My Remarkable Journey

by Katherine Johnson

  That evening I told Jimmie, “We’re going to Newport News!”

  I told him that Eric had said he could get us both jobs. I explained that, according to Eric, a federal agency in Hampton was hiring Negro women with degrees in math. Both Newport News and Hampton were part of the Hampton Roads area, a collection of cities that also included Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and Chesapeake. The area is also known as “the Pennisula.” The region was home to one of the country’s largest naval bases, five other major military facilities, and was still bustling with job opportunities after the war, my brother-in-law had said.

  That night, Jimmie and I lay awake, mulling our plans aloud. We both enjoyed teaching and inspiring young people, and we knew that a loss of two teachers in August, just weeks before the start of the new school year, might put tremendous pressure on the principal to find replacements. But this might just be the fresh start we both needed.

  At every point in my life, I’d been blessed by family, friends, and even strangers who stepped in to help me along my journey. Daddy, Mamà, and my family, of course, had been there from the beginning. But there had been so many others: the teachers who recognized my academic gifts at every stage and challenged me, the countess at the Greenbrier who’d connected me with the French chef; Dr. Davis and Mr. Evans, who offered me the chance at graduate school; and the Negro families who had opened their homes and embraced me as a single young professional and then as a young wife and mother, moving from one small town to the next. And then, there was Dr. Claytor, who had opened my mind and ambitions to a possibility I never knew existed.

  Was this the path?

  The help that my brother- and sister-in-law were offering felt right. Confident that we were making a decision that would change our lives for the better, Jimmie and l looked at each other and agreed: yes, we were doing the right thing.

  Chapter 5

  Be Ready

  When I was in high school, I learned an important lesson about the power of preparation. In about my junior year, my mother became worried that I had too much idle time. So she walked over to the college campus of the West Virginia Colored Institute and expressed her concern to Mr. Evans, who was head of the Trade and Technical Department at the time. Mr. Evans, who eventually became head of the Mathematics Department, told Mamà, “Send her over to me. I’ll give her something to do.”

  I started working in his office, and he quickly realized I could not type. At the end of that school session, he handed me a ream of paper, a typing textbook, and his typewriter, and gave me these instructions: “When you come back in September, I want you to be able to type.”

  That summer, I spent much of my time reading that textbook and teaching myself how to type. I knew typing was a great skill to have, and I was determined to be ready for whatever opportunities it opened to me. I practiced daily, getting faster and more accurate, which was extremely important back then because there was no easy, clean way to make corrections. Sure enough, when I returned in the fall, I became the key administrative person in Mr. Evans’s office. Then, when I got to college, I landed a coveted job in the president’s office and was able to help pay my own tuition. Because I took the time to better myself that summer, I was ready when life offered me a chance to go higher. It was a lesson that would stick with me for the rest of my life.

  Nearly three decades later, when the slightest opportunity opened for me to apply for a job that perhaps would allow me to use those high-level math courses I’d studied in college, I couldn’t resist. And Jimmie and I took the leap. On a hot, clear day in August 1952, we packed the car and headed with the girls into our future.

  As our eight-hour journey wound down to the Hampton Roads corridor, the girls noticed something unusual. Trees were disappearing from the landscape, flashing across their car window frames. When we traveled, they loved looking out the windows at the sky, mountains, and trees. That was their usual backseat view on our road trips from one small Virginia town to the next. But we were entering a new world of wide-open sky, flat highways, buildings where trees used to be, and downtowns with tall, neon signs that brightened the night. For the first time we were moving to the city; and to the girls, it was exciting and a bit scary at the same time.

  We moved first to a trailer park on 52nd Street, where a long row of mobile homes sat on the dirt. Ours was a brand-new, compact two-bedroom trailer that had most of the comforts we needed while waiting for a more permanent place. After about a year, my brother-in-law Eric helped us to get off the waiting list and into a three-bedroom, single-story duplex in Newsome Park, the same neighborhood where he and Margaret and Pat and Walter lived. Our home was in the 4200 block of Marshall Avenue, and we literally could look out of our front door at Jimmie’s sisters’ homes. It was comforting to walk into a new environment with such family support. Despite the newness of our surroundings, the community feeling was familiar. Newsome Park was like my old Church Street community in White Sulphur Springs, multiplied block after block after block. It was a huge, all-Negro neighborhood with families from every income bracket—doctors, shipyard workers, teachers, brickmasons, postal workers, carpenters, entrepreneurs, college-educated, and life-schooled, all mixed in there together. The community of white, look-alike, prefabricated homes had been built during World War II as the federal government’s response to a severe housing shortage. Workers from all over the country had poured into the region with their families during the war to fill an abundance of military and defense jobs, especially at the shipyard, but there were not nearly enough decent places for them to live. To meet the demand, the federal Public Housing Administration constructed the largest single defense housing project in the world, as described by news reports at the time, on the East End of the city from 41st Street to 56th Street and from Madison Avenue to Chestnut Avenue. The massive development consisted of Newsome Park, which provided twelve hundred housing units for Negro families, and the similar but separate Copeland Park nearby, offering four thousand homes for white families. Each thrived as small cities unto themselves, as a neighborhood shopping center and an array of businesses built up in and around them. Newsome Park was named in honor of a local Negro attorney and community leader, Thomas J. Newsome, who died in 1942, the year residents began moving into the development.

  When we first moved there, Newsome Park was in Warwick, which had just become incorporated as a city to protect its independent status after years of fighting annexation by its landlocked neighbor, Newport News. A city is guaranteed protection against annexation of its territory by adjacent communities. But as Warwick’s population growth after the war continued to outpace its tax base and ability to cover the costs of mandatory public services, residents of both Warwick and Newport News years later (in 1958) would agree to a merger. They also decided to keep the better-known name of Newport News, which after the consolidation would become the third most populous city in Virginia. Even before the merger, though, people in Newsome Park always said they lived in Newport News.

  We newcomers cared little about the politics of the city’s name, though, as we settled into our new community. The girls spent much of their time running around Newsome Park’s dirt playground, which had a couple of swings, and monkey bars made of metal pipes. When they saved up enough pennies, they could walk to the soda shop down the street to buy single pickles from a gallon jar. Their new school, Newsome Park Elementary, was a two-minute dash across a few lawns. Joylette was entering the seventh grade, and since she was the oldest child, her father and I allowed her to have her own bedroom. Connie and Kathy, who were going into the fourth grade, shared a room. Their schoolmates and many of the teachers lived in the community, too. The heart of the neighborhood was the Newsome Park Community Center, which had a kitchen and banquet hall, as well as smaller rooms for social and service club meetings. There were basketball and tennis courts, and even a baseball field, where a semipro team, called the Newsome Park Dodgers, played. As director of the center, Eric also managed the team. The gam
es and other events at the center were such fun and an easy way for my family to connect with our new neighbors. Jimmie, the girls, and I made further community connections when we joined our other family members at Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church. I began singing in the sanctuary choir right away and eventually became director of the youth choir and head of the finance committee. The girls also sang in the youth choir and participated in other youth activities at the church. Jimmie and I didn’t believe in our girls having too much idle time, so we filled a good part of their summer days with chores. We did, however, eventually allow them to cross 39th Street to participate in activities at the Dorie Miller Recreation Center. The center had been named in honor of the first Negro to be awarded the Navy Cross, one of the navy’s highest honors, for his bravery, manning antiaircraft guns and tending to wounded shipmates during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Mr. Miller died in battle two years later. The recreation center had the city’s only public swimming pool for Negroes. The girls later would take music lessons there in the mornings, tennis lessons in the afternoons, and go swimming. Several members of my new church were members of the Lambda Omega graduate chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., so I joined the chapter and became even more active in the community. Jimmie also joined the local chapter of his beloved Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.

  Eric delivered almost immediately on his promise to help Jimmie find a job at the Newport News shipyard, where he was hired as a painter. Jimmie gladly accepted the position because it was a higher-paying job than teaching, and there was lots of work. Jimmie’s education level helped him rise quickly to a position as supervisor, and he was very well liked among the workers. Jimmie liked his coworkers and job, too, and also served as a union leader. Newport News Shipyard was one of the biggest and busiest in the world, given its proximity to so many military facilities. All types of naval vessels, including battleships, were constructed there. Predictions that the postwar season would bring massive layoffs and an economic downturn to the region never became a reality. Shipyard jobs remained plentiful. That was so, in part, because military readiness never lost its urgency as new tensions quickly surfaced between the United States and its former World War II ally, the Soviet Union.

  Both countries emerged from the war as superpowers—the United States controlling much of Western Europe and the Soviet Union in control of the East. But their tenuous alliance quickly unraveled, with the two nations jockeying to keep the other’s political ideology and influence from spreading. Conflict erupted repeatedly, a time or two even landing the superpowers at the brink of war. Then, in 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic warhead, sending a threatening message that the United States was no longer superior in its military might. Both nations now possessed the powerful bomb technology to obliterate the other. That sobering knowledge may have been the key factor that prevented an all-out physical war. But the heightened tensions and fears during the long Cold War period led both nations to engage in nonstop political maneuvering, threats, and subversive tactics, such as spying, to try to gain an advantage over the other.

  Those escalating Cold War tensions also may have created the job opportunities that ultimately enticed me to the Virginia peninsula. In 1950, North Korea, with support and supplies from the Soviet Union, invaded its US-backed neighbor South Korea. The invasion set the stage for a “proxy war,” in which the two world superpowers avoided a direct military fight but took opposing sides behind the scenes in this Korean civil war. When Virginia newspapers touted the speed and precision of Russian aircraft after its 1950 attack on a prized US bomber, a shiver must have gone up the hierarchy of the nation’s federal aviation program. A headline in the Norfolk Journal and Guide read, “Russia Said to Have Fastest Fighter Plane.” The next year the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the predecessor to NASA) sent Congress a proposal to double its staff agencywide from seven thousand to fourteen thousand in 1953. Military publications trumpeted the job openings, and word traveled through the Negro community with supersonic speed, reaching even the smallest mountain hamlets.

  To keep his word about getting me a job, Eric introduced me to the woman who supervised the group of Negro mathematicians at NACA, which was based at Langley Field (now Langley Air Force Base), in Hampton. She and I both were surprised to learn that we had met previously, in West Virginia. She was Dorothy Vaughan—Dot, as she was known by friends and family—the woman who had lived briefly with her husband and children across the street from my parents in White Sulphur Springs. The world suddenly felt smaller, and she and I both marveled at how life had landed us back in the same city after all those years. Dot told me that her agency was not hiring at the moment but that I still should complete an application, and she would look for it.

  One September morning a short time later, I drove myself to Langley, completed an application, and began the wait. Between my sorority chapter and church, there were a few ladies who worked at NACA, and they helped me keep track of my application status. Meanwhile I had returned to my other love, teaching. I was working as a substitute math teacher at Collis P. Huntington High School in the East End. Though I was a substitute, I enjoyed helping students understand quadratic equations, geometric construction, logarithms, polynomials, whatever they needed to leave high school with a good understanding of math. It baffled me that so many students disliked math and struggled with it. I figured they had either a parent who didn’t like math and told them it was hard or a teacher who didn’t have the passion or the patience to make math relevant to their lives. At home I never let my girls tell me math or any other subject was difficult. From the time they were very young, I always tried to incorporate learning, whether it was math, spelling, or creative activities, such as sewing and working puzzles, into their lives. I tried to show them how what they were learning in school connected to our lives outside school. Of course, I had them counting everything—the stars in the sky, the steps from the bottom to the top of the Carson mansion, or the people in church on any given Sunday. On road trips I’d have them add the numbers on the license plates of cars traveling in front of us. Or I’d have them cover their eyes and spell the state. If they were helping in the kitchen, I might write out a recipe, give it to them, and ask them to figure out how much of each ingredient we would need if I wanted to make half of that batch of cookies or biscuits. They got the message early that math is everywhere, and it’s not to be feared. Once they learned the basics, they just built on that knowledge with the same confidence. I tried to implement that same philosophy in the classroom as much as was practical. Many years later, I encountered a few of the students I’d taught during that time, and they told me they once hated math but that I’d helped them to understand it as they never had before. That really touched my heart.

  In addition to teaching, I also got a job at the Twenty-Fifth Street USO (United Service Organizations) Club as a program director, providing support for military personnel and their families, such as helping them find jobs and housing. The organization’s mission is to support these service members and their families in every way possible so they can focus on their primary mission, service to our country. The USO is probably better known for its huge traveling shows, transporting celebrities and entertainers overseas to brighten the days of our deployed troops. But the organization also operated Stateside clubs in large military communities to act as community centers and as hubs for military families and their supportive services.

  Eventually I received word that my NACA application had been approved and that my appointment was set to begin in June 1953. Then, twenty-four hours later, the Huntington High School principal offered me a permanent teaching job. I was honored that the principal didn’t want to lose me. Of course, the government job offered a much higher salary, and I was surprised when the principal offered to match what I would be making at the other job. I was very grateful, but I didn’t have to think about it long. I had moved to the Hampton Roads area to become a research mathemat
ician. And the job at NACA offered me the chance finally to learn just what that was.

  The rest of the school year passed quickly, and one day in early June 1953, I was on my way to NACA. My sorority sister Eunice Smith, who also sang in the choir with me at church, offered to drive me to work because Jimmie usually took our car to his shipyard job. Eunice was a delightful woman. She was about five years younger than I, and she had grown up as the youngest of seven children in Portsmouth, Virginia. Her intelligence was evident by the fact that NACA had hired her right after her graduation from Hampton Institute in 1944 with a degree in mathematics. The two of us would become great friends over the years, as our lives intersected in so many ways beyond work. When we made it to Langley Field, I checked in with the human resources director, took care of the required paperwork and other first-day necessities, pinned my employee badge on my blouse, and was told to report to the Aircraft Loads Building. I was about to follow my escort out the door when the director said,

  “Don’t come in here in two weeks asking for a transfer!”

  The director’s rudeness surprised me. It was my first day. I was thrilled to be there. Why would I even think about wanting a transfer anytime soon? The remark was condescending and annoying, but I responded politely and kept walking. No one would spoil this moment for me. The classification on my paperwork said I was hired as an SP-3, level 3 subprofessional, basically the entry-level status of most women hired at the agency, regardless of their college degree. But I was a mathematician, a research mathematician, and soon I would know what that meant.