Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race tells the story of a group of African-American women who, over a period of over 25 years, made major contributions to the US space program during its golden age. Overcoming racist and sexist discrimination, these women established themselves as brilliant mathematicians and engineers and helped lead the United States to victory in some of the pivotal moments of the Cold War-era space race—including John Glenn’s 1962 orbit of the Earth and the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.
The scene of their success was the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. It was here, in the heartland of American segregation, that a group of extraordinary women, including Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson, helped their country break through the color barrier and leap into the great unknown.
During World War Two, the gradual dismantling of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation began, as the demands of the war economy brought African-Americans and women into jobs and industries from which they had previously been excluded. This was especially true of the aeronautics and defense industry, which was crucial to the American war effort.
Facilities like Langley began to hire qualified women in large numbers to work as mathematicians and number-crunchers. Aeronautics was an intensely quantitative field: designing and testing combat planes produced a deluge of numerical data that needed to be processed and analyzed. And that meant hiring an army of number-crunchers (“computers” as they were known at the time).
Under pressure from African-American civil rights leaders, the Roosevelt Administration took steps to desegregate the industry and open up defense jobs to black female applicants as well. This enabled the first generation of black female professionals to get in the door at Langley. The opportunity for a black person to work as a computer in an aeronautical laboratory (and not as a janitor or cafeteria worker) was something altogether new and extraordinary. In spring 1943, Dorothy Vaughan, a schoolteacher from Virginia, filled out her application. In the fall, she received her answer: she was hired to work as a Grade P-1 Mathematician at Langley for the duration of the war. It was a position that would last over 30 years.
Despite the opportunity, new arrivals to Langley like Dorothy still had to face the prejudice of living and working in a segregated city of the American South at the height of the Jim Crow era. Black people had to use separate bathrooms, separate drinking fountains, separate entrances on buses, send their children to separate schools, and live in separate neighborhoods—or face severe repercussions. Indeed, segregation was powerfully entrenched in the nation’s historical experience and was an all-encompassing feature of life in Virginia.
The prejudice even followed these women into the laboratory at Langley. A separate area of the facility, known as West Area Computing, was reserved for the new black female computers. Langley was generally a place where colleagues worked closely with one another. Because of the color of their skin, however, the West Area Computers were largely excluded from this collegial atmosphere. This was symbolized most hurtfully by the sign on the table where they sat at the back of the cafeteria that read, “COLORED COMPUTERS.” In an act of defiance, the women of West Computing began tearing the sign down each day they saw it, a first shot across the bow for equality and dignity.
Facing this climate of discrimination, the first generation of West Computers established their own culturally vibrant and cohesive communities all throughout Hampton Roads. Such communities enabled mobile young black families who’d moved to Virginia to keep their morale high and served to welcome and acclimate new waves of black migrants to the region.
After the Allied victory in the war, Hampton Roads became a focal point of the US defense industry during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This meant that most of the West Computers who had initially come to Langley on temporary assignment ended up receiving permanent offers of employment, as Dorothy did in 1946.
The Cold War also marked a turning point in the struggle for black civil rights, contributing to the eventual breakdown of Jim Crow. As the United States sought international allies in its fight against worldwide Soviet Communism, American policymakers began to realize that segregation at home had become a significant liability, one that made America’s self-proclaimed leadership of “the free world” look hypocritical and handed a significant propaganda coup to the Soviet Union. The federal government began putting more resources toward desegregation and slowly started to side with the civil rights protesters over the die-hard segregationists.
As women began advancing through the ranks at Langley in the postwar years, they saw that their sex was still a barrier to advancement in a field that was built and run by men. There was a whole universe of networking, consisting of lunches, cocktail hours, and men-only smoking sessions from which the women were excluded. Moreover, the decentralized nature of their work also disadvantaged the female computers. Because they were only given small portions of larger assignments to work on, it was difficult for the women to develop a holistic understanding of the kind of work the male engineers were doing.
The way to get noticed and start getting real credit for one’s work as a computer was to get out of the general computing pool and become assigned to a specific group working on a particular project. This would allow for the development of specialized knowledge, which would make the computer far more valuable to the team than someone with just general knowledge.
The all-white East Computing unit was shuttered after the war—many of the white women had won new positions in specialized units, plus the changing nature of the work at Langley reduced the need for a general computing pool. All remaining general computing work was transferred to West Computing. This opened new doors to the black women who worked there. Black women started getting their names on published reports that were being produced by the laboratory. During this time, too, Dorothy Vaughan rapidly ascended the ranks at Langley: in 1949, she was appointed head of West Computing, a position she would hold for the next decade.
The postwar years would also see a new wave of black women coming to Langley, following in the footsteps of pioneers like Dorothy Vaughan who had done so much to open the doors of opportunity to the next generation.
In 1951, a new 26-year-old native of Hampton Roads named Mary Jackson made her way to West Computing. From an early age, she had committed herself to helping young African-American women make the most of themselves—with a special focus on helping them prepare for college careers. But she, too, felt the sting of segregation—on one occasion at Langley, she was mocked by a group of white female employees for asking where the “colored” bathroom was (as white women, they found Mary’s question absurd—why would they know where her bathroom was?). But she struck up a friendship with Kazimierz “Kaz” Czarnecki, a white engineer who was an assistant section head working on Langley’s Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, who eventually assigned her to his group. Mary distinguished herself, earning a reputation as a trusted and capable mathematician. She was marked as someone who deserved to move ahead.
Another new arrival was Katherine Goble (later known to history as Katherine Johnson), a brilliant young mathematician from West Virginia. In 1952, she and her husband moved to Hampton Roads, drawn by the emerging job opportunities for black professionals and the opportunity for Katherine to work on exciting projects like the ones at Langley. Like those who had come to Hampton Roads during World War Two, Katherine found a ready-made community waiting to accept her and her family, helping her fill the void of the world she’d left behind in her native and beloved West Virginia.
By the mid-1950s, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the agency that housed Langley, was beginning to introduce mechanical computers into its laboratory spaces. Companies like Bell Telephone Laboratories and IBM were supplying the government with the first generation of mechanical data-processing machines. The female mathematicians’ jobs weren’t immediately placed in jeopardy, but the most astute among them, like Katherine, could certainly see the writing on the wall—that mastering these powerful machines would be essential to future success at Langley.
This was also happening at a critical time for race relations in America. The year 1954 saw the Supreme Court hand down the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. The injustice of segregation had always been obvious to all of the West Computers. But now, at last, major cracks were beginning to appear in the segregationist system of the South.
On October 5, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit, inaugurating the space race and sparking a major panic among both American policymakers and the general public. All across the US, people with shortwave radios tuned in to hear the tiny satellite’s telltale “beep beep” and organized observation parties to watch Sputnik as it travelled through space. Sputnik also brought the absurdity of segregation to light. If the Soviet satellite launch represented a true national crisis, then why were black Americans being denied the opportunity to fully serve their country? The US was leaving untapped the intellectual resources of a large part of its population, in service of a ridiculous and morally indefensible commitment to racial apartheid.
All of this created great pressure on NACA to design and test satellites that would be capable of making it to space. The agency was selected as the home for all of America’s space research and operations and given a new name: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
This brought major changes to the women of West Computing. There was less of a need for general computing skills and a greater demand for mathematicians with specialized knowledge. As such, West Computing was shuttered and its employees reassigned to smaller groups organized around specific tasks. Katherine also gained a more prominent role in the space program as she became attached to the Flight Research Division, working closely with an engineering group called the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD), which specialized in rocketry. Katherine was integral to the publication of technical reports that enabled the space program to put astronauts into orbit. She overcame a great deal of institutional sexism, but she proved her value to the program with her obvious brilliance, competence, and passion for the mission.
The team of engineers with whom Katherine worked was tasked with mapping the exact trajectory of the manned spacecraft, from the second it lifted off the launchpad to the instant it splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. Katherine had to process the numbers generated by the proposed trajectories, over and over, re-calculating the figures every time any slight detail in the flightpath was changed. There was zero room for error, as everything needed to be calibrated perfectly in order to launch the craft and return the astronaut safely. Katherine was blunt with her bosses, telling them, “Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up.”
Through the mission preparation, astronauts like John Glenn forged close relationships with human computers like Katherine Johnson. To them, these number-crunching women were the equivalent of test pilots, ensuring the soundness and reliability of their craft before they stepped into it. As Glenn always said, “Get the girl to check the numbers.”
On February 20, at 9:47 Eastern Standard Time, the Friendship 7 rocket carrying John Glenn shot into orbit. After nearly four hours in flight, he returned to the bounds of Earth, with a near-perfect landing—calculated with precision by Katherine Johnson. When the navy scooped Glenn out of the waters while a jubilant nation looked on, few watching on television knew that a black female mathematician from West Virginia had mapped the journey of America’s rendezvous with destiny.
Pioneering black female engineers and mathematicians like Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson left an indelible mark on NASA, the struggle for African-American civil rights, and the United States itself.
When, on July 20, 1969, the men of the Apollo 11 mission finally walked on the surface of the Moon, it was the fulfillment of the hopes and dreams of a nation, as well as decades of research, advocacy, and struggle on the part of NASA’s black scientists and engineers.
The story of the women of West Computing is one of hope and triumph over the harshest adversity. It is also one of empowerment—these women exercised real agency and control over the course of their lives. They were protagonists who acted upon America and shaped its destiny, actors in the great drama of the nation’s history.
World War Two was the most devastating conflict in human history. Although the United States was spared from the ravages of combat on its own soil, the war nevertheless profoundly reshaped the country’s economic, social, and political system. Perhaps the most lasting and significant domestic effect of World War Two was its role in accelerating the dismantling of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation that had prevailed throughout much of the American South for over a century following the end of the US Civil War.
The demands of the war economy brought African-Americans and women into jobs and industries from which they had previously been excluded. This was an important factor in breaking down racial apartheid all across the country, as African-Americans refused to accept second-class citizenship in a nation for which they had served, fought, and even died. It was in this context that a pioneering generation of black women first began to break down the color bar at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia.
At the height of the war in 1943, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which operated the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, was the US government’s main agency for civilian aeronautics research. NACA was crucial to the war effort, as its research informed airplane design decisions being made by the US Army Air Corps. Thus, the researchers, scientists, and engineers at NACA knew that their work had major real-world implications.
By disseminating their knowledge with the military, the men and women of NACA were helping the US create the fleet of bombers and fighter planes that would defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Almost every new aircraft model during the war years was tested at Langley—and with President Franklin Roosevelt’s challenge to have the nation produce over 50,000 aircraft per year, this was indeed a tall order for NACA. “Victory through airpower!” was the guiding mission and mantra of the NACA-ites.
With so many men serving overseas and the unceasing labor demands of the wartime economy, government facilities like Langley began to hire women in large numbers to work as mathematicians and computers. Aeronautics was an intensely quantitative field: designing and testing combat planes produced a deluge of numerical data that needed to be processed and analyzed. And that meant hiring an army of number-crunchers.
(Shortform note: In this era before electronic computers, the word “computer” typically referred to an individual who performed mathematical calculations. Throughout the summary, when we say “computer,” we are referring to a human being, not a machine.)
Women had been working as computers at Langley during the 1930s, but they would take on a far greater role at the laboratory during and after the war. By 1941, personnel officers at the lab were eagerly searching for more and more women (or “girls” as they were called at the time) to fill the new positions at Langley. Hiring agents scoured the East Coast for coeds who had any sort of mathematical background and placed job advertisements in newspapers in their endless quest for new talent.
At the same time, African-American leaders like A. Philip Randolph, head of the largest black labor union in the country, were pressuring the Roosevelt Administration to open up coveted jobs in the defense industry to black applicants. With two executive orders in 1941, FDR banned discriminatory hiring practices in the defense industry and opened the door for African-Americans to contribute to this growing and dynamic sector of the economy for the first time. This was what enabled black women to submit their applications to work at Langley—it was just a crack, but the door to opportunity was slowly starting to open.
Melvin Butler, the lab’s chief personnel officer, was a native Virginian who had grown up in the world of Jim Crow, but was also inherently practical and recognized the urgent need for new mathematical talent. While he recognized there would need to be a segregated space for the new black women, he also ensured that nothing was done to inhibit their arrival. The women would work in the warehouse building on the west side of the laboratory campus: the place would become known to history as West Area Computing.
One of the first to seize this new opportunity was Dorothy Vaughan. As a college graduate and high school teacher, she had reached the pinnacle of what was thought possible for black women at that time. Still, the inequality was inescapable—Virginia’s black teachers earned less than 50 percent of what their white counterparts did and worked in segregated, poorly funded, and dilapidated school buildings. But she was a passionate believer in education, believing that it was the best chance black children had to succeed in a country that forced them to work twice as hard to get half as far as white people. She poured herself into her work and was a passionate advocate for her students, even under the trying circumstances of Virginia’s segregated public schools. She even once sent a letter to a math textbook publisher when she discovered an error in one of their books, demanding that they correct it.
She had received her degree in education from Howard University, one of the nation’s premier black colleges. Because the white schools (including the Ivy League) refused to tenure black professors regardless of their brilliance, black schools like Howard had an over-abundance of extraordinary scholars. Dorothy had the opportunity to study under some of the nation’s greatest minds. Although she studied education in order to become a teacher (considered at the time to be the most stable possible career for a black woman) she had always had a passion for mathematics.
In 1943, Dorothy saw a job bulletin for a federal agency that was hiring women to fill mathematics-related jobs: NACA. Although the intended audience for this advertisement was likely the white students from the State Teachers College, it captivated Dorothy. This was also happening at a time when the black press was spreading the word that the federal government had cracked open the door of opportunity to African-Americans to work in the bustling war economy.
In 1943, typical black jobs might have been in domestic work (for women) or low-skill, low-wage agricultural industrial work (for men). A good black job would have been as a small business entrepreneur or as a unionized porter on a railcar. A very good black job would have been working as a teacher, minister, doctor, or lawyer. But the opportunity for a black person to work in an aeronautical laboratory (and not as a janitor or cafeteria worker) was something altogether new and extraordinary.
That spring, Dorothy filled out her application. In the fall, she received her answer: she was hired to work as a Grade P-1 Mathematician at Langley for the duration of the war. Her pay would be more than twice what she was earning as a high school teacher. Although the job would take her away from her husband, her children, and the community that she loved (they would only be able to see her during school breaks and scheduled visits), she knew she could not let this opportunity pass her by.
As chance would have it, Dorothy had had some contact with another future NACA pioneer: a black West Virginian named Katherine Coleman (she would become more famous under the name Katherine Johnson after she married her second husband). Dorothy’s husband, Howard, was a bellhop who worked seasonally at the famed Greenbrier hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. In the summer of 1942, a year before she took the NACA job, Dorothy and her family temporarily relocated to West Virginia, so Howard could be closer to his summer job. While there, the Vaughan family formed a close bond with the Coleman family, especially their brilliant 24-year-old daughter, Katherine.
Katherine shared Dorothy’s passion for mathematics and displayed signs of being a numerical prodigy as early as grade school. She poured herself into her studies at West Virginia State Institute, a black college near the state capital (which she entered after graduating high school at the age of 14), where she enjoyed a full scholarship. During her junior year, she was mentored by a young math professor, the brilliant William Waldron Schiefflin Claytor, who, recognizing Katherine’s talents, created special courses exclusively for her and prepared her for a career as a research mathematician. She matriculated to Howard University, where she graduated summa cum laude with a double major in mathematics and French.
In 1936, the NAACP scored some major legal victories before the Supreme Court, which ruled that explicitly barring black students from graduate programs was unconstitutional. States either needed to create “separate, but equal” programs for black students or allow them to integrate into the white schools. While some states (like Virginia, which actually subsidized black graduate students to study outside the state rather than allowing them to integrate) openly defied the court order, West Virginia opted to comply.
Katherine was one of the first three black students to enroll in the graduate program at West Virginia University in the summer of 1940, though she left early when she got married and had her first daughter. But that was hardly the only barrier she would break through. Later, we’ll see how Katherine would follow Dorothy’s path to Langley and make extraordinary contributions to the space program.
Virginia’s Hampton Roads region, where the Langley lab was located, was a wartime boomtown, bustling with economic activity and new migrants from all over the world participating in the American war effort. There were new black regiments, legions of female and African-American civilian workers, as well as German, Japanese, and Italian POWs. Between 1940 and 1942, the region’s civilian population grew from 393,000 to 575,000. On top of that, the number of military personnel stationed in the area’s bases grew tenfold, from 15,000 to 150,000. By 1945, half the adults in Southern Virginia would be working for the federal government. This influx of new people from all over the country and the world radically reshaped the small southern town’s cultural and economic life.
As progressive and forward-looking as Hampton Roads may have seemed at first glance to someone like Dorothy Vaughan, it was still a segregated city of the American South at the height of the Jim Crow era. Black people and white people had separate entrances to get on buses, and blacks were expected to give up their seats to whites if the white section was filled. African-Americans who were caught sitting in white sections could be fined, arrested, or even dragged off the bus and beaten by police. These practices even extended to black soldiers in uniform. Indeed, segregation was powerfully entrenched in the nation’s historical experience and was an unmistakable feature of life wherever one travelled, especially in the South.
The injustice seemed all the more perverse during World War Two. Black Americans were being asked to fight and die to defeat genocidal Nazis in Europe, yet were simultaneously being told to accept a brutal and violent system of repression at home. The irony wasn’t lost on many. Black scholars like Altona Trent Johns noted the distressing similarities between the German treatment of Jews and southern whites’ treatment of their black fellow citizens, a theme that was echoed all throughout black civil society—in churches, the press, sororities and fraternities, and civic organizations. The question was clear: What are we fighting for? Victory in the war overseas had to be matched by victory over white supremacy at home.
The new black economic migrants to the region, like Dorothy, settled in a neighborhood called Newsome Park. The community was built during the Depression, a subdivision designed and built “for blacks, by blacks.” It became a focal point of the black community in Hampton Roads, attracting residents from all different occupations and income levels.
Because legal segregation prohibited so many of Newsome Park’s residents from full participation in Virginia’s economy and society, the community (like many other black communities throughout the South) became economically and culturally self-sufficient. Newsome Park featured its own community center with a full kitchen and banquet space, basketball and tennis courts, and a baseball diamond. The shopping center was home to a bustling grocery store, drugstore, barbershop, and even a TV repair shop.
In short, Newsome Park featured all the amenities that the upwardly mobile young black families who’d moved to Virginia needed to keep their morale high and find new sources of community in a new town. As the new black migrants came and settled, they saw that their children became fast friends with the children of the other families who’d recently made their way to Virginia.
When Dorothy Vaughan arrived at Langley, the bus dropped her off at the West Area of the campus, the space that had been reserved for the new black, female computers (the East Area was set aside for their white counterparts). She found that her new colleagues shared her background in the world of black colleges, alumni associations, and churches. Despite the prejudices and limited opportunities that existed at the time even for white women, these black women had all landed jobs at the world’s premier aeronautical research institution.
White women (former East Area Computers) oversaw the West Computers, parceling out tasks to the various section heads, who in turn subdivided the work among the women in their section of the computing pool. What the women of West Computing were usually working on was a portion of a larger task, some quick piece of calculation that an engineer required for a bigger project.
Langley was a place where colleagues worked closely with one another (often literally close, thanks to the wartime hiring spree) and clerks and computers might rub shoulders with top aeronautics researchers. Yet, because of the color of their skin, the West Area Computers were largely excluded from this collegial atmosphere. Although Executive Order 8802 had mandated fair employment in the defense industry, Langley’s location in the Commonwealth of Virginia forced it to comply with that state’s segregation statutes.
This was symbolized most hurtfully by the sign on the table where they sat at the back of the cafeteria that read, “COLORED COMPUTERS.” Although they were ostensibly professionals on par with their colleagues at Langley, they were still treated as something less than equal.
Seeing this sign every day was deeply insulting and offensive for the West Computers. One day, a West Computer named Miriam Mann could take it no more. She walked over to the sign, removed it, and stuffed it into her purse.
This prompted a mini struggle for equal treatment within Langley. The sign was back up a few days later, prompting Miriam to take it down once again. This back-and-forth played out over the course of weeks, but Miriam and her fellow computers were determined to take a stand against this small, but potent symbol of oppression. Her husband warned her that she might lose her job over this act of defiance, but Miriam knew that this was a battle that needed to be fought.
Eventually, she won. One day, the sign went into Miriam’s purse and no one ever bothered to replace it. This was a powerful victory, one that helped to convince her fellow women of West Computing that the laboratory was theirs as well. Dorothy, Miriam, and the other black computers had become more than colleagues—they had become a tight-knit band, an army in its own right that was prepared to fight and win the war for equality at home.
Miriam’s rebellion was taking place in a much wider context. For the first time, cracks were beginning to show in Jim Crow’s armor. Although the process was slow, the new migrants to Hampton Roads were helping to transform the racial politics of the region. Many of the incoming white NACA engineers were from New England and other, more liberal parts of the country. To them, the southern system of apartheid seemed strange at best, immoral and unjust at worst.
The local southern whites were often highly suspicious of the new government employees that had come into their communities during the war years. They castigated the newcomers as Californians, Yankees, and New York Jews, or “NACA nuts,” oddballs who were well-read, spoke with strange accents, and had condescending attitudes.
Some white Langley employees began openly defying southern segregationist practices and even local laws. Margery Hannah, who oversaw West Computing, made a point of inviting some of her black employees to social gatherings at her home. Robert Jones, a brilliant aeronautics engineer, went even further. One day, he saw white police officers harassing a black man and getting ready to beat him up. Jones shouted at them to leave the man alone, which landed Jones in jail for a night.
These were not minor acts of disobedience. In the context of the Jim Crow South, these were extraordinary displays of rebellion. Fundamentally, the new white Langley employees were pragmatists. While it would be overly simplistic to say that they were all uniformly egalitarian on the racial issue, they fundamentally cared more about their colleagues’ competence and professionalism than they did about their skin color. In their passionate and mission-focused work, they developed a rapport with their black colleagues. This would prove crucial to breaking down the barriers at the laboratory.
Despite the oppression of legal segregation, Dorothy Vaughan and her colleagues knew that working at Langley was an extraordinary opportunity. Even an entry-level job there was better than the best engineering graduate program in the world. Langley had an interest in turning even its female computers into junior engineers who could contribute more to the war effort. The laboratory organized crash courses in engineering physics and aerodynamics, as well as laboratory sessions run by brilliant instructors. Dorothy leapt at the opportunity to pursue her passion for mathematics and enrich her mind.
Through these courses, Dorothy learned how planes actually managed to fly through the air and discovered the process by which engineers tested new models of aircraft. The planes were tested in a wind tunnel, in which powerful wooden turbines blasted air over the prototype in an effort to mimic the conditions of flight. In her courses, Dorothy had to master the concept of the Reynolds number, a quantity that enabled engineers to gauge how close the wind tunnel experiments came to replicating actual flight.
She saw that the physics which underpinned each model’s design could be tweaked and refined to suit different purposes for the war effort. Fighter planes, cargo planes, reconnaissance planes, and bombers all required different designs. During the peak years of the war, every American military plane in production was based on the research and recommendations coming out of NACA—and Dorothy had a front-row seat to it all.
Think about how prejudice and discrimination inhibit lives and careers.
Has prejudice ever prevented you from doing something you wanted to do and were capable of doing? Describe what happened in a few sentences.
What can you do in the future to help ensure that you are judged based on your abilities rather than the group you happen to belong to?
The research and innovation coming from Langley played a major role in the ultimate Allied victory in World War Two, which finally came when Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. Although few Americans knew it, a small contingent of black female computers had made vital contributions to the superior aircraft production that had enabled the Allies to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
But while the end of the war ushered in a nationwide wave of euphoria, it was a source of anxiety for Langley computers like Dorothy Vaughan. Their contracts had only guaranteed employment for the duration of the war. Now that the war was over, what lay ahead for the black computers of Langley? Would the extraordinary opportunity they’d been given be taken away?
The much-feared rollback of federal jobs began quickly. Just three weeks after V-J Day, newspapers announced a planned layoff of 1,500 Newport News shipyard workers as well as downsizings in other parts of the government’s civilian workforce. This would hit women particularly hard, as the returning GIs were expected to have first claim to these jobs. Women who’d earned an unprecedented level of economic and social independence were expected to return to their traditional domestic role. Indeed, two million American women were let go from their jobs before the end of August 1945.
Conservative figures like Virginia’s Democratic Senator Harry Byrd sought to use the transition to a peacetime economy to roll back the progress that had been made toward racial and gender equity in employment during the war years. To figures like Byrd, Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 was an inversion of the natural order of things and an unwelcome federal intrusion into the southern way of life.
During the Cold War and the “Red Scare” of the late 1940s and early 1950s, anti-communist radicals like Byrd and Senator Joseph McCarthy targeted government employees who had alleged “leftist” or “un-American” views. The anti-communist crusade often blended seamlessly with a defense of Jim Crow and white supremacy and an attack on groups and individuals who supported integration, civil rights, and equality for women. Groups like the NAACP were frequently harassed, and a black computer at Langley named Matilda West was even forced out of her job for her supposed disloyalty.
But pioneers like Dorothy weren’t about to let their gains be taken away without a fight. They had established new lives and careers during the war, and they intended to consolidate and expand on the progress they had made. They could not and would not be sent packing to their former lives.
While much of the nation did, in fact, witness a downscaling of the defense industry, this was not the case in Hampton Roads. As the Cold War with the Soviet Union began to take shape following World War Two, Southern Virginia was set to become a critical hub of the nation’s defense industry. The Norfolk Naval Base became the command center of the Atlantic Fleet, while the US Army designated Langley Field as the headquarters of its Tactical Air Command (later to become an independent branch of the military: The United States Air Force).
Thus, although some women who had been hired during the war did end up leaving Langley, this was usually due to personal choice rather than being forced out of their positions. Most of the West Computers ended up receiving permanent offers of employment, as Dorothy did in 1946, when she was made a permanent Civil Service employee.
The new strategic importance of the region meant that the boom economy would continue. With new bases, there would be new needs for military contractors to supply them. Defense industry money poured into Hampton Roads, bringing new jobs, new migrants, and new transformations. During the Korean War (1950-1953) alone, NACA presented a proposal to Congress to double its staff from 7,000 to 14,000.
While, as we’ve seen, the Cold War and the Red Scare gave new force to racist policies, they also contributed to the eventual breakdown of Jim Crow. As the United States sought international allies in its fight against worldwide Soviet Communism, American policymakers began to realize that segregation at home had become a significant liability, one that made America’s self-proclaimed leadership of “the free world” look hypocritical. In fact, foreign leaders of color who visited the US were frequently banned from hotels and restaurants—stories that received much attention in the foreign press and that handed a significant propaganda coup to the Soviet Union.
The question became clear to many international observers: Why should an African or Asian country side with the US in the Cold War when the US supported segregation at home? The necessities of Cold War politics and the weight of international opinion started to make a real difference in US domestic policy. They were a major part of the impetus behind President Harry Truman’s 1947 executive order desegregating the military and a subsequent order making federal department heads “personally responsible” for rooting out discrimination in their departments.
For all of the progress that had been made, Langley was still very much a white world, in particular a white man’s world. The women of West Computing may have mastered the intricacies of aerodynamics, but now they faced an even more daunting task: advancing as women in a career that was built and run by men.
The forms of discrimination could be subtle. There was a whole universe of networking, consisting of lunches, cocktail hours, and men-only smoking sessions from which the women of Langley were shut out. Being talented wasn’t enough when they lacked the social capital and access to get their superiors to see it.
The decentralized nature of their work was also a disadvantage to the female computers. Because they were only given small portions of larger assignments to work on, it was difficult for Dorothy and her peers to develop a holistic understanding of the kind of work the male engineers were doing. Without this context, their work was just a series of isolated math equations and without specialized knowledge, they would become expendable when electronic computers began entering the laboratory.
The way to get noticed and start getting real credit for one’s work as a computer was to get out of the general computing pool and become assigned to a specific group working on a particular project. This would allow for the development of specialized knowledge, which would make the computer far more valuable to the team than someone with just general knowledge. As NACA moved into space research in the 1950s and 1960s, this kind of specialization would be a key point of difference between the women who made the cut and those that didn’t.
This was illustrated dramatically by the experience of two (white) female computers from East Computing. In 1947, these two women were sent west to the Mojave Desert, along with a small team of fellow Langley employees, to conduct research into the vexing problem of getting aircraft to travel faster than the speed of sound (“breaking the sound barrier”).
Working in this small, detached team and focusing on a singular, mission-oriented project was a game-changer for these two women. When they verified the fact that pilot Chuck Yeager had indeed broken the sound barrier, it brought them a new level of credit and recognition. They had broken a barrier of their own. Other signs of progress were there, as more and more Langley women began to get their names on research reports, a key first step in the career of any engineer.
Of course, the women of West Computing faced a double barrier to their upward mobility, being both female and black. Segregation had isolated them from their colleagues and from many opportunities. The all-white East Computing unit was shuttered after the war—many of the white women had won new positions in specialized units, plus the changing nature of the work at Langley reduced the need for a general computing pool. All remaining general computing work was transferred to West Computing, many Langley employees hadn’t even known that there was an all-black computing unit.
But the integration of the computing functions at Langley was a watershed moment at the laboratory and opened new doors to the black women who worked there. In 1946, a unit conducting stability analysis research integrated a former West Computer, Dorothy Hoover, into its group full-time. In 1951, Dorothy Hoover would co-publish a report on a new wing-design for airplanes, contributing to one of Langely’s major breakthroughs from this era. She eventually went on to a prestigious academic career in mathematics at Arkansas AM&N. Her achievement was followed by others, as more West Computers moved to specialized divisions.
Dorothy Vaughan rapidly ascended the ranks at Langley. As more and more women were hired at the now-integrated West Computing to replace those who had been reassigned to specialized divisions, she transitioned into a managerial role. In 1949, the laboratory director appointed her head of West Computing, a position she would hold for the next decade.
In 1951, a new 26-year-old hire named Mary Jackson made her way to West Computing. Whereas so many of her predecessors had been “come-heres,” transplants from other parts of the country, Mary was a “been-here:” she’d grown up in Hampton Roads and had deep roots in that part of Virginia. She graduated from high school in 1938, after which she had enrolled at Hampton Institute, an all-black college founded on the idea of self-help and practical and industrial training.
With these founding principles, most women at Hampton studied home economics, but Mary was different. She completed a double major in mathematics and physical science. After graduating, she married and started a family. Mary also became deeply involved in her local Girl Scout troop, where she committed herself to helping young African-American women make the most of themselves—with a special focus on helping them prepare for college careers.
Although the troop was segregated from the local all-white Girl Scout troop, Mary always took pains to show her girls that they deserved far better than what a racist society was prepared to give them. On one occasion, she stopped the troop from singing the slave spiritual “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” believing that performing it would only contribute to negative stereotypes of black people. She couldn’t remove the limits that Jim Crow placed on these girls, but she could remove the limits the girls placed on themselves.
Mary was working as a clerk typist at Fort Monroe in 1951. Her mathematical abilities quickly became obvious to her superiors, and with the Korean War heating up, there was an urgent need for more skilled computers at NACA. After just three months at Fort Monroe, the federal government transferred Mary to Langley, where she began working for Dorothy Vaughan.
Mary was a full-fledged Civil Service employee. But the sting of discrimination that she’d known so well growing up in Virginia still followed her to Langley. Once, when she was sent by Dorothy Vaughan on an assignment to the predominantly white East Side, she asked the white computers where she could find the bathroom. The white girls simply laughed at her—Mary was black, so how could they possibly know where her bathroom was? The ugly specter of Jim Crow hurt all the more because it was at Langley, where Mary was supposed to be an equal, working with her colleagues to help her country. But still, absurdly, she was unable to perform her bodily functions in the same bathroom as her white colleagues.
As she was reeling from that encounter, Mary ran into Kazimierz “Kaz” Czarnecki, a white engineer who was an assistant section head working on Langley’s Supersonic Pressure Tunnel (SPT). Although he was a total stranger to her, Mary shared her frustration about the bathroom incident with Kaz. He listened to her story, sympathized, and asked Mary to come work for him instead of returning to West Computing. She didn’t know it, but this chance encounter would change her entire career.
Mary quickly distinguished herself while working on the SPT unit. One day, she was asked to perform some calculations on supersonic and hypersonic research for John Becker, a powerful and important division chief at Langley. Mary deftly delivered her calculations to Becker, fully confident that she had performed them correctly. Becker refused to accept them, however, insisting that something was wrong with Mary’s numbers.
But she stood by her work. There was an error in the numbers—but it was Becker’s, not Mary’s. He had given her the wrong numbers to input, but Mary had performed her calculations flawlessly. Becker apologized, and Mary earned a reputation as a trusted and capable mathematician. She was marked as someone who deserved to move ahead.
While Dorothy and her colleagues were breaking new ground as the first black female professionals at Langley during the war, the brilliant Katherine Coleman (who was now known as Katherine Goble after marrying her first husband, Jimmy) was a devoted housewife and mother. She had given up her own trailblazing academic career as one of the first three black students at West Virginia University to raise her family. Dr. Claytor at Howard had prepared her for a career as a research mathematician, but this dream now seemed a faraway abstraction to Katherine. But that would soon change.
In 1952, Katherine’s in-laws told her and her husband about the job opportunities in Hampton Roads. Her husband’s brother-in-law, Eric Epps, encouraged Katherine to apply for a position at Langley, where she could finally fulfill her dream of working as a mathematician (and earn three times what her salary had been as a teacher). Eric also said that Jimmy could find work at the Newport News Shipyard—thus, there was a promise of good federal jobs for the couple, representing a major new opportunity for them and their three daughters.
As director of the Newsome Park Community Center, Eric was a strong advocate for the neighborhood and was extremely well-connected with the black community and its civic and cultural institutions all throughout the Virginia peninsula. If anyone would be able to smooth the Gobles’ transition to the region, it would be Eric.
His offer was too good to resist and tugged at Katherine’s insatiable intellectual curiosity: the family made the momentous decision to leave the mountains of West Virginia and head for Hampton Roads. Well-paid federal jobs like the ones awaiting Katherine and Jimmy helped build the emerging black middle class. Like those who had come to Hampton Roads during World War Two, Katherine found a ready-made community waiting to accept her and her family, helping her fill the void of the world she’d left behind in her native and beloved West Virginia. As an added bonus, Katherine would be reporting to her old neighbor from West Sulphur Springs—Dorothy Vaughan.
Although Katherine had real credentials with her honors degree in mathematics and her teaching experience, she started at Langley with the rank of SP-3: a level 3 sub-professional, the low rank to which nearly all women at Langley were assigned during this era.
After just two weeks on the job, Katherine was moved to the Flight Research Division, one of the most important and powerful groups at Langley. This was a major step forward in her career and a major move toward integration. The laboratory was always a curious outpost in the heartland of Jim Crow. At Langley, the racial barrier was a bit murkier, the walls of separation more scalable. There were still separate bathrooms, but African-Americans also had an opportunity to demonstrate their value as professionals.
Katherine was determined to make the most of her opportunity, recognizing that she would never change the minds (or win the hearts) of the most die-hard racists. She avoided the symbols of segregation where she found them (making a point of eating her lunch at her desk rather than sitting in the “colored” section of the cafeteria). But, most of all, she wanted to combat ignorance and prejudice by demonstrating her intelligence and capability to her colleagues, presenting herself as a well-spoken, patriotic model of the very best that the black community had to offer. While there were certainly hardcore racists at Langley, there were also white people whose opinions of black people were open to change—and these were the people upon whom she mounted her charm offensive.
Dorothy Vaughan was a tireless advocate for the computers who worked under her. After hearing how well Katherine was performing in the Flight Research Division, she presented the head of the division with an ultimatum: either give Katherine the raise and permanent position in the division she deserved, or return her to West Computing. The division chief, the formidable and intimidating Henry Pearson, acceded to Dorothy’s pressure: Katherine was given a salary increase and a permanent job in his Maneuver Loads Branch in 1953.
This group was working on the aerodynamics of airplanes as they moved in and out of steady, stable flight—a key subject area of research in the Cold War 1950s. It was a very masculine, testosterone-fueled workplace, one which didn’t seem outwardly hospitable to a female computer. But Katherine held her own and impressed the engineers with her insatiable intellectual curiosity and her obvious passion for the work. What she relished most of all was the intelligence of her colleagues—she respected their intellectual capacity, and they respected hers right back. They stopped seeing her as the “black computer” and saw her simply as “Katherine.”
On one of her first assignments, Katherine had to conduct research into why a propeller plane had fallen out of the sky for seemingly no reason. She pored over the numbers, calculating the airspeed, acceleration, altitude, and other data points from the flight in an attempt to unlock the mystery of this crash. Through her data analysis, the engineers determined that the propeller plane had crossed the flight path of a jet and had gotten caught in its wake vortex (similar to how, on water, the wake created by a large ship can overwhelm and capsize a small boat). This discovery led to changes in air traffic regulations, mandating minimum times and distances between flight paths. Katherine’s work had made a powerful and direct impact on the real world.
Katherine was enjoying professional success and career fulfillment on a level which she’d never dreamed of before she came to Langley. The Gobles were upwardly mobile and solidly middle class. They decided to take that next step toward the achievement of the American Dream—homeownership.
But tragedy struck for Katherine and her daughters. In 1956, Jimmy Goble died, after having fallen sick the year before. It was an incalculable loss to the family. But Katherine knew that she could not let her daughters sink into despair over the death of their father. She had promised Jimmy that she would always do everything she could to keep the girls on the path to achievement, and she refused to let them deviate from it.
After setting aside a period of mourning, Katherine sent her daughters back to school and instructed the principal not to show them any special treatment. She was determined that they go to college and she needed them to be prepared, seeing their success as the fulfillment of the legacy of her and Jimmy’s ancestors, who had all pushed their children toward greater and greater heights. There could be no going backwards.
By the mid-1950s, NACA was beginning to introduce mechanical computers into its laboratory spaces. Companies like Bell Telephone Laboratories and IBM were supplying the government with the first generation of mechanical data-processing machines (though they weren’t yet digital, but analogue; their output came in the form of paper punch cards). They weren’t totally reliable and still produced lots of errors that needed to be corrected by the female mathematicians, but they could process data at a speed that was impossible for humans to match—and, critically, they could be left to run overnight after the staff had gone home.
The female mathematicians’ jobs weren’t immediately placed in jeopardy, but the most astute among them, like Katherine, could certainly see the writing on the wall—that mastering these powerful machines would be essential to future success at Langley.
In addition to mastering the machines in the laboratory, Katherine and her peers would need to master another machine, one that dominated the social, economic, and political order of the South—the machine of Jim Crow. It would need to be smashed, defeated, and consigned to the ash heap of history if African-Americans were ever to advance and be seen as equals. This was all happening at a critical time for race relations in America.
The year 1954 saw the Supreme Court hand down the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. In the years that followed, there would be violence, as white mobs all across the South attempted to forcibly prevent black students from attending formerly all-white schools—most famously in Little Rock, Arkansas, where President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to protect the black students who had enrolled in the local high school.
In Virginia, the powerful Senator Harry Byrd used all the influence of his political machine to stop integration, including by establishing whites-only “segregation academies,” schools that, because of their nominally private status, were able to circumvent Brown v. Board of Education (though Byrd and his Dixiecrat allies still managed to divert taxpayer dollars to such schools). In the fall of 1958, the governor of Virginia took the extraordinary step of shutting down the schools altogether in the few districts that had attempted to comply with the Brown decision. The state apparently preferred to deprive all children of public education rather than have black and white children attend school together.
The injustice of segregation was obvious to all of the West Computers, but so was its absurdity and inefficiency. When Mary Jackson attended Hampton High School for engineering classes at Kazimierz Czarnecki’s urging (for which she had to get a special dispensation from the City of Hampton to attend the all-white program), she saw that the school from which she had been barred was run-down and dilapidated, little better than the black schools. In fact, all throughout the South, districts maintained parallel failing schools that needlessly duplicated resources and disadvantaged both black and white children. Why, thought Mary, wouldn’t they just combine resources to deliver a better education for all students?
On October 5, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit, inaugurating the space race era of the Cold War and sparking a major panic among both American policymakers and the general public. All across the US, people with shortwave radios tuned in to hear the tiny satellite’s telltale “beep beep” and organized observation parties to watch Sputnik as it travelled through space.
It was a deeply humbling moment for the West: the Russians had beaten the Americans into space. Had American technology fallen behind that of the Soviets? And if so, what did that mean for the future security of the self-styled “free world?” Many feared that the Soviet Union’s ability to launch the satellite proved that they must be in possession of a vast arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of raining destruction down upon American cities.
Once again, the urgency of the Cold War brought the absurdity of segregation to light. If Sputnik represented a true national crisis, then why were black Americans being denied the opportunity to fully serve their country? The US was leaving untapped the intellectual resources of a large part of its population, in service of a ridiculous and morally indefensible commitment to racial apartheid (while also handing the Soviet Union a major propaganda talking point). While Americans were devoting their energies to keeping black children off high school and college campuses, the Soviets were working vigorously to make sure that all their children received the best possible education. In fact, one-third of Soviet engineering undergraduates were female.
All of this created great pressure on NACA to design and test satellites that would be capable of making it to space. This was no easy feat, as any such craft would need to first break through the sound barrier, escape Earth’s gravitational pull, and settle into a speed (18,000 MPH) that would enable it to lock into a low orbit around the planet, all while withstanding levels of heat that could reach up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
NACA’s destiny as the powerhouse of America’s Space Race was hardly assured at this time. There were competing agencies within the federal government that might have conceivably taken the mantle of space leadership from NACA and Langley, including the US Air Force, the US Naval Research Observatory, and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. But NACA, with its wealth of engineering talent, was selected as the home for all of America’s space research and operations—and Langley would be its nerve center. In October 1958, all competing operations were placed under NACA’s purview. With the expanded mission came a new name for the agency: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.
History began playing out right in front of Katherine Goble. Her Flight Research Division worked closely with an engineering group called the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD), which specialized in rocketry. With the new emphasis on space, PARD’s and Flight Research’s engineers came to the fore. This represented Katherine’s wildest dreams come true—an opportunity to leap into the intellectual (and literal) unknown, to be involved with something completely untried and untested in the course of human history. She would be part of the effort to put human beings into outer space.
The expanded mission and scope of NASA wrought major changes for the agency, transforming it into a high-profile bureaucracy with twice as many employees as it had before. It also signalled the end of an era for West Computing. Skill specialization was now the key to success at NASA: there was simply less of a need for a centralized pool like West Computing. Many of the original West Computers had already moved out of the pool, being assigned to mission-focused projects and divisions elsewhere at the laboratory. By the time NASA shuttered the West Area Computers Unit in 1958, only nine remained, including Dorothy Vaughan.
The end of the unit represented the end of an era, the disbanding of a band of sisters who had made great strides in smashing the color barrier in the United States. For the rest of their lives, the former West Computers would remember their experiences and tell their stories with the quiet dignity that was so characteristic of women of this generation. They didn’t see themselves as heroes—they were simply doing their jobs.
In subsequent years, Dorothy would reinvent herself as an early computer programmer, mastering the IBM 704. She performed the vital task of translating engineers’ data and entering it into the computer in its FORTRAN language. Dorothy’s work at Langley had helped her fulfill many of her ambitions. Her children were off to college, and she had bought a home of her own. And she had shepherded so many of her “girls” onto fulfilling careers of their own. But this was a bittersweet moment for Dorothy. As she passed the torch to a new generation of black women, she also recognized that she would be taking a back seat. Her days as a manager were over. At NASA, she would be just one of the girls again.
Think about how people like the women of West Computing helped each other overcome obstacles.
Have you ever served as a mentor or guide to someone who was trying to follow in your footsteps? Briefly describe the experience.
What made you want to lend a helping hand to this person?
Do you think people who have achieved success have a responsibility to pay it forward to those who come after? Explain why or why not.
NASA assembled a brain trust at Langley, called the Space Task Group. This was a semi-autonomous working group, composed mainly of engineers from Flight Research and PARD. Their mission, codenamed Project Mercury, was to launch a manned craft into orbit, research the effect of space travel on humans, and ensure safe reentry to Earth of both the astronaut and the spacecraft.
Katherine’s workspace was abuzz with talk of space. NASA’s top engineers from Flight Research and PARD were discussing orbital mechanics, rocket propulsion, reentry, solar system physics, and trajectories. Katherine hung on every word of these discussions, angling for every opportunity she could get to hear even snippets of conversation. She yearned to be part of these meetings and conversations and knew that she had valuable skills to offer.
Langley presented engineers with a grueling research review process. To get a technical report published, an engineer needed to present it at an editorial meeting, during which a committee of subject matter experts would review and scrutinize every detail of the report while grilling the researcher on the soundness of the information within it. The committee was thorough (and often quite harsh) in rooting out inconsistencies and poorly reasoned conclusions. The whole process could take months, even years.
Katherine was helping the senior researchers prepare these reports, which were beginning to be generated at an increasingly steady pace. She took the opportunity to pepper the engineers with questions, both to satisfy her own bottomless curiosity and to demonstrate her intellectual bona fides to the team. But because the topic was so unknown, she was discovering the answers right alongside the engineers. Despite her desire to contribute more to the mission by participating in the editorial meetings, however, she was still excluded from them, being told bluntly by her male colleagues, “Girls don’t go to the meetings.”
Her insistence on being included in the process was notable in an era when, even in the workplace, women were expected to “act like ladies” and patiently wait for assignments to be given to them by their male supervisors. That women might have the same passion for the work as their male colleagues seemed to have crossed no one’s mind. But Katherine was undaunted. For her, it would have been a betrayal of her own confidence and that of the people who had helped her get this far to turn her back on the greatest journey of exploration in human history, simply because she was a woman.
So she persisted. She kept asking to come to the meetings, always showing the utmost respect for her colleagues (which was genuine), but also the confidence that came from knowing that she truly belonged in the room. Her persistence paid off. The engineers couldn’t come up with a rational explanation for why someone so obviously committed to the cause and qualified to take on the challenge shouldn’t be allowed to contribute. In 1958, Katherine entered the editorial meetings of the Aerospace Mechanics Division of NASA.
Within the Space Task Group, the demands of the work became all-consuming. Staying at work until after ten o’clock at night was normal, but the engineers were laser-focused on achieving their monumental task. Still, there were enormous engineering and physics challenges to overcome in the quest to launch a man into orbit.
The first problem was designing the vessel that would carry the astronaut into orbit. It would need to be capable of withstanding the extreme heat that would be generated when the craft rocketed through the friction of the atmosphere. After rejecting earlier needle-shaped designs (which testing showed would fail to deflect the heat), the team designed what would ultimately become the Mercury space capsule—a blunt-shaped vessel, six feet wide, eleven feet long, and weighing 3,000 pounds.
The next hurdle was selecting an astronaut. Candidates needed to be small enough to fit inside the small cabin of the capsule: only men under five feet eleven inches and under 180 pounds were to be considered. After screening candidates for the appropriate physical, age, education, and background credentials, NASA unveiled the “Mercury Seven” at a 1959 press conference. Their training facility was established at Langley, adjacent to the Space Task Group. Katherine had the opportunity to meet and rub shoulders with this elite cadre, who had suddenly become some of the most famous people in the world.
The team also needed to work out how to blast the man and the craft into orbit. The team of engineers with whom Katherine worked was tasked with mapping the exact trajectory of the spacecraft, from the second it lifted off the launchpad to the instant it landed back on Earth (or, more accurately, splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean). Katherine had to process the numbers generated by the proposed trajectories over and over, re-calculating the figures every time any slight detail in the flightpath was changed.
There was zero room for error, as everything needed to be calibrated perfectly in order to launch the craft and return the astronaut safely. Katherine’s ballistic trajectory tables would determine whether or not the returning astronaut would land near enough to the waiting navy ships to be speedily scooped out of the sea and brought to safety. Even the slightest error would result in the craft missing its mark, putting the astronaut in mortal danger. This was made all the more complicated, as the capsule would both be launching from and landing back on a moving target: the orbiting planet Earth.
But Katherine, as ever, was undaunted by the task. She had proven herself an incomparable mathematician and a quick study with the higher-level conceptual work. She was straightforward with her bosses, telling them, “Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up.”
Katherine authored her first research report, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite over a Selected Earth Position” and helped shepherd it through the rigorous editorial and publication process. Its publication in September 1960 was the first from her division by a female.
When astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to travel to space in Langley’s Mercury-Redstone 1 capsule in May 1961, it was a moment of triumph for the entire team. Although the enthusiasm was somewhat tempered by the fact that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had successfully made it to space the month before (and had achieved orbit, which Shepard’s craft had not), it proved that the United States had the technological capability to compete in the space race. It emboldened American policymakers and was a strong boost of confidence for a nation that feared it was falling behind its Cold War rival. Shortly after this, Kennedy challenged the nation to cross another frontier. He pledged that the US would complete a successful manned mission to the Moon by the close of the 1960s.
During this time, Katherine also remarried, taking Jim Johnson, a dashing younger army captain, as her second husband. Her marriage to Jim gave her the name for which history would remember her: Katherine G. Johnson.
At this time, Mary Jackson was promoted to the rank of engineer at Langley. This was unusual—most of the women (black and white) working as technical professionals at the laboratory, regardless of their talent, were classified as mathematicians or computers. This meant lower pay and lower status.
To Mary, who had always been so deeply committed to social justice, this was unacceptable. She was not content to keep her promotion to herself: she wanted to ensure that others who had been marginalized would have the same access to opportunity that she did. She became a tireless advocate with the National Technical Association, the professional organization for black engineers and scientists.
She also saw Langley as a beacon of opportunity for the Hampton Roads community, and she made every effort to ensure that local children knew about the exciting work being done in their hometown. She organized tours and field trips for students from public schools and from Hampton Institute to let them see engineers at work. It was vitally important that black children be able to see black professionals working in such a cutting-edge, dynamic environment—it raised their expectations and broadened the possibilities they could imagine for themselves.
But she saw that her white female colleagues were also marginalized by the male-dominated power structures at Langley. Mary forged alliances with white female engineers like Emma Jean Landrum. In 1962, the two women participated in a career panel in front of an all-black group of junior high school girls. A black and a white professional appearing together, speaking as equals, made a profound and powerful impression on these girls.
One young American who breathlessly followed the progress of Sputnik and the reaction to it was a rising high school senior from North Carolina named Christine Mann. While she was fully aware of the racism that defined so much of her experience as an African-American, she still thought of herself as an American—and a patriotic one, at that.
Christine had attended The Allen School, widely considered to be one of the finest all-black high schools in the country, with students from as far away as New York. In the eleventh grade, she discovered a passion for mathematics and began to consider a future that would allow her to explore this further. For her and her classmates, the decision in Brown v. Board of Education had been a moment for celebration, but also anxiety: if they were forced to attend school and compete with white students, would they be smart enough to succeed?
Christine had always been fascinated by the idea of space and now saw that the subject had been thrust to the forefront of the national conversation. As a proud American, she didn’t want to let the Soviets dominate the universe beyond the Earth’s orbit, and she was determined to help her country get into space.
After graduating from The Allen School in 1958, Christine matriculated at Hampton Institute, Mary Jackson’s alma mater. She was on her own collision course, destined to meet the black female engineering pioneers at Langley who had come before her and make her own contributions to the “civilian army of the Cold War.”
Christine’s time at Hampton Institute came at an extraordinary time in the struggle for civil rights. While Katherine Johnson was mapping out the trajectory to launch a man into space and bring him back safely, four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina were making a breakthrough of their own. They sat at the segregated lunch counter at the local Woolworth’s and refused to leave until they were served as equals. Word spread of this powerful display of nonviolent resistance to Jim Crow—soon, “sit-ins” were being staged all across the segregated public spaces of the South.
The struggle reached Christine’s doorstep when Hampton Institute became the first school in Virginia to organize a sit-in. She was drawn to the nascent activist movement and became a committed participant in its marches, protests, and voter registration drives. Despite the massive resistance of Southern whites and the state governments they controlled, the civil rights movement made progress.
In March 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925, ordering federal agencies and contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin. This meant that agencies (like NASA) had to create specific policies and guidelines that rooted out discrimination in their employment practices. President Kennedy had, with the stroke of a pen, put the resources of the federal government on the side of the civil rights movement.
With the expanded scope of NASA’s mission, the influx of new personnel and funding, and the enormous public attention on the agency’s activities, American policymakers began to see that NASA was getting too big for Hampton Roads and Langley. The government explored options for a new base of operations, one which would have the right mix of warm climate, cheap land, and friendly politicians.
With much influence and lobbying from Vice President Lyndon Johnson (a Texan who had deep political connections from his time as Senate Majority Leader and would soon be president himself after Kennedy’s assassination), NASA decided to move the bulk of its space operations to Houston. This meant that the men and women of Langley would face difficult personal and professional decisions.
Katherine Johnson chose to stay in Virginia. After all the changes and tumult in her children’s lives over the past few years, she couldn’t uproot them to Texas. She still would make highly valuable contributions to NASA, but she would be doing it away from the true nerve center of the agency in Houston.
The man whom Katherine and her group would be launching into orbit was a name that would become known to history—John Glenn. The logistical hurdles of launching and returning a satellite were complicated enough. Doing so with a human being inside made it vastly more challenging. The extreme temperatures and radiation could be extremely dangerous for Glenn. Moreover, the NASA leadership knew that his death during the mission would be a public relations nightmare for the agency and for the United States as it sought to gain the upper hand in the Cold War.
The pressure was on, as the Soviets beat the Americans to the punch once again when cosmonaut Gherman Titov completed a seventeen-orbit flight in October 1961. With Gagarin’s successful orbital flight earlier that year, the Russians now had two to the Americans’ zero. With the press hounding NASA for progress updates, the agency announced February 20, 1962 as the date of his launch into orbit.
Through the mission preparation, astronauts like Glenn forged close relationships with human computers like Katherine Johnson. As former navy pilots, the astronauts were accustomed to having constant and complete control over their craft. They were distrustful of the onboard electronic computers that would be determining their fate, as they would have little to no control over these functions. But they could and did trust the human computers. To the astronauts, these number-crunching women were the equivalent of test pilots, ensuring the soundness and reliability of their craft before they stepped into it. As Glenn always said, “Get the girl to check the numbers.”
Although they were rarely featured in the televised broadcasts of the mission control center during John Glenn’s historic journey, NASA’s black employees had made immeasurable contributions to America’s space program. They had been the ones calculating the numbers, writing reports, and sparking the nation’s dream of space travel, right alongside their white colleagues.
On February 20, at 9:47 Eastern Standard Time, the Friendship 7 rocket carrying John Glenn shot into orbit. After nearly four hours in flight, he returned to the bounds of Earth, with a near-perfect landing—calculated with precision by Katherine Johnson. When the navy scooped Glenn out of the waters while a jubilant nation looked on, few watching on television knew that a black female mathematician from West Virginia had mapped the journey of America’s rendezvous with destiny.
As the years and decades wore on, it became clear that the women of West Computing (which had ceased operations in the late 1950s) had left an indelible mark on NASA, the struggle for African-American civil rights, and the United States itself. Facing down racism and segregation, these women had turned their temporary wartime jobs into permanent and fulfilling careers.
Their years at Langley would be marked by watershed moments in the fight for civil rights—the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. As pioneers, the West Computers had opened the doors for people of color who would follow in their footsteps. Mary Jackson always made a point of welcoming new black employees, helping them find places to live and offering them a home-cooked meal when they were homesick.
She, along with women like Katherine Johnson, created an informal network of older black women who helped new minority employees make the transition to the agency. In doing so, they midwifed the careers of a generation of black engineers and scientists, including Christine Mann (later Christine Darden), who knew Katherine Johnson through a friendship with the latter’s daughter. Mary Jackson being named Federal Women’s Program Manager was the natural fulfillment of a career defined by helping girls and women of all colors advance.
When, on July 20, 1969, the men of the Apollo 11 mission walked on the surface of the Moon, it was the fulfillment of many things—President Kennedy’s 1961 challenge, the hopes and dreams of a nation, and decades of research, advocacy, and struggle on the part of NASA’s black scientists and engineers. That night, Katherine Johnson watched the landing on television, transfixed by the marvel of human achievement she was witnessing, and her role in bringing it to fruition.
As she watched and listened to Neil Armstrong describe mankind’s historic leap, she thought of the men and women who had made her own journey possible—Dorothy Vaughan, Dr. Claytor, A. Phillip Randolph, her parents. From a little girl who used to gaze up in wonder at the sky, she was now the engineer who sent men to touch the face of the heavens and walk where no one had walked before.
The story of Katherine and her fellow West Computers is one of hope, of triumph over the harshest adversity. It is also one of empowerment—these women exercised real agency and control over the course of their lives. They were protagonists who acted upon America and shaped its destiny, protagonists in the great drama of the nation’s history.
Explore the main takeaways from Hidden Figures.
Why do you think the culture and environment at Langley were more conducive to integration, during an era when much of the country wasn’t?
Briefly describe the historical context during which most of the action in Hidden Figures is set. Why do you think this background is important for understanding the achievements of this group of women?
What do you think was the bigger hurdle for the women of West Computing to overcome: being black or being female? Briefly describe your reasoning.