundary layer, that thin layer of air that passes most closely over a moving object. Never one to miss an opportunity to continue her education, Mary took FORTRAN classes, teaching herself to program. The computers that had made long-distance spaceflight possible were also revolutionizing aeronautical research, a specialty known as computational fluid dynamics. The engineers now conducted experiments in their beloved wind tunnels and then compared the results with simulations on their computers. Just as the electronic machines had taken the place of human computers in aeronautical research, the day would eventually come when the computer would displace the wind tunnel itself.
Mary Jackson was a tireless promoter of science and engineering as a meaningful and stable career choice. She made so many speeches at local schools that one might have thought she was running for office: Thorpe and Sprately Junior High Schools, Carver and Huntington High Schools, Hampton Institute, Virginia Wesleyan, a small college in Norfolk. At the King Street Community Center, where Mary had worked as the USO secretary during World War II, she started an after-school science club for junior and senior high school students. She helped the students build a smoke tunnel and conduct experiments, and taught them how to use the tool they created to observe the airflow over a variety of airfoils. “We have to do something like this to get them interested in science,” Mary commented in a 1976 article in the employee newsletter Langley Researcher, which profiled her for being honored as the center’s Volunteer of the Year. “Many times, when children enter school they shun mathematics and science during the years when they should be learning the basics.”
In 1979, Mary Jackson organized the retirement party for Kazimierz Czarnecki, who was leaving government service after forty years. Two years prior, the facility that had been the bedrock of most of their work—the four-by-four-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, the third member of Mary and Kaz’s partnership—had come to the end of its service at Langley as well. In 1977, the tunnel that had been state-of-the-art technology when it began operations in 1947 was razed to make way for the National Transonic Facility, a 1.2 Mach, $85 million tunnel that was powered by cryogenic nitrogen.
It was a moment for Mary to reflect on her career. She traveled regularly to make presentations at industry conferences, and by the end of the 1970s she had twelve authored or coauthored papers to her name. She had progressed from computer to mathematician to engineer, and in 1968 had been promoted to the level of GS-12. The budget cuts and RIFs of the 1970s made promotions harder to come by, however, and the next rung on the ladder for Mary Jackson—GS-13—was starting to look distant. GS-13 was a significant threshold, with few women in Langley at that grade in the mid-1970s. This was a contrast with Goddard, where both Dorothy Hoover and Melba Roy had hit the GS-13 mark by 1962. In 1972, NASA’s agencywide goal was “to place a woman in at least one of out of every five vacancies filled at levels GS-13 through GS-15.” The numbers of women, professional and administrative, had grown along with Langley’s general level of employment, but women were still a scarcity in high-level technical positions and in management. Even seemingly small barriers conspired to keep larger numbers of women from advancing: until 1967, the Langley Field golf course—as in other workplaces, a prime location for networking—restricted women to playing during the workday, rather than allowing them to golf alongside men after work.
In 1979, Mary Jackson was fifty-eight years old and coming to the conclusion that she had probably hit the glass ceiling. It would have been easy for her to reap the benefits of seniority, reducing her workload and taking a long coast toward retirement. Even if the next promotion eluded her, she still had the prestige of being an engineer and the satisfaction of knowing how hard she had worked to arrive at this point. But a position opened up in the Human Resources Division, and Mary’s name was floated to fill it: Federal Women’s Program Manager, charged with pushing for the advancement of all of the women at the center. To relinquish her hard-won title of engineer, at an organization that was created and run by engineers, was no easy choice.
Mary’s career frustration wasn’t unique, she knew. When she looked around, she saw many women and minorities at Langley trapped in the sticky middle grades, unable to rise to the level that their ability would otherwise merit. Did Langley really need one more GS-12 aeronautical engineer, even if the seat was occupied by a black woman? Or would the center be better served by someone who could help make way for legions of employees, at every level and from every background, liberated to give their best to their work? Mary Jackson wasn’t wired to take the easy road or be satisfied with the status quo. If the decision wasn’t simple, it was certainly clear. Stepping off the engineering track wasn’t a sacrifice if it allowed her to act on her principles. Taking a demotion from GS-12 to GS-11 in order to accept the less-prestigious position, Mary Jackson threw herself in 1979 into her new role as the center’s Federal Women’s Program Manager.
Helping girls and women advance was at the core of Mary’s humanitarian spirit; she saw the relationships between women as a natural way to bridge racial differences. She had been instrumental in bringing the separate regional white and black Girl Scout Councils together into a unified service organization for all girls in southeastern Virginia. In 1972, Mary volunteered as an equal opportunity employment counselor, and in 1973 she joined Langley’s Federal Women’s Program Advisory Committee. Both programs had been created in the 1960s to make sure that the federal government was hiring and promoting without differentiation by race, gender, or national identity. At Langley, as in other federal workplaces, the programs had a beneficial secondary effect: they gave female and minority employees a formalized way to make connections and boosted their centerwide visibility. Mary had always been a natural networker, bringing people together to help one another and to marshal their support for the many causes that were dear to her heart. She became an energetic member of a group of Langley women who were determined to push for opportunities for women of all colors at NASA, clearing the way for women to take their place as equals alongside men in science and engineering jobs, and also looking for ways to help secretaries and clerical employees to make the leap into technical jobs and program management. Accepting the position as the Federal Women’s Program Manager was a way of uniting twenty-eight years of work at Langley with a lifetime commitment to equality for all.
One of the most difficult aspects of writing a book is knowing that there’s not enough space or time to give voice to all the incredible people you meet along the way. The original draft of Hidden Figures had a final section portraying in detail how Mary Jackson and her fellow travelers went to all lengths in the 1970s and 1980s to extinguish the lingering traces of what NASA historian Sylvia Fries called the “fantasy that men were uniquely gifted to be engineers.” Like Mary, the final narrative stepped away from the daily routines of research to follow the women of Langley as they formed alliances and used all the ingenuity they brought to engineering to change the face of the center’s workforce. Making the decision to trim this section was difficult; while it allowed for the chance to spend more time with Dorothy, Mary, and Katherine in the golden age of aeronautics and space, it meant ending the book before Mary’s decision to leave engineering for Human Reso
urces. It also meant saying good-bye to one of my favorite “characters” in this sweeping drama, who has become a treasured friend in real life: Gloria Champine. The relationship between Gloria and Mary, which grew out of Mary’s decision to sacrifice her engineering career for the future career prospects of other women, is one of the most poignant of all the stories I uncovered in the research.
Gloria Champine was born at Fort Monroe in Hampton in 1932, her family home a stone’s throw from Mary’s. Her father was an airman at Langley Field who was instrumental in the development of the parachute. He died in the crash of a Keystone bomber on a flight from Langley in 1933. Her stepfather was the crew chief on the only XB-15 ever built, which was stationed at Langley. Gloria spent part of her childhood on the base, where “everybody’s daddy had a plane.” She grew up overhearing her stepfather and his crew tell stories of the “crazy things” the NACA nuts put them through in order to analyze the flying qualities of their experimental model bomber. Gloria, who is white, graduated from Hampton High School in 1947, completed an associate’s degree at a local business college, and found a job as the secretary to the head of a printing company in Newport News. In 1959, Gloria took the civil service exam and accepted a job as a secretary in the Mercury range office, helping with the logistics required to build the worldwide tracking network that debuted with John Glenn’s orbital flight.
In 1974, an equal opportunity program gave Gloria the chance to advance from a clerical position in the Dynamic Loads Division into a faster-track administrative position in the Acoustics Division. Then, she competed for an even higher position as the Technical Assistant to the Division Chief of Space Systems, a job that had previously only been held by men. She went through the interview process three times, and each time she came out on top. “They kept testing you because they didn’t want to give the position to a woman,” a friend in Human Resources confided to her. Eventually, however, the center was obligated to hire Gloria: the best candidate for the job, the first woman in the position.
Hidden Figures Page 28