I reported first to the office of my supervisor, Mrs. Vaughan, which is what we called Dot at work. Her office was on the ground floor of the Aircraft Loads Building, and I was immediately impressed. She carried herself in a professional manner, and she exuded confidence and authority. I would learn later that, like me, she had started her career as a teacher. She was working at a high school in Farmville, Virginia, when she spotted a flyer advertising job openings in Hampton for female college graduates with math degrees. She applied and to her astonishment was offered a temporary position in 1943. The position offered twice as much pay as her teacher’s salary, but her employment was supposed to end in six months. Dot took the job, nevertheless, leaving her children briefly in Farmville with her husband and his family. But her brilliance, meticulous attention to detail, and obvious leadership skills made her higher-ups take notice. Working in her favor, too, was Executive Order 8802, which President Roosevelt had signed in 1941, prohibiting discrimination in federal agencies, including the defense industry. The order also created the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and two years later, an amended version, Executive Order 9346, strengthened the committee and laid out guidelines for it to monitor the progress. Dorothy’s hiring status not only became permanent, but also she climbed higher and faster than any Negro woman before her. In 1951 she was named head of the West Area Computing Unit, the all-Negro section of female mathematicians, where I had been assigned. That promotion had made Dorothy the first Negro manager at NACA.
When I first stepped into the room to head to my assigned desk, I was amazed. The office itself was non-descript, arranged somewhat like a classroom with small, professional desks. But I had never seen so many professional Negro women—mathematicians!—in one place before. About two dozen of them sat behind their desks, heads down, fingers click-clacking across their desktop calculating machines, making the most beautiful noises. They were called computers, and they were responsible for the tedious mathematical calculations needed by engineers and scientists throughout the agency. There were white computers, too, who did the same work. In fact, the vast majority of computers at the agency were white.
The first female “computer pool” dates back to 1935, when the agency hired four women to perform some of the mathematical equations and hand calculations that beforehand had been done by the engineers themselves. The idea was that this arrangement would free the engineers from spending so much time on essential but time-consuming computing work so they could focus on higher tasks. Despite initial opposition from male staff members at the agency, particularly to spending five hundred dollars per machine for each of the women, the new computers proved that they could do the calculations faster and better.
“The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they would,” a 1942 personnel memo about the computers said. “This is due in large measure to the feeling among the engineers that their college and industrial experience is being wasted and thwarted by mere repetitive calculations.”
The number of computers grew rapidly, boosted by the efforts of Head Computer Virginia Tucker, one of the original four, who also was a former high school teacher with a college degree in mathematics. She traveled to colleges and universities throughout the South, particularly women’s colleges, in search of good candidates. The white women’s qualifications varied. Some had a college degree, usually in math or science, and some didn’t. Many of the college-educated women were former high school teachers. In 1942 there were about 75 computers and 450 engineers among the 1,000 employees at the agency. But World War II dramatically increased the demand for Langley’s aeronautics research, particularly aircraft testing, and by 1945 the number of employees at the agency had more than tripled, to 3,220. And Tucker’s Computing Department had more than quintupled, to over 400 women in 1946.
By the early 1940s, President Roosevelt’s federal antidiscrimination orders were in play, and the agency began hiring Negro computers, who were segregated into the West Area Computing Unit. Many of the early hires came from an obvious source, Hampton Institute, less than ten miles away, but as the word spread, female math graduates from Negro colleges across the country made their way there. Initially the white computers also were organized in a general pool, the East Area Computing Group, but by 1947 their numbers had outgrown their office space, and the group was disbanded. The white computers were then dispatched throughout the agency to work in different sections directly with engineers or research groups. General computing work from the sections or individuals without embedded computers flowed to the West Computers.
Before this day, I didn’t have a clue that such a job even existed, but there I was, at the base of some of the nation’s most critical mathematical research. The specific tasks varied from one computer to the next, but the majority of the work centered around “reading” film, running calculations, and plotting data on graph paper. For example, when wind tunnel tests were conducted, manometer boards measured pressure changes using tubes filled with liquid. A computer would be assigned the task of “reading” photographic films of the manometer readings, and recording the data on worksheets. The computer might work one-on-one with an engineer or as part of a group assigned to a section to run different kinds of calculations to analyze the data and plot the results on graph paper. The computers did the work by hand with slide rules, curves, magnifying glasses, and the calculating machines to multiply and calculate square roots. The work would then be checked for accuracy and sent to the engineers.
I jumped right in, learning everything I could about the job as quickly as possible. We primarily used two kinds of machines for our calculations. Most of the ladies liked the Friden, but I preferred the Monroe because it was smaller. Dot patiently showed me how to complete the data sheets, based on equations that she or one of the engineers provided. The engineers were in and out of our office all day. One by one they would huddle with Dot at her desk, and after a few minutes exit the room. She would then look up, as if she were studying our faces, and then call one or two of the computers over to her desk to explain their next assignment. Dorothy’s mind was the sharpest in that room. She had to understand the math herself first to know the specific skills needed to get an answer. Even more, she had to match personalities, especially when a computer was requested to work on loan for a period of time directly with an engineer in another unit. Scientists can be quite quirky, but Dot seemed to have a knack for figuring out who could work well with whom and get the job done well. She was the mother hen of our unit, the one who challenged, protected, and defended those in her nest, and we all wanted to live up to her expectations.
I’d been there about two weeks when one day Dot looked up from her desk after one of the engineers left and called fellow computer Erma Walker and me. Erma later would marry a guy named Cartwright Tynes, who worked with Jimmie at the shipyard.
“The Flight Research Division is requesting two new computers,” Dot explained.
This was not an unusual request. Computers were often dispatched to a particular unit as the need arose, for a few days, weeks, or even months.
“I’m sending you,” she continued.
Every department at NACA had a unique purpose, each critical in some way to the bigger operation. But for an aeronautics agency, Flight Research was the heartbeat. I hadn’t expected to be dispatched away from the West Area Computers so quickly, and certainly not to the prestigious group of engineers in Building 1244.
I walked back to my desk and gathered my few belongings. My heart beat fast with excitement, but I wasn’t afraid. Dr. Claytor had prepared me well, and I’d done my part to fill in the gaps. The moment I had been anticipating since I was an eager eighteen-year-old girl had arrived. By then I was thirty-four, and as the door to the West Area Computers closed behind me, I was sure of this:
I was ready.
Chapter 6
Ask Brave Questions
Mamà was always trying to shush me as a child.
I was a meddlesome busybody, and my questions often flustered her. While my older brothers and sister tried studying quietly at the table, I was flitting from one to the other, asking what they were doing and what all those letters on the page meant. Probably just to keep me quiet, Mamà started teaching me how to read and count. It may have surprised her at first how much I could learn at such a young age, but the more I learned, the more she taught. By age four I was reading and doing simple math.
Throughout elementary and high school, my hand stayed in the air, ready to ask the next question. When I was in Dr. Claytor’s class in college, the chalk in his hand would be flying across the chalkboard almost as fast as the thoughts flew through his brilliant mind. I usually could keep up, but when I looked around, some of my classmates’ expressions appeared as if he were scribbling gibberish. It always baffled me why none of them raised their hands to ask him to slow down and explain. I think they were afraid, as many people often are, of sounding dumb. But I think the smartest people ask lots of questions. I’ve always loved being around smart people, and the only way to know what they know is to ask questions. When it seemed my friends or classmates in school were too intimidated to ask our teacher a question, my hand shot up, and I asked for them.
One day Dr. Claytor turned the question on me:
“Why is it that you’re always asking me questions when I know you know the answer?” he asked.
I explained that he had not made the information as clear to all of the students as he had to me and that I wanted my classmates to understand, too. That slowed him down, at least for a while. The point is this: if you want to know something or don’t understand, ask questions. The path to your destiny may start with a simple question.
So quite naturally, when I landed in the Research Division at NACA in the summer of 1953, I was as inquisitive as ever. I knew I would be surrounded by some of the brightest minds at the agency, and I savored the thought of being able to learn from them. The division chief was an engineer named Henry Pearson, who had started at Langley in 1930 and worked his way up. His office was along a wall inside a larger office with twenty small workstations, filled mostly by white male engineers and a sprinkle of white female computers.
When Erma and I first walked into the office, barely anyone even looked up. That wasn’t unusual because people were coming and going through most offices frequently, and the easiest way to avoid distraction was just to keep working. Erma and I found empty desks to await further instructions. I smiled automatically when the engineer in the adjacent workstation turned toward me for what I thought would be a pleasant introduction. But before I could say even a word, he stood hastily and huffed away. Was he upset that a Negro had the nerve to sit next to him? Segregation was still the law in Virginia, and despite multiple presidential executive orders banning discrimination across the defense industry, laws could not legislate hearts. Was he one of the men who opposed women in the workplace? At the time, just about 34 percent of all women worked outside the home, and the percentage was even smaller for white women, who were far more likely than their Negro counterparts to stay at home after marriage. Maybe the engineer didn’t want to be bothered with anyone who wasn’t at least on his level professionally. Or maybe the guy was just having a bad day. Either way, I didn’t react. I didn’t try to figure it out. If he had a problem with me for any reason, I would not make it my problem. It was lunchtime, so I opened my brown paper bag and enjoyed my lunch as if nothing had happened. Sometime over the next two weeks, the engineer heard that I was a fellow West Virginia native, and that melted the ice around him. He warmed up to me, and we soon were chatting across our desks. I filed away his initial reaction to me as a distant memory.
I worked well with the engineers. They were full of passion for their work, and they liked that I was interested enough to ask questions: How did you reach this conclusion? Why did you use that equation? What do you expect to learn? Dr. Claytor had pushed me to be more analytical in my approach to mathematics, to understand the whys and ask the right questions to get the right answer. The other computers in the division mostly did their work by the book, hardly ever looking up from their calculating machines to chat with the engineers. Not me, though. I certainly was tedious and thorough in my work, but I also watched the engineers closely. I noticed how they read the newspaper or flipped through the pages of Aviation Week magazine each morning to learn the latest industry news and trends. I began starting my day that way, too. The industry stories I read not only helped me learn more about aviation to connect with my work, but the reading materials also gave me plenty to discuss with the engineers.
By engaging with the guys regularly, I felt comfortable enough to question them when I spotted something that didn’t seem quite right. But I knew I had to handle such situations delicately. This was 1953, and many white men were still struggling with seeing women, particularly Negro women, in the workplace. I wasn’t at all sure how the engineers would react to a woman, a Negro woman, a computer, questioning their work. They seemed to enjoy interacting with me when I was in student mode, learning from their brilliance. But would they accept my critiques? Would they accept that the high-level math skills I had attained were at least equal to their own? I had a job to do and couldn’t let uncertainty get in the way. So on the rare occasions when I spotted an error, I posed a polite question: “Is it possible you could have made a mistake in your formula?” Of course, I’d already double- and triple-checked the math. One of the things I’ve always loved about math is that the answer is either right or wrong. And right always prevailed. Accuracy was paramount in our line of work, and the engineers wanted to do good work, so I never had much of a problem with them. They came to respect my questions and rely on my mathematical training and calculations.
Before I knew it, six months had passed, and I was still on loan to the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division. I could hardly believe my luck that my temporary assignment had lasted so long. Only a few of the West Computers had gotten plum permanent positions in other divisions. I had been at the agency less than a year, so I was certain that at any moment I would be sent back to the general West Computing pool. Mr. Pearson might have been content to let me linger in the temporary status a while longer, but for Dorothy Vaughan. She had remained my supervisor, and she knew that with the successful end of my six-month probationary period, I was due a promotion from SP-3 to SP-5 and a salary increase. Ever a fearless advocate for her workers, she paid Mr. Pearson a visit and pushed him to decide one way or the other. I was ecstatic when he offered me a permanent position.
I loved my job in the Maneuver Loads Branch, which was responsible for researching aircraft safety issues. Among my duties as a computer was to review the photographic film from an aircraft’s flight recorder, better known as the “black box.” I then plotted the data, such as the plane’s airspeed, acceleration, and altitude throughout the flight, on large data sheets. I usually did my computing work without knowing any details about the aircraft or the incident in question. But when a small Piper plane fell inexplicably out of the sky while cruising along on a perfectly clear day, I was assigned to help research what went wrong. As usual I was assigned to review the film from the black box. For days I sat in a dark room throughout my entire eight-hour shift and peered down through a binocular-like lens to read the flight coordinates and make notes of the data. The engineers had taught me how to convert the raw data into the metrics they needed, like miles per hour to feet per second. They also provided me the equations to analyze and plot the coordinates on the data sheet to give them a visual image of the flight’s fatal path. The engineers then used a test plane to conduct a simulation of the troubled flight, and I assisted in analyzing that data as well. The work was monotonous and strenuous on my eyes, but it was fascinating.
The report, produced from our work, was one of the most interesting things I’d ever read. The engineers discovered that the Piper had flown perpendicular to the path of a huge jet and
that the wind stream following the jet was just too powerful for the small plane to withstand. Once a large aircraft passes through an airspace, the troubled air swirls dangerously behind it for as long as a half hour. The small propeller plane had plowed into the turbulent gusts, which sent the aircraft toppling to the ground. Our research helped to change the rules of the airways. New rules were implemented to require minimum distances between planes flying from east to west and north to south to prevent future accidents.
Working so closely with the engineers on these kinds of projects, I developed a good rapport with them. We talked about a range of topics, even school desegregation. Just after the US Supreme Court banned segregated public schools in its historic 1954 ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case, I asked the guys what they thought of the decision. I shared with them what I knew firsthand: that separate schools for Negro children were never equal to schools provided for whites. I talked about the ripped and torn books that were handed down to the Negro students when the white schools got new ones. I had used the well-worn books as both a student and a teacher. I described the dingy, stained majorette uniforms that also had been tossed from the white schools to my black students when I taught high school in Bluefield. The uniform skirts were so shabby that I had to discard them and sew new ones for my students. And I pointed out the pay discrepancies, how Negro teachers got paid less when they often had more education than their white counterparts. But the fundamental unfairness of all those things could not compare to the mental toll of the constant, second-rate treatment on Negro children. To demonstrate this effect during the case, Attorney Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, relied on research conducted by husband-and-wife child psychologists Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark. The Negro couple had conducted an experiment using four dolls (two white and two painted brown) to ask schoolchildren a series of questions, including which dolls were “nice,” which were “bad,” which were “most like you,” etc. The majority of children preferred the white dolls, and found that the brown dolls were “bad.” One child even burst into tears and ran out of the room when asked “which doll is most like you.” The tests were used to prove that segregation had engrained in Negro children a feeling of inferiority. When I read about the doll tests, I was even more grateful to Daddy for the self-confidence he had instilled in me from the beginning. After my discussion with the white engineers, the guys all agreed with me that they were in favor of the Supreme Court ruling.
My Remarkable Journey Page 11