When Mary and Gloria were girls in the early part of the twentieth century, only the most gifted seer could have predicted the changes that would bring their paths together. In later years, Mary would describe to Gloria the segregation she had experienced in the early years at Langley. They met through one of the Federal Women’s Program committees and became friends, collaborators, and conspirators in the service of a shared belief in helping unrecognized talent get its day in the sun. Like Mary, Gloria Champine had a “hard head and strong shoulders and back.” She couldn’t keep herself from acting when she saw a way to give someone else a leg up. She always kept an extra women’s blazer behind the door in her office, in case a potential job candidate needed a little sartorial sharpening to make a better impression. When a young black woman who spent the summer interning with her mentioned an interest in computers, Gloria marched her over to meet the head of a programming branch in the Business Systems Division. The young woman secured a place in a programmer trainee program.
Male supervisors warned Gloria to “stay away from the woman stuff,” but the woman stuff was just as important to Gloria as it was to Mary Jackson. She had seen how dependent her mother, who was smart but valued for her beauty, had been on her father and stepfather. Gloria vowed never to be in the same situation; she never entertained the idea of not working, even after her three children came along. It was a decision that helped her to bear up when she separated from and then divorced her husband in the mid-1960s, leaving her a single mother and the head of her household at a time when the majority of white women still didn’t work outside the home.
In 1981, Langley sent Mary Jackson to NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, for a year of training to become an equal opportunity specialist. Mary had already decided who should follow her as Langley’s Federal Women’s Program Manager. Though Gloria didn’t come from a technical background, her military upbringing and fifteen years of experience at NASA gave her an understanding of the business of engineering and the motivations of the engineers. She knew airplanes better than a lot of the engineers she worked with. She was also a quick study with computers: Mary Jackson taught her how to “reprogram” the computers in the Human Resources Division, going deep into the databases that fed the systems in order to run statistical reports on employee qualifications and promotions. These reports revealed that female graduates with the same degrees as men were still more often hired as “data analysts,” the upgraded term for the center’s mathematicians, than as engineers. Black employees with similar qualifications lagged their white counterparts in promotions and were more likely to be steered to support roles, such as work in the Analysis and Computation Division, where Dorothy Vaughan had been reassigned, than to engineering groups. She showed Gloria how lacking a single course on a college transcript, such as Differential Equations, could keep an otherwise qualified and well-reviewed woman from keeping up with her male counterparts, even years after she had entered the workforce.
For the next five years, Mary Jackson and Gloria Champine were an effective social engineering team within the Equal Opportunity and Federal Women’s Program offices. For three of those five years, they worked for my father, Robert Benjamin Lee III, a research scientist in Langley’s Atmospheric Sciences Division. My father’s move into equal opportunity was part of a career development program designed to “season” him for moves into management when he returned to his division.
Mary, however, spent the rest of her career in the equal opportunity office, retiring in 1985. Her husband, Levi Jackson Sr., had spent the end of his working years at Langley as well, transferring from the air force base in the 1980s, still working as a painter. “We always thought it was so cool that Grandma worked in the wind tunnels and Granddaddy painted them,” remembered their granddaughter, Wanda Jackson. To the end of his life, Levi Jackson was devoted to Mary and proud of her every achievement. Mary stayed as busy over the next twenty years as she had been over the previous sixty-four, filling her days with her grandchildren and the volunteer work that gave her so much fulfillment. Mary Jackson died in 2005, and Gloria Champine penned a moving obituary that was published on the NASA website. “The peninsula recently lost a woman of courage, a most gracious heroine, Mary Winston Jackson,” Gloria wrote. “She was a role model of the highest character, and through her quiet, behind-the-scenes efforts managed to help many minorities and women reach their highest potential through promotions and movement into supervisory positions.”
Gloria, too, ended her thirty-year career at Langley in the equal opportunity office, building on Mary’s legacy, making sure that no talent at Langley was overlooked. One of those whose careers she tracked was Christine Darden, the young mathematician who had been galvanized by Sputnik back in 1957. Christine’s first years at Langley had been an exercise in enduring monotony. Though the Reentry Physics Branch had been an exciting place in the run-up to Apollo, long development lead times meant that by the time Christine came to the office, most of the interesting work had been completed, and the pace had slowed significantly. Although Christine’s pool was attached to an engineering group, most days she felt that she had entered a time machine. Many of the women in the pool of data analysts were former West Computers, and even though Christine had significant FORTRAN programming experience from her time in graduate school, a Friden calculator sat on her desk awaiting her input, just as it had for the computers in the 1940s. It was “deadly,” she said. She was working for the organization that had just led the charge to the Moon, and yet in her corner of NASA, Christine felt like the future had passed her by.
It took persistence, luck, and more than a little cheek to break out of what had become such tedium that Christine thought many times about quitting. She had survived the Green Book RIF in 1970, but just prior to a second wave in 1972, she happened to overhear her boss talking to someone in the Human Resources Department: she was on the hit list! In the complex game of RIF chess, she was being knocked off the board by a black man who had been hired at the same time as her, but as a mathematician. He had been sent off to an engineering group and promoted; she, with less seniority, was slated for layoff.
The revelation spurred her to action. Rather than raise the issue with her boss, Christine went directly to the division chief—her boss’s boss’s boss, none other than John Becker, Langley’s éminence grise, now on the cusp of retirement.
“Why is it that men get placed into engineering groups while women are sent to the computing pools?” Christine asked him. “Well, nobody’s ever complained,” he answered. “The women seem to be happy doing that, so that’s just what they do.” Becker was a man from another era. His wife, Rowena Becker, had been an “excellent mathematician”—the two met during the war, in the eight-foot tunnel—but after marrying she made the decision to leave Langley to become a full-time wife and mother. His frame of reference for working women and their expectations was like that of most men of his generation. But just as Becker had been willing to admit he was wrong when challenged by Mary Jackson in the 1950s, he rose to meet Christine Darden’s challenge twenty years later. Two weeks after Christine walked into John Becker’s office, she was assigned to a group working on sonic boom research.
Christine’s new boss, David Fetterman, was a self-described “wing man” who had decided to stay in aeronautics even as others were moving to space. He was happy working on his research independently and assumed that his new charge felt the same way. So he handed Christine a fly-or-fail research assignment: she was to take the industry standard algorithm used to minimize sonic boom for a given airplane configuration (developed by Cornell researchers Richard Seabass and Albert George) and write a FORTRAN program based on it. It was work at aeronautics’ leading edge, a computational fluid dynamics project that might help to mitigate the sonic boom that had made commercial supersonic flight so unpalatable.
It took three years of work, but the results were published in a 1975 paper entitled “Minimization of Sonic-Boom Parameters in Real an
d Isothermal Atmospheres.” Christine was the sole author. The code she wrote as an aspiring engineer is still the core of sonic boom minimization programs that aerodynamicists use today. It was an important contribution and a career-making achievement, but the road from that breakthrough moment to becoming an internationally recognized sonic boom expert with sixty technical publications and presentations under her belt and a member of NASA’s Senior Executive Service was still not direct.
In 1973, Christine took a computer programming course through Langley’s partnership with George Washington University. She had excelled at Hampton Institute, powered through her master’s degree at Virginia State, and finally landed a position with an engineering group at NASA, but the class of eight students—seven white and one black, seven men and one woman—was the first time she had been in an integrated school setting. She was intimidated at first, but high marks in the class made her decide to pursue a doctorate. Getting approval to enroll in the program took some doing. An upper-level supervisor denied her initial request. Even after she got the approval, she still was “juggling the duties of Girl Scout mom, Sunday school teacher, trips to music lessons, and homemaker,” for her two daughters in addition to her full-time work at Langley.
The doctorate in mechanical engineering took ten years. It was bestowed upon her forty years after the first West Computers walked into Langley. Christine’s success was supported by the work of the women who had come before her, her research based on the uncountable number of numbers that had passed through their hands and minds. Even with two of the finest credentials in the field to her name—a PhD and a major research contribution—it would take one more push before Langley acknowledged Christine Darden with the promotion that matched her accomplishments.
Gloria Champine admired Christine Darden’s intelligence and the dogged way she had pursued her PhD. From her perch in the equal opportunity office, she knew that women at the center—even at the top levels—were still being leapfrogged by men, and Christine was one of them. By the mid-1980s, Christine had moved up to GS-13, but even with the doctorate, she was having problems breaking into GS-14. On the other hand, a white male engineer who had started at the same time, with similar quality performance reviews, had already hit the GS-15 level. Gloria knew the Langley way: “Present your case, build it, sell it so they believe it.” She created a bar chart and showed it to the head of her directorate—a manager one level down from the top of Langley—who was shocked at the disparity. With Gloria’s efforts, the promotion came, and after it, the renown and the mobility for Christine that should come to people with such outstanding abilities. It was one of Gloria’s proudest moments. Christine had already done the work; Langley just needed someone who could help it see the hidden figures.
“What I changed, I could; what I couldn’t, I endured,” Dorothy Vaughan told historian Beverly Golemba in 1992. Dorothy retired in 1971 after twenty-eight years of service. The world had changed dramatically since the day she had taken the bus from Farmville to the war boomtown, but not quite enough to fulfill her last career ambitions. The Green Book landed on Dorothy’s desk just two days after her sixtieth birthday. Her name was in the book, but it was not where she hoped it would be.
“It involved a promotion,” Dorothy’s daughter, Ann Vaughan Hammond, told me, though to exactly what, her mother never said. Dorothy played it close to the vest, giving her family only the barest sketch of her final disappointment. In all likelihood, she had expected to serve out her last few years as a section head, regaining the title she had held from 1951 through 1958. What a triumph it would have been to return to management, but as the head of a section that employed both men and women, black and white. The section head position was given to Roger Butler, a white man, who also held the post of branch chief. Sara Bullock, the East Computer who had been put in charge of the group programming the Bell computer back in 1947, was appointed head of one of the branch’s four sections. Bullock was one of the rare female supervisors, particularly outside of administration. In 1971, there were still no female branch chiefs, no female division chiefs, no female directors at Langley.
And for the first time in almost three decades, no Dorothy Vaughan. Dorothy Vaughan’s time as a supervisor back in the 1950s was relatively brief, but during those years she had midwifed many careers. Her name never appeared on a single research report, but she had contributed, directly or indirectly, to scores of them. Only reluctantly did she agree to a retirement party; she never liked it when people made a fuss. She discouraged her family from coming and found a ride (despite all her years in automobile-dependent Virginia, she never did learn to drive). Many of her new colleagues turned out to celebrate her, including her boss, Roger Butler. Of course, many of her old colleagues came too. Once upon a time they were girls who had come to Langley expecting a six-month war job; now they were older women with decades of membership in an elite scientific club. At one point in the evening, Lessie Hunter, Willianna Smith, and other West Computers gathered around their former supervisor for a picture, which was published the next week in the Langley Researcher. It was perhaps the only photographic evidence of the story that began in May 1943 with the Band of Sisters in the Warehouse Building. Though Langley was meticulous about documenting its employees over the years, individually and in groups, I have yet to stumble upon another Langley photo of the West Computing section.
Dorothy Vaughan had always loved to travel, and in retirement she indulged herself, traveling for pleasure across the United States and to Europe. In her eighties she took a trip to Amsterdam with her family. At home, she remained as frugal as she had been during the Depression and the war, never spending when she could save, never discarding what she could salvage.
At some point, some years into her retirement, a woman came to the house, trying to enlist her in a class-action lawsuit over pay discrimination against the women who had worked at Langley. Dorothy sat on her couch and gave the woman a polite hearing, and then said: “They paid me what they said they were going to pay me,” and that was the end of that. She never had been one to dwell on the past. After her retirement party, Dorothy Vaughan never went back to Langley. The photo album, the service awards, and the retirement gifts—all of them she tucked away in the keepsakes box in the back of the closet. The greatest part of her legacy—Christine Darden and the generation of younger women who were standing on the shoulders of the West Computers—was still in the office.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The title of this book is something of a misnomer. The history that has come together in these pages wasn’t so much hidden as unseen—fragments patiently biding their time in footnotes and family anecdotes and musty folders before returning to view. My first thanks are to the historians and archivists who helped me reconstruct this story through its documents: to Colin Fries at the NASA History Office in Washington, DC, Patrick Connelly at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Philadelphia, Meg Hacker at NARA Fort Worth, Kimberly Gentile at the National Personnel Records Center, and Tab Lewis at NARA College Park. Thanks also to Donzella Maupin and Andreese Scott at the Hampton University Archives, and Ellen Hassig Ressmeyer and Janice Young at West Virginia State University’s Drain-Jordan Library.
I’ve been buoyed by the enthusiasm of David Bearinger and Jeanne Siler at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities since the day I walked into their office unannounced, in the middle of an early spring blizzard in 2014. Because of their support, the Human Computer Project, which sprang out of my research for the book, will be able to pick up the baton from Hidden Figures by creating a comprehensive database of all the female mathematicians who worked at the NACA and NASA during the agency’s golden age. Thanks to Doron Weber at the Sloan Foundation, who was willing to take a flyer on a first-time author; Sloan’s support made it possible for me to make recovering this important history a full-time job.
I couldn’t have had a better team to work with at William Morrow. Trish Daly, even though you are off to new
ventures, I’ll always be grateful for the dogged way you worked to put Hidden Figures at the top of your list. Rachael Kahan, thank you for your calm guidance in helping me bring this book home. To have a book published is exciting enough; to have it made into a film at the same time is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thanks to my film agent, Jason Richman, at the United Talent Agency, my lawyer, Kirk Schroeder, and especially to Donna Gigliotti, Hidden Figures’ producer, who was able to see a movie in a fifty-five-page book proposal. She’s one of the most gifted professionals I’ve ever met, in any industry.
Nowhere has Hidden Figures received a warmer reception than in my hometown, Hampton, Virginia. My deepest gratitude to Audrey Williams, president of the Hampton Roads Chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), which served as sponsor for the seed stage of the Human Computer Project. Thank you to Mike Cobb and Luci Coltrane of the Hampton History Museum for inviting me to be part of the museum’s speaker series, and to Wythe Holt and Chauncey Brown for their vivid recollections of the early days of life in Hampton, which added wonderful detail and texture to the book’s narrative.
Current and former employees of the Langley Research Center, people too numerous to mention in such a limited space, have supported this project in many ways over the last few years, including Gail Langevin, NASA Langley’s History Liaison. Andrea Bynum invited me to present my research in progress at Langley’s Women’s History Month celebration in March 2014 and has been a tireless supporter of the book ever since. Mary Gainer Hurst, Langley’s recently retired Historic Preservation Officer, is a heroic public historian; thanks to her, thousands of interviews, wind tunnel test logs, photos, personnel documents, org charts, articles, and other primary materials that bear witness to Langley’s extraordinary history are available to the public via the NASA Langley Cultural Resources website and related YouTube channel. So much of the connective tissue of this story came from the untold hours I spent consulting the information she so expertly recovered and curated.
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