Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly

  169 “How can Senator Byrd”: John B. Henderson, “Henderson Speaks: Closing Schools No Way to Cope with Sputniks,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, November 23, 1957.

  169 forcing each of those Virginia school districts to integrate: Smith, They Closed Their Schools, 144.

  169 “the ‘separate but equal’ education of the Negroes marks time”: James Rorty, “Virginia’s Creeping Desegregation: Force of the Inevitable,” Commentary Magazine, July 1956. Rorty’s article offers a fascinating snapshot of Virginia’s struggle with desegregation in the years just after Brown v. Board of Ed.

  170 “Eighty percent of the world’s population is colored”: Paul Dembling to file, July 7, 1956.

  171 NASA: For years, the folks who had worked for Langley prior to 1958 could be distinguished by the fact that they said the name of the new agency after the fashion of the old one, pronouncing each letter separately: “the N-A-S-A.”

  171 “to provide for the widest”: The Space Act of 1958, http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/spaceact.html.

  171 “the bearer of a myth”: McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth, 376.

  171 “the West Area Computers Unit is dissolved”: Floyd L. Thompson to All Concerned, “Change in Research Organization,” May 5, 1958, NARA Phil.

  173 “She was the smartest of all the girls”: Johnson interview, September 17, 2011.

  CHAPTER 17: OUTER SPACE

  175 “This is not science fiction”: Introduction to Outer Space: An Explanatory Statement Prepared by the President’s Science Advisory Committee, January 1, 1958. The pamphlet’s words “the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before” inspired the well-known introduction to the television series Star Trek.

  175 “As everyone knows”: Ibid.

  176 The only real reference: Forest Ray Moulton, Introduction to Celestial Mechanics (New York: Macmillan, 1914).

  178 “Present your case, build it, sell it so they believe it”: Claiborne R. Hicks, interview with Kevin M. Rusnak, JSC, April 11, 2000.

  178 months, even years in the making: This long lead time was underscored every time I read through an NACA or NASA research report: the cover lists the date of publication, but the date that the researchers actually completed and submitted the research for review is included at the end of the body of the report.

  178 Katherine sat down with the engineers to review: Johnson interview, September 15, 2015.

  179 “Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?”: Johnson interview, September 27, 2013.

  179 “Girls don’t go to the meetings”: Ibid.

  179 “Is there a law against it?” Ibid.

  179 laws restricting her ability to apply for a credit card: Diana Pearl, “Rights Women Didn’t Used to Have,” Marie Claire.com, August 18, 2014, http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/news/a10569/things-women-couldnt-do-1920/.

  180 “Women Scientists”: This 1959 Langley file photo was simply labeled “Women Scientists.” It was published in James Hansen’s 1995 book Spaceflight Revolution, p. 105, but without names. The NASA Cultural Resources website selected the photo for its July 2013 “Mystery Archive,” inviting visitors to help identify the women portrayed; see http://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/historic/Mystery_Archives_2013.

  180 Five out of the six women . . . worked in PARD: Langley Research Center Telephone Directory, 1959, LAC.

  180 in 1948, fresh out of Randolph-Macon Women’s College: Dorothy B. Lee, interview with Rebecca Wright, JSC, November 10, 1999.

  180 he invited her to become a permanent member of his branch: Ibid.

  180 authored one report, coauthored seven more: Dorothy B. Lee, “Flight Performance of a 2.8 KS 8100 Cajun Solid-Propellant Rocket Motor,” Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Janaury 21, 1957, NTRS.

  180 “Do you believe”: Lee interview.

  181 “inveterate wind tunnel jockeys”: Becker, The High Speed Frontier, 19.

  181 “can’t-hack-it engineers”: Gloria R. Champine, personal interview, April 2, 2014.

  181 “they were all the same”: Johnson interview, December 27, 2010.

  182 “Let her go”: Johnson interview, September 27, 2013.

  CHAPTER 18: WITH ALL DELIBERATE SPEED

  183 from erudite and obscure to obvious and spectacular: Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Prestige (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 235.

  184 “a dull bunch of gray buildings”: Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, Apollo (Burkittsville, MD: South Mountain Books, 2004), 322.

  184 “So far as the future histories of this state”: Lenoir Chambers, “The Year Virginia Closed the Schools,” The Virginian-Pilot, January 1, 1959. The Virginian-Pilot was the only white newspaper in Virginia to take an editorial stand in favor of school desegregation.

  184 A total of ten thousand of the shut-out students: Kristen Green, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 1347–49.

  185 salutatorian of Carver High School’s class of 1958: “Peninsula Social Whirl,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, June 14, 1958.

  186 drifting toward the social sidelines: Katherine Goble Moore, personal interview, February 7, 2015.

  186 Mary Jackson had been one of his student teachers: James A. Johnson, personal interview, June 11, 2011.

  186 “Ladies, he’s single”: Johnson interview, March 13, 2011.

  187 arriving together at church: James A. Johnson.

  189 “bootlegged”: Cox and Murray, Apollo, ch.1

  189 “computing runs”: Ibid.

  189 “a hell of a lot of fun”: Ibid.

  189 thousands of woman-hours computing ballistics trajectory tables: LeAnn Erickson’s documentary Top Secret Rosies provides a detailed look at the University of Pennsylvania. See https://www.facebook.com/topsecretrosies.

  190 “Let me do it”: Katherine Johnson, The History Makers.

  192 “Katherine should finish the report”: Warren, Black Women Scientists in the United States, 143.

  192 by a female author: Ted Skopinski and Katherine G. Johnson, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite over a Selected Earth Position,” Langley Research Center, 1960.

  CHAPTER 19: MODEL BEHAVIOR

  193 The bar had been set the year before: “Congratulations . . .” Air Scoop, July 1, 1960.

  193 “The car and driver together”: Soapbox Derby Rules 1960.

  194 Levi and his competitors: “Hampton Youth Captures Area Derby Championship,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, July 2, 1960.

  194 nine-hundred-foot racecourse: Ibid.

  194 girls weren’t allowed to race: Paul Dickson, “The Soap Box Derby,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 1995. Girls did not compete in the derby until the 1970s.

  194 one of fifty thousand boys: “Derby Day Is Your Day!” Boy’s Life, February 1960, 12.

  195 “A Study of Air Flow in Scaled Dimensions”: “Science Fair Held at Y. H. Thomas Jr. High,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, March 31, 1962.

  195 “Soapbox what?”: Janice Johnson interview.

  197 Emma Jean was valedictorian: Golemba, “Human Computers,” 39.

  197 produced several research reports: “Report Listing from December 1949–October 1981,” Unitary and Continuous-Flow Hypersonic Tunnels, LAC, http://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/crgis/images/a/aa/1251-001.pdf.

  197 National Council of Negro Women: “Girls’ Group Hears Talk by 2 Women Engineers,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, February 16, 1963.

  197 “The Aspects of Engineering for Women”: Ibid.

  198 one of the largest minority troops on the peninsula: “Girl Scout Pioneers Honored During Tribute in Hampton,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, November 6, 1985.

  198 troop leader: Janice Johnson interview.

  198 So Mary enlisted the help of Helen Mulcahy: Ibid.

  198 take Janice trekking: Ibid.

  199 an enthusiastic crowd of four thousand:
“Hampton Youth Captures Area Derby Championship.”

  199 clear, warm, just enough of a breeze: Newport News, Virginia, Historical Weather, Almanac.com, July 3, 1962.

  199 Officials weighed and inspected each car: “Hampton Youth Captures Area Derby Championship.”

  199 “a drop of oil on each wheel bearing”: Ibid.

  199 seventeen miles per hour: Ibid.

  200 the slimness of his machine: Ibid.

  200 “I want to be an engineer like my mother”: “Hampton Youth Captures Area Derby Championship.”

  200 a spot at the national All-American Soap box Derby: Ibid.

  200 in front of seventy-five thousand fans: “Derby Day Is Your Day!”

  200 “first colored boy in history”: “Hampton Youth Captures Area Derby Championship.”

  200 the donations started rolling in: “Citizens Honor Local Soap Box Derby Champ,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, August 27, 1960.

  CHAPTER 20: DEGREES OF FREEDOM

  201 reliability tests on the Mercury capsule: Loyd S. Swenson Jr., James M. Grimwood, and Charles C. Alexander, This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury (Washington, DC: NASA, 1989), 256.

  201 three hundred had joined the demonstration: “The Greensboro Sit-In,” History.com, http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/the-greensboro-sit-in

  201 “Dear Mom and Dad”: John “Rover” Jordan, “This Is Portsmouth,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, June 8, 1963.

  202 offering her a job as a hostess: Dr. William R. Harvey, “Hampton University and Mrs. Rosa Parks,” Daily Press, February 23, 2013.

  202 seven hundred: Arriana McLymore, “A Silenced History; Hampton’s Legacy of Student Protests,” Hampton Script, November 6, 2015.

  202 until the owners shut down their establishments: “Hampton ‘Sit-down’: Students Seek Service; 5 & 10 Counter Closes,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, February 20, 1960.

  202 five hundred students staged a peaceful protest: Jimmy Knight, “Hamptonians Vow: Jail Will Not Stop Student Protests,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, March 5, 1960.

  202 “We want to be treated as American citizens”: Ibid.

  202 walking door-to-door in black neighborhoods: Christine Darden, personal interview, April 30, 2012.

  203 alive, breathless even: Hammond interview.

  203 the astronauts were contributing to the students’ organizing activities: Ibid. Though I could never find documents to support this, many in Ann Vaughan Hammond’s circle of friends had heard the rumor; her memory of the rumor and of the enthusiasm it engendered among the students was vivid.

  203 reopening Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Front Royal schools: Lenoir Chambers, “The Year Virginia Opened the Schools,” Virginian-Pilot, December 31, 1959. Chambers, the editor-in-chief of the Virginian-Pilot, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this and the eleven other editorials he wrote over the course of 1959.

  204 “The only places on earth known not to provide free public education”: Smith, They Closed Their Schools, 190. Smith’s book is perhaps the best historical account of the Prince Edward County school situation.

  204 Marjorie Peddrew and Isabelle Mann: Thompson, “Change in Research Organization.”

  208 aerodynamic, structural, materials, and component tests: Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 60.

  208 “We could have beaten them”: Kraft, Flight, 132. See also Robert Gilruth, interview with David DeVorkin and John Mauer, National Air and Space Museum, March 2, 1987, part 6, http://airandspace.si.edu/research/projects/oral-histories/TRANSCPT/GILRUTH6.HTM.

  208 1.2 million tests, simulations, investigations: “Webb Receives Safety Award,” Air Scoop, June 30, 1961.

  208 Have the chimpanzee: Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander, This New Ocean, 317.

  208 Forty-five million Americans: Ibid.

  209 116.5 miles above Earth: Ibid., 355.

  209 fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds and covered 303 miles: Ibid.

  209 “I believe that this nation should commit itself”: John F. Kennedy, “Urgent National Needs: A Special Message to Congress by President Kennedy,” May 25, 1961, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8151.

  209 required a team of eighteen thousand people: Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander, This New Ocean, 508.

  210 nine locations made the short list:

  210 “was going to be badly understaffed”: Harold Beck, “The History of Mission Planning for Manned Spaceflight,” unpublished document in author’s possession.

  210 asked to transfer to Houston: Katherine Johnson, personal interview, September 27, 2013.

  210 “five qualified young women”: Beck, “History.”

  CHAPTER 21: OUT OF THE PAST, THE FUTURE

  213 ninety-five-foot-high, 3.5-million-horsepower: Colin Burgess, Friendship 7: The Epic Orbital Flight of John H. Glenn Jr. (New York: Springer Praxis Books, 2015).

  214 “a Rube Goldberg device on top of a plumber’s nightmare”: Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander, This New Ocean, 411.

  214 running miles each day: Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, 128.

  214 water egress from the capsule: “Astronaut Training at Langley,” http://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/historic/Astronaut_Training.

  214 hundreds of simulated missions: Kraft, Flight.

  215 conspired to push the date: Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander, This New Ocean, 273–83.

  216 resisted the computers: David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 175.

  217 a black scientist named Dudley McConnell: Sylvia Doughty Fries, NASA Engineers in the Age of Apollo (Washington, DC: NASA, 1992).

  218 staffed on Project Centaur: Annie Easley, interview with Sandra Johnson, JSC, August 21, 2001.

  218 a Howard University graduate named Melba Roy: Alice Dunnigan, “Two Women Help Chart Way for the Astronauts,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, July 6, 1963.

  218 Hoover had worked at the Weather Bureau: Ibid.

  219 calculations that were used in Project Scout: Golemba, “Human Computers,” 121.

  219 “mad scientists”: Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 345.

  221 a blazing 1 kilobyte per second: Saul Gass, “Project Mercury Real-Time Computational and Data-Flow System,” IBM, 1961.

  222 proposed blaming it on the Cubans: James Bamford, Body of Secrets (New York: Anchor Books, 2001) Kindle ed., loc. 1525.

  223 phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets: Johnson interview, September 27, 2013.

  223 three-orbit mission: Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander, This New Ocean.

  223 It took a day and a half: Johnson interview, September 27, 2013.

  223 February 20 dawned with clearing skies: Burgess, Friendship 7.

  223 One hundred thirty-five million people: Ibid.

  224 3,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures: Ibid.

  224 off by forty miles: Ibid.

  224 “our Ace of Space”: Izzy Rowe, “Izzy Rowe’s Notebook,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 10, 1962.

  224 Thirty thousand local residents: Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 77.

  225 fifty-car parade: Ibid.

  225 traced a twenty-two-mile route: Ibid.

  225 Joylette and Dorothy Vaughan’s son, Kenneth: Interviews with Joylette Goble Hylick, Kenneth Vaughan, and Christine Mann Darden.

  225 sign reading SPACETOWN, USA: Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution, 80.

  225 “Katherine Johnson: mother, wife, career woman!”: “Lady Mathematician Played a Key Role in Glenn Space Flight,” Pittsburgh Courier, March 10, 1962.

  225 “Why No Negro Astronauts?” Pittsburgh Courier, March 10, 1962.

  CHAPTER 22: AMERICA IS FOR EVERYBODY

  227 “America Is for Everybody”: US Department of Labor, April 1963.

  227 landed on Katherine Johnson’s desk in May 1963: John P. Scheldrup to Edward Maher, May 15, 1963, NARA Phil.

  227 “occupied positions of responsibility”: Ibid.

  227 “analyzing lunar trajectories”: “America Is for Everybody.”

  228 in Englis
h North America in 1619: Robert Brauchle, “Virginia Changing Marker Denoting Where First Africans Arrived in 1619,” Daily Press, August 19, 2015. For years, Jamestown was thought to be the first landing place for the “twenty and odd” Africans who were brought as slaves to English-speaking North America, but recent research has revealed that they disembarked at Old Point Comfort in Hampton, site of modern-day Fort Monroe.

  228 in 1963 with a twenty-two-orbit flight: Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander, This New Ocean, 494.

  228 Dorothy Height, John Lewis, Daisy Bates, and Roy Wilkins: Though the women played a critical behind-the-scenes role helping to organize the day’s events, none of them were given a prominent speaking role that day.

  228 three hundred thousand people: Branch, Parting the Waters, 878.

  228 “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”: Marian Anderson onstage at the March on Washington, 1963, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HfNovwcaX8.

  228 W. E. B. Du Bois had died early that morning: Branch, Parting the Waters, 878.

  229 “Dear Mrs. Vaughan”: Floyd L. Thompson to Dorothy J. Vaughan, July 8, 1963, Vaughan Personnel File.

  229 a gold-and-enamel lapel pin: Ibid.

  230 “very few Negroes”: Floyd L. Thompson to James E. Webb, December 29, 1961, NARA Phil.

  230 “social and economic mobility”: Fries, NASA Engineers in the Age of Apollo, loc. 1385.

  230 with “dreams of working at NASA”: Ibid.

  234 fell asleep at the wheel: Warren, Black Women Scientists in the United States, 144.

  CHAPTER 23: TO BOLDLY GO

  235 a hundred or so black women: Johnson interview, September 27, 2013.

  236 groups of them perching in front of the screen: Ibid.

  236 a total of six hundred million people: Scott Christianson, “How NASA’s Flight Plan Described the Apollo 11 Moon Landing,” Smithsonian.com, November 24, 2015, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/us-history/apollo-11-flight-plan-180957225/?no-ist.

  236 four hundred thousand: “NASA Langley Research Center’s Contributions to the Apollo Program,” n.d., http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Apollo.html.

  237 the weekend leadership conference: “Alpha Kappa Alpha’s 39th Mid-Western Regional Conference at LU,” Langston University Gazette, July 1969.