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Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
Margot Lee Shetterly
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURETop 10 Sunday Times BestsellerSet amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program.Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’, calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘colored computers’ used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women’s rights movement, ‘Hidden Figures’ interweaves a rich history of mankind’s greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.




COPYRIGHT (#ulink_a1f40aa5-8b7d-5bed-8ccc-3613d6c20cdb)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, in 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Margot Lee Shetterly
Margot Lee Shetterly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008201289
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008201302
Version: 2018-09-26
DEDICATION (#ulink_7f808e3f-1fdc-5f54-b4c3-1860cac2dbfc)
To my parents, Margaret G. Lee and Robert B. Lee III, and to all of the women at the NACA and NASA who offered their shoulders to stand on
CONTENTS
Cover (#u5e3ec0ae-712c-5fc6-9e38-bed0b53a0e5a)
Title Page (#u46d3e5d4-ead4-59a6-aa48-42fac4eb99f3)
Copyright (#u621f4ce2-8341-5ec7-aa29-c090a3b1fb2f)
Dedication (#u27c11ea5-cf5e-5228-be31-b13e6cf2fa6b)
Author’s Note (#u472592e3-f065-5f42-a687-1cd9519b60ed)
Prologue (#u49a8caf6-46f0-506d-aec6-a246a59dcd5d)
1 A Door Opens (#u7415828a-1968-546b-9747-757b2947e176)
2 Mobilization (#u228e86b4-98fb-5173-916c-d47c998428af)
3 Past Is Prologue (#ub4da8e58-d3ae-57b5-9bdf-6a1ce717c759)
4 The Double V (#ud7896d17-03c6-5d13-9c52-3f95a97f2ebe)
5 Manifest Destiny (#u48fafd56-5752-5850-af23-0f82dec2eb11)
6 War Birds (#u8c9947c2-e95a-538c-8074-81ab98db9f54)
7 The Duration (#ud64db966-a00a-5d09-bb6f-db2c36c7e1a8)
8 Those Who Move Forward (#u45f222e8-1392-58b0-9ad3-2434f8f432ec)
9 Breaking Barriers (#u37aeb595-8b7e-56c7-bb16-b7808785c4c9)
10 Home by the Sea (#u9325a254-9e29-53ba-b256-dd937c964cb9)
11 The Area Rule (#u7d38775a-7d66-5bbe-8e74-90018aac1e79)
12 Serendipity (#ua585ab4a-67e0-5887-a085-af7d9c6955c7)
13 Turbulence (#uaefb69a4-5e7c-541b-a05b-dbceb1a02a56)
14 Angle of Attack (#uf70924d4-da91-5bc2-8763-4f8829123a84)
15 Young, Gifted, and Black (#u3379105b-c1a1-54a1-bdf5-95eea6ecbdb4)
16 What a Difference a Day Makes (#u2561d700-1064-5b84-a060-ee0ecd034d32)
17 Outer Space (#uff6d8247-4046-5699-b572-a309917889c6)
18 With All Deliberate Speed (#u9fdd0509-681c-5bfb-9f1a-cf00335bc522)
19 Model Behavior (#ud0688afe-5297-548c-918c-64ca6762fd01)
20 Degrees of Freedom (#u0405930b-357a-53fb-968b-04993584f013)
21 Out of the Past, the Future (#u828b7078-f311-53b0-8e01-ba10ad33006e)
22 America Is for Everybody (#u66151df9-07f0-5549-ba71-fb7799af8eb3)
23 To Boldly Go (#u6093c727-410c-5717-9717-b1d3f7c3fffb)
Epilogue (#ubbddb9f9-71eb-5012-9e6e-95703140f1d1)
Notes (#uac4658fc-ce7b-58cb-9498-52c124204556)
Bibliography (#ua2bb1bde-26b6-5a55-add5-3827a5fd12bd)
Index (#u732d118b-91f3-5361-8465-35234936490c)
Acknowledgments (#u35728351-f261-535f-81c8-3fa9f6414cee)
About the Author (#u76b7f7f4-ad34-5712-86f2-95f8c4de3086)
Credits (#ufac7a873-040b-5d07-b685-418a62dfc630)
About the Publisher (#u89acb319-4179-5553-b567-f056f5cd8317)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_57ee8a31-fcc7-54d5-8d91-dd68bb29ac76)
“Negro.” “Colored.” “Indian.” “Girls.” Though some readers might find the language of Hidden Figures discordant to their modern ears, I’ve made every attempt to remain true to the time period, and to the voices of the individuals represented in this story.
PROLOGUE (#ulink_e76eb830-309e-594b-b6c0-753b8c781d2f)
Mrs. Land worked as a computer out at Langley,” my father said, taking a right turn out of the parking lot of First Baptist Church in Hampton, Virginia.
My husband and I visited my parents just after Christmas in 2010, enjoying a few days away from our full-time life and work in Mexico. They squired us around town in their twenty-year-old green minivan, my father driving, my mother in the front passenger seat, Aran and I buckled in behind like siblings. My father, gregarious as always, offered a stream of commentary that shifted fluidly from updates on the friends and neighbors we’d bumped into around town to the weather forecast to elaborate discourses on the physics underlying his latest research as a sixty-six-year-old doctoral student at Hampton University. He enjoyed touring my Maine-born-and-raised husband through our neck of the woods and refreshing my connection with local life and history in the process.
During our time home, I spent afternoons with my mother catching matinees at the local cinema, while Aran tagged along with my father and his friends to Norfolk State University football games. We gorged on fried-fish sandwiches at hole-in-the-wall joints near Buckroe Beach, visited the Hampton University Museum’s Native American art collection, and haunted local antiques shops.
As a callow eighteen-year-old leaving for college, I’d seen my hometown as a mere launching pad for a life in worldlier locales, a place to be from rather than a place to be. But years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city’s hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to mean to me.
That day after church, we spent a long while catching up with the formidable Mrs. Land, who had been one of my favorite Sunday school teachers. Kathaleen Land, a retired NASA mathematician, still lived on her own well into her nineties and never missed a Sunday at church. We said our good-byes to her and clambered into the minivan, off to a family brunch. “A lot of the women around here, black and white, worked as computers,” my father said, glancing at Aran in the rearview mirror but addressing us both. “Kathryn Peddrew, Ophelia Taylor, Sue Wilder,” he said, ticking off a few more names. “And Katherine Johnson, who calculated the launch windows for the first astronauts.”
The narrative triggered memories decades old, of spending a much-treasured day off from school at my father’s office at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Langley Research Center. I rode shotgun in our 1970s Pontiac, my brother, Ben, and sister Lauren in the back as our father drove the twenty minutes from our house, straight over the Virgil I. Grissom Bridge, down Mercury Boulevard, to the road that led to the NASA gate. Daddy flashed his badge, and we sailed through to a campus of perfectly straight parallel streets lined from one end to the other by unremarkable two-story redbrick buildings. Only the giant hypersonic wind tunnel complex—a one-hundred-foot ridged silver sphere presiding over four sixty-foot smooth silver globes—offered visual evidence of the remarkable work occurring on an otherwise ordinary-looking campus.
Building 1236, my father’s daily destination, contained a byzantine complex of government-gray cubicles, perfumed with the grown-up smells of coffee and stale cigarette smoke. His engineering colleagues with their rumpled style and distracted manner seemed like exotic birds in a sanctuary. They gave us kids stacks of discarded 11×14 continuous-form computer paper, printed on one side with cryptic arrays of numbers, the blank side a canvas for crayon masterpieces. Women occupied many of the cubicles; they answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but they also made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and conferred with my father and other men in the office on the stacks of documents that littered their desks. That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother’s age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.
My dad joined Langley in 1964 as a coop student and retired in 2004 an internationally respected climate scientist. Five of my father’s seven siblings made their bones as engineers or technologists, and some of his best buddies—David Woods, Elijah Kent, Weldon Staton—carved out successful engineering careers at Langley. Our next-door neighbor taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother’s sorority, and electrical engineers sat on the board of my parents’ college alumni associations. My aunt Julia’s husband, Charles Foxx, was the son of Ruth Bates Harris, a career civil servant and fierce advocate for the advancement of women and minorities; in 1974, NASA appointed her deputy assistant administrator, the highest-ranking woman at the agency. The community certainly included black English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors, and contractors, black cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents, and undertakers, several black lawyers, and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that’s just what black folks did.
My father, growing up during segregation, experienced a different reality. “Become a physical education teacher,” my grandfather said in 1962 to his eighteen-year-old son, who was hell-bent on studying electrical engineering at historically black Norfolk State College.
In those days, college-educated African Americans with book smarts and common sense put their chips on teaching jobs or sought work at the post office. But my father, who built his first rocket in junior high metal shop class following the Sputnik launch in 1957, defied my grandfather and plunged full steam ahead into engineering. Of course, my grandfather’s fears that it would be difficult for a black man to break into engineering weren’t unfounded. As late as 1970, just 1 percent of all American engineers were black—a number that doubled to a whopping 2 percent by 1984. Still, the federal government was the most reliable employer of African Americans in the sciences and technology: in 1984, 8.4 percent of NASA’s engineers were black.
NASA’s African American employees learned to navigate their way through the space agency’s engineering culture, and their successes in turn afforded their children previously unimaginable access to American society. Growing up with white friends and attending integrated schools, I took much of the groundwork they’d laid for granted.
Every day I watched my father put on a suit and back out of the driveway to make the twenty-minute drive to Building 1236, demanding the best from himself in order to give his best to the space program and to his family. Working at Langley, my father secured my family’s place in the comfortable middle class, and Langley became one of the anchors of our social life. Every summer, my siblings and I saved our allowances to buy tickets to ride ponies at the annual NASA carnival. Year after year, I confided my Christmas wish list to the NASA Santa at the Langley children’s Christmas party. For years, Ben, Lauren, and my youngest sister, Jocelyn, still a toddler, sat in the bleachers of the Langley Activities Building on Thursday nights, rooting for my dad and his “NBA” (NASA Basketball Association) team, the Stars. I was as much a product of NASA as the Moon landing.
The spark of curiosity soon became an all-consuming fire. I peppered my father with questions about his early days at Langley during the mid-1960s, questions I’d never asked before. The following Sunday I interviewed Mrs. Land about the early days of Langley’s computing pool, when part of her job responsibility was knowing which bathroom was marked for “colored” employees. And less than a week later I was sitting on the couch in Katherine Johnson’s living room, under a framed American flag that had been to the Moon, listening to a ninety-three-year-old with a memory sharper than mine recall segregated buses, years of teaching and raising a family, and working out the trajectory for John Glenn’s spaceflight. I listened to Christine Darden’s stories of long years spent as a data analyst, waiting for the chance to prove herself as an engineer.
Even as a professional in an integrated world, I had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took for an African American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on the Moon. These women’s paths set the stage for mine; immersing myself in their stories helped me understand my own.
Even if the tale had begun and ended with the first five black women who went to work at Langley’s segregated west side in May 1943—the women later known as the “West Computers”—I still would have committed myself to recording the facts and circumstances of their lives. Just as islands—isolated places with unique, rich biodiversity—have relevance for the ecosystems everywhere, so does studying seemingly isolated or overlooked people and events from the past turn up unexpected connections and insights to modern life. The idea that black women had been recruited to work as mathematicians at the NASA installation in the South during the days of segregation defies our expectations and challenges much of what we think we know about American history. It’s a great story, and that alone makes it worth telling.
In the early stages of researching this book, I shared details of what I had found with experts on the history of the space agency. To a person they encouraged what they viewed as a valuable addition to the body of knowledge, though some questioned the magnitude of the story.
“How many women are we talking about? Five or six?”
I had known more than that number just growing up in Hampton, but even I was surprised at how the numbers kept adding up. These women showed up in photos and phone books, in sources both expected and unusual. A mention of a Langley job in an engagement announcement in the Norfolk Journal and Guide. A handful of names from the daughter of one of the first West Computers. A 1951 memo from the Langley personnel officer reporting on the numbers and status of its black employees, which unexpectedly made reference to one black woman who was a “GS-9 Research Scientist.” I discovered one 1945 personnel document describing a beehive of mathematical activity in an office in a new building on Langley’s west side, staffed by twenty-five black women coaxing numbers out of calculators on a twenty-four-hour schedule, overseen by three black shift supervisors who reported to two white head computers. Even as I write the final words of this book, I’m still doing the numbers. I can put names to almost fifty black women who worked as computers, mathematicians, engineers, or scientists at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory from 1943 through 1980, and my intuition is that twenty more names can be shaken loose from the archives with more research.
And while the black women are the most hidden of the mathematicians who worked at the NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later at NASA, they were not sitting alone in the shadows: the white women who made up the majority of Langley’s computing workforce over the years have hardly been recognized for their contributions to the agency’s long-term success. Virginia Biggins worked the Langley beat for the Daily Press newspaper, covering the space program starting in 1958. “Everyone said, ‘This is a scientist, this is an engineer,’ and it was always a man,” she said in a 1990 panel on Langley’s human computers. She never got to meet any of the women. “I just assumed they were all secretaries,” she said. Five white women joined Langley’s first computing pool in 1935, and by 1946, four hundred “girls” had already been trained as aeronautical foot soldiers. Historian Beverly Golemba, in a 1994 study, estimated that Langley had employed “several hundred” women as human computers. On the tail end of the research for Hidden Figures, I can now see how that number might top one thousand.
To a first-time author with no background as a historian, the stakes involved in writing about a topic that was virtually absent from the history books felt high. I’m sensitive to the cognitive dissonance conjured by the phrase “black female mathematicians at NASA.” From the beginning, I knew that I would have to apply the same kind of analytical reasoning to my research that these women applied to theirs. Because as exciting as it was to discover name after name, finding out who they were was just the first step. The real challenge was to document their work. Even more than the surprisingly large numbers of black and white women who had been hiding in a profession seen as universally white and male, the body of work they left behind was a revelation.
There was Dorothy Hoover, working for Robert T. Jones in 1946 and publishing theoretical research on his famed triangle-shaped delta wings in 1951. There was Dorothy Vaughan, working with the white “East Computers” to write a textbook on algebraic methods for the mechanical calculating machines that were their constant companions. There was Mary Jackson, defending her analysis against John Becker, one of the world’s top aerodynamicists. There was Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, describing the orbital trajectory of John Glenn’s flight, the math in her trailblazing 1959 report as elegant and precise and grand as a symphony. There was Marge Hannah, the white computer who served as the black women’s first boss, coauthoring a report with Sam Katzoff, who became the laboratory’s chief scientist. There was Doris Cohen, setting the bar for them all with her first research report—the NACA’s first female author—back in 1941.
My investigation became more like an obsession; I would walk any trail if it meant finding a trace of one of the computers at its end. I was determined to prove their existence and their talent in a way that meant they would never again be lost to history. As the photos and memos and equations and family stories became real people, as the women became my companions and returned to youth or returned to life, I started to want something more for them than just putting them on the record. What I wanted was for them to have the grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as a part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.
Today, my hometown—the hamlet that in 1962 dubbed itself “Spacetown USA”—looks like any suburban city in a modern and hyperconnected America. People of all races and nationalities mingle on Hampton’s beaches and in its bus stations, the WHITES ONLY signs of the past now relegated to the local history museum and the memories of survivors of the civil rights revolution. Mercury Boulevard no longer conjures images of the eponymous mission that shot the first Americans beyond the atmosphere, and each day the memory of Virgil Grissom fades away from the bridge that bears his name. A downsized space program and decades of government cutbacks have hit the region hard; today, an ambitious college grad with a knack for numbers might set her sights on a gig at a Silicon Valley startup or make for one of the many technology firms that are conquering the NASDAQ from the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington, DC.
But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female. For a group of bright and ambitious African American women, diligently prepared for a mathematical career and eager for a crack at the big leagues, Hampton, Virginia, must have felt like the center of the universe.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_aa98d7c0-6a6c-50fc-94db-fb7f0dbd57f3)
A Door Opens (#ulink_aa98d7c0-6a6c-50fc-94db-fb7f0dbd57f3)
Melvin Butler, the personnel officer at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, had a problem, the scope and nature of which was made plain in a May 1943 telegram to the civil service’s chief of field operations. “This establishment has urgent need for approximately 100 Junior Physicists and Mathematicians, 100 Assistant Computers, 75 Minor Laboratory Apprentices, 125 Helper Trainees, 50 Stenographers and Typists,” exclaimed the missive. Every morning at 7:00 a.m., the bow-tied Butler and his staff sprang to life, dispatching the lab’s station wagon to the local rail depot, the bus station, and the ferry terminal to collect the men and women—so many women now, each day more women—who had made their way to the lonely finger of land on the Virginia coast. The shuttle conveyed the recruits to the door of the laboratory’s Service Building on the campus of Langley Field. Upstairs, Butler’s staff whisked them through the first-day stations: forms, photos, and the oath of office: I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic … so help me God.
Thus installed, the newly minted civil servants fanned out to take their places in one of the research facility’s expanding inventory of buildings, each already as full as a pod ripe with peas. No sooner had Sherwood Butler, the laboratory’s head of procurement, set the final brick on a new building than his brother, Melvin, set about filling it with new employees. Closets and hallways, stockrooms and workshops stood in as makeshift offices. Someone came up with the bright idea of putting two desks head to head and jury-rigged the new piece of furniture with a jump seat in order to squeeze three workers into space designed for two. In the four years since Hitler’s troops overran Poland—since American interests and the European war converged in an all-consuming conflict—the laboratory’s complement of 500-odd employees at the close of the decade was on its way to 1,500. Yet the great groaning war machine swallowed them whole and remained hungry for more.
The offices of the Administration Building looked out upon the crescent-shaped airfield. Only the flow of civilian-clothed people heading to the laboratory, the oldest outpost of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), distinguished the low brick buildings belonging to that agency from identical ones used by the US Army Air Corps. The two installations had grown up together, the air base devoted to the development of America’s military airpower capability, the laboratory a civilian agency charged with advancing the scientific understanding of aeronautics and disseminating its findings to the military and private industry. Since the beginning, the army had allowed the laboratory to operate on the campus of the airfield. The close relationship with the army flyers served as a constant reminder to the engineers that every experiment they conducted had real-world implications.
The double hangar—two 110-foot-long buildings standing side by side—had been covered in camouflage paint in 1942 to deceive enemy eyes in search of targets, its shady and cavernous interior sheltering the machines and their minders from the elements. Men in canvas jumpsuits, often in groups, moved in trucks and jeeps from plane to plane, stopping to hover at this one or that like pollinating insects, checking them, filling them with gas, replacing parts, examining them, becoming one with them and taking off for the heavens. The music of airplane engines and propellers cycling through the various movements of takeoff, flight, and landing played from before sunrise until dusk, each machine’s sounds as unique to its minders as a baby’s cry to its mother. Beneath the tenor notes of the engines played the bass roar of the laboratory’s wind tunnels, turning their on-demand hurricanes onto the planes—plane parts, model planes, full-sized planes.
Just two years prior, with the storm clouds gathering, President Roosevelt challenged the nation to ramp up its production of airplanes to fifty thousand per year. It seemed an impossible task for an industry that as recently as 1938 had only provided the Army Air Corps with ninety planes a month. Now, America’s aircraft industry was a production miracle, easily surpassing Roosevelt’s mark by more than half. It had become the largest industry in the world, the most productive, the most sophisticated, outproducing the Germans by more than three times and the Japanese by nearly five. The facts were clear to all belligerents: the final conquest would come from the sky.
For the flyboys of the air corps, airplanes were mechanisms for transporting troops and supplies to combat zones, armed wings for pursuing enemies, sky-high launching pads for ship-sinking bombs. They reviewed their vehicles in an exhaustive preflight checkout before climbing into the sky. Mechanics rolled up their sleeves and sharpened their eyes; a broken piston, an improperly locked shoulder harness, a faulty fuel tank light, any one of these could cost lives. But even before the plane responded to its pilot’s knowing caress, its nature, its very DNA—from the shape of its wings to the cowling of its engine—had been manipulated, refined, massaged, deconstructed, and recombined by the engineers next door.
Long before America’s aircraft manufacturers placed one of their newly conceived flying machines into production, they sent a working prototype to the Langley laboratory so that the design could be tested and improved. Nearly every high-performance aircraft model the United States produced made its way to the lab for drag cleanup: the engineers parked the planes in the wind tunnels, making note of air-disturbing surfaces, bloated fuselages, uneven wing geometries. As prudent and thorough as old family doctors, they examined every aspect of the air flowing over the plane, making careful note of the vital signs. NACA test pilots, sometimes with an engineer riding shotgun, took the plane for a flight. Did it roll unexpectedly? Did it stall? Was it hard to maneuver, resisting the pilot like a shopping cart with a bad wheel? The engineers subjected the airplanes to tests, capturing and analyzing the numbers, recommending improvements, some slight, others significant. Even small improvements in speed and efficiency multiplied over millions of pilot miles added up to a difference that could tip the long-term balance of the war in the Allies’ favor.
“Victory through airpower!” Henry Reid, engineer-in-charge of the Langley laboratory, crooned to his employees, the shibboleth a reminder of the importance of the airplane to the war’s outcome. “Victory through airpower!” the NACA-Aites repeated to each other, minding each decimal point, poring over differential equations and pressure distribution charts until their eyes tired. In the battle of research, victory would be theirs.
Unless, of course, Melvin Butler failed to feed the three-shift-a-day, six-day-a-week operation with fresh minds. The engineers were one thing, but each engineer required the support of a number of others: craftsmen to build the airplane models tested in the tunnels, mechanics to maintain the tunnels, and nimble number crunchers to process the numerical deluge that issued from the research. Lift and drag, friction and flow. What was a plane but a bundle of physics? Physics, of course, meant math, and math meant mathematicians. And since the middle of the last decade, mathematicians had meant women. Langley’s first female computing pool, started in 1935, had caused an uproar among the men of the laboratory. How could a female mind process something so rigorous and precise as math? The very idea, investing $500 on a calculating machine so it could be used by a girl! But the “girls” had been good, very good—better at computing, in fact, than many of the engineers, the men themselves grudgingly admitted. With only a handful of girls winning the title “mathematician”—a professional designation that put them on equal footing with entry-level male employees—the fact that most computers were designated as lower-paid “subprofessionals” provided a boost to the laboratory’s bottom line.
But in 1943, the girls were harder to come by. Virginia Tucker, Langley’s head computer, ran laps up and down the East Coast searching for coeds with even a modicum of analytical or mechanical skill, hoping for matriculating college students to fill the hundreds of open positions for computers, scientific aides, model makers, laboratory assistants, and yes, even mathematicians. She conscripted what seemed like entire classes of math graduates from her North Carolina alma mater, the Greensboro College for Women, and hunted at Virginia schools like Sweetbriar in Lynchburg and the State Teachers College in Farmville.
Melvin Butler leaned on the US Civil Service Commission and the War Manpower Commission as hard as he could so that the laboratory might get top priority on the limited pool of qualified applicants. He penned ads for the local newspaper, the Daily Press: “Reduce your household duties! Women who are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and do jobs previously filled by men should call the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory,” read one notice. Fervent pleas from the personnel department were published in the employee newsletter Air Scoop: “Are there members of your family or others you know who would like to play a part in gaining supremacy of the air? Have you friends of either sex who would like to do important work toward winning and shortening the war?” With men being absorbed into the military services, with women already in demand by eager employers, the labor market was as exhausted as the war workers themselves.
A bright spot presented itself in the form of another man’s problem. A. Philip Randolph, the head of the largest black labor union in the country, demanded that Roosevelt open lucrative war jobs to Negro applicants, threatening in the summer of 1941 to bring one hundred thousand Negroes to the nation’s capital in protest if the president rebuffed his demand. “Who the hell is this guy Randolph?” fumed Joseph Rauh, the president’s aide. Roosevelt blinked.
A “tall courtly black man with Shakespearean diction and the stare of an eagle,” Asa Philip Randolph, close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, headed the 35,000-strong Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The porters waited on passengers in the nation’s segregated trains, daily enduring prejudice and humiliation from whites. Nevertheless, these jobs were coveted in the black community because they provided a measure of economic stability and social standing. Believing that civil rights were inextricably linked to economic rights, Randolph fought tirelessly for the right of Negro Americans to participate fairly in the wealth of the country they had helped build. Twenty years in the future, Randolph would address the multitudes at another March on Washington, then concede the stage to a young, charismatic minister from Atlanta named Martin Luther King Jr.
Later generations would associate the black freedom movement with King’s name, but in 1941, as the United States oriented every aspect of its society toward war for the second time in less than thirty years, it was Randolph’s long-term vision and the specter of a march that never happened that pried open the door that had been closed like a bank vault since the end of Reconstruction. With two strokes of a pen—Executive Order 8802, ordering the desegregation of the defense industry, and Executive Order 9346, creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to monitor the national project of economic inclusion—Roosevelt primed the pump for a new source of labor to come into the tight production process.
Nearly two years after Randolph’s 1941 showdown, as the laboratory’s personnel requests reached the civil service, applications of qualified Negro female candidates began filtering in to the Langley Service Building, presenting themselves for consideration by the laboratory’s personnel staff. No photo advised as to the applicant’s color—that requirement, instituted under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, was struck down as the Roosevelt administration tried to dismantle discrimination in hiring practices. But the applicants’ alma maters tipped their hand: West Virginia State University, Howard, Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal, Hampton Institute just across town—all Negro schools. Nothing in the applications indicated anything less than fitness for the job. If anything, they came with more experience than the white women applicants, with many years of teaching experience on top of math or science degrees.
They would need a separate space, Melvin Butler knew. Then they would have to appoint someone to head the new group, an experienced girl—white, obviously—someone whose disposition suited the sensitivity of the assignment. The Warehouse Building, a brand-new space on the west side of the laboratory, a part of the campus that was still more wilderness than anything resembling a workplace, could be just the thing. His brother Sherwood’s group had already moved there, as had some of the employees in the personnel department. With round-the-clock pressure to test the airplanes queued up in the hangar, engineers would welcome the additional hands. So many of the engineers were Northerners, relatively agnostic on the racial issue but devout when it came to mathematical talent.
Melvin Butler himself hailed from Portsmouth, just across the bay from Hampton. It required no imagination on his part to guess what some of his fellow Virginians might think of the idea of integrating Negro women into Langley’s offices, the “come-heres” (as the Virginians called the newcomers to the state) and their strange ways be damned. There had always been Negro employees in the lab—janitors, cafeteria workers, mechanic’s assistants, groundskeepers. But opening the door to Negroes who would be professional peers, that was something new.
Butler proceeded with discretion: no big announcement in the Daily Press, no fanfare in Air Scoop. But he also proceeded with direction: nothing to herald the arrival of the Negro women to the laboratory, but nothing to derail their arrival either. Maybe Melvin Butler was progressive for his time and place, or maybe he was just a functionary carrying out his duty. Maybe he was both. State law—and Virginia custom—kept him from truly progressive action, but perhaps the promise of a segregated office was just the cover he needed to get the black women in the door, a Trojan horse of segregation opening the door to integration. Whatever his personal feelings on race, one thing was clear: Butler was a Langley man through and through, loyal to the laboratory, to its mission, to its worldview, and to its charge during the war. By nature—and by mandate—he and the rest of the NACA were all about practical solutions.
So, too, was A. Philip Randolph. The leader’s indefatigable activism, unrelenting pressure, and superior organizing skills laid the foundation for what, in the 1960s, would come to be known as the civil rights movement. But there was no way that Randolph, or the men at the laboratory, or anyone else could have predicted that the hiring of a group of black female mathematicians at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory would end at the Moon.
Still shrouded from view were the great aeronautical advances that would crush the notion that faster-than-sound flight was a physical impossibility, the electronic calculating devices that would amplify the power of science and technology to unthinkable dimensions. No one anticipated that millions of wartime women would refuse to leave the American workplace and forever change the meaning of women’s work, or that American Negroes would persist in their demands for full access to the founding ideals of their country and not be moved. The black female mathematicians who walked into Langley in 1943 would find themselves at the intersection of these great transformations, their sharp minds and ambitions contributing to what the United States would consider one of its greatest victories.
But in 1943, America existed in the urgent present. Responding to the needs of the here and now, Butler took the next step, making a note to add another item to Sherwood’s seemingly endless requisition list: a metal bathroom sign bearing the words COLORED GIRLS.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_d13c61a0-2f66-52c4-89c0-18fb4a0f2fec)
Mobilization (#ulink_d13c61a0-2f66-52c4-89c0-18fb4a0f2fec)
There was no escaping the heat in the summer of 1943, not in the roiling seas of the South Pacific, not in the burning skies over Hamburg and Sicily, and not for the group of Negro women working in Camp Pickett’s laundry boiler plant. The temperature and humidity inside the army facility were so intense that slipping outdoors into the 100-plus degrees of the central Virginia June summer invited relief.
The laundry room was both one of the war’s obscure crannies and a microcosm of the war itself, a sophisticated, efficient machine capable of processing eighteen thousand bundles of laundry each week. One group of women loaded soiled laundry into the enormous boilers. Others heaved the sopping clothes into the dryers. Another team worked the pressing machines like cooks at a giant griddle. Thirty-two-year-old Dorothy Vaughan stood at the sorting station, reuniting wayward socks and trousers with the laundry bags of the black and white soldiers who came to Camp Pickett by the trainload for four weeks of basic training before heading on to the Port of Embarkation in Newport News. Small talk of husbands, children, lives back home, or the ever-present war rose above the thunder and hum of the giant laundry boilers and dryers. We gave him a real nice send-off, whole neighborhood turned out. Just as well you can’t get stockings nowhere, hot as it is. That Mr. Randolph sure is something, and friends with Mrs. Roosevelt too! They brooded over the husbands and brothers and fathers heading into the conflict that was so far away from the daily urgencies of their lives in Virginia, yet so close to their prayers and their dreams.
The majority of the women who found their way to the military laundry room had left behind jobs as domestic servants or as stemmers in the tobacco factories. The laundry was a humid inferno, the work as monotonous as it was uncomfortable. Laundry workers existed at the bottom of the war’s great pyramid, invisible and invaluable at the same time. One aircraft industry executive estimated that each laundry worker supported three workers at his plants; with someone else to tend to their dirty clothing, men and women on the production lines had lower rates of absenteeism. The laundry workers earned 40 cents an hour, ranking them among the lowest paid of all war workers, but with few job options available to them, it felt like a windfall.
Only a week had elapsed between the end of the school year at Robert Russa Moton, the Negro high school in Farmville, Virginia, where Dorothy worked as a math teacher, and her first day of work at Camp Pickett. As a college graduate and a teacher, she stood near the top of what most Negro women could hope to achieve. Teachers were considered the “upper level of training and intelligence in the race,” a ground force of educators who would not just impart book learning but live in the Negro community and “direct its thoughts and head its social movements.” Her in-laws were mainstays of the town’s Negro elite. They owned a barbershop, a pool hall, and a service station. The family’s activities were regular fodder for the social column in the Farmville section of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the leading Negro newspaper in the southeastern United States. Dorothy, her husband, Howard, and their four young children lived in a large, rambling Victorian house on South Main Street with Howard’s parents and grandparents.
In the summer of 1943, Dorothy jumped at the chance to head to Camp Pickett and earn extra money during the school break. Though teaching offered prestige, the compensation was modest. Nationally, Virginia’s white teachers ranked in the bottom quarter in public school salaries, and their black counterparts might earn almost 50 percent less. Many black teachers in the South gave lessons in one- or two-room schools that barely qualified as buildings. Teachers were called upon to do whatever was necessary to keep the schoolhouses clean, safe, and comfortable for pupils. They shoveled coal in winters, fixed broken windows, scrubbed dirty floors, and prepared lunch. They reached into their own threadbare purses when the schoolroom kitty fell short.
Another woman in Dorothy’s situation might have seen taking the laundry job as unthinkable, regardless of the economics. Wasn’t the purpose of a college degree to get away from the need to work dirty and difficult jobs? And the location of the camp, thirty miles southeast of Farmville, meant that she lived in worker housing during the week and got back home only on weekends. But the 40 cents an hour Dorothy earned as a laundry sorter bested what she earned as a teacher, and with four children, a summer of extra income would be put to good and immediate use.
And Dorothy was of an unusually independent mind, impatient with the pretensions that sometimes accompanied the upwardly mobile members of the race. She did nothing to draw attention to herself at Camp Pickett, nor did she make any distinctions between herself and the other women. There was something in her bearing that transcended her soft voice and diminutive stature. Her eyes dominated her lovely, caramel-hued face—almond-shaped, wide-set, intense eyes that seemed to see everything. Education topped her list of ideals; it was the surest hedge against a world that would require more of her children than white children, and attempt to give them less in return. The Negro’s ladder to the American dream was missing rungs, with even the most outwardly successful blacks worried that at any moment the forces of discrimination could lay waste to their economic security. Ideals without practical solutions were empty promises. Standing on her feet all day in the sweltering laundry was an opportunity if the tumbled military uniforms bought new school clothes, if each sock made a down payment on her children’s college educations.
At night in the bunk of the workers’ housing, as she willed a breeze to cut through the motionless night air, Dorothy thought of Ann, age eight, Maida, six, Leonard, three, and Kenneth, just eight months old. Their lives and futures informed every decision she made. Like virtually every Negro woman she knew, she struggled to find the balance between spending time with her children at home and spending time for them, for her family, at a job.
Dorothy was born in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her own mother died when Dorothy was just two years old, and less than a year later, her father, Leonard Johnson, a waiter, remarried. Her stepmother, Susie Peeler Johnson, worked as a charwoman at the grand Union Station train depot to help support the family. She took Dorothy as her own daughter and pushed her to succeed, teaching the precocious girl to read before she entered school, which vaulted her ahead two grades. She also encouraged her daughter’s natural musical talent by enrolling her in piano lessons. When Dorothy was eight, the family relocated to Morgantown, West Virginia, where her father accepted a job working for a successful Negro restaurateur. There she attended the Beechhurst School, a consolidated Negro school located around the corner from West Virginia University, the state’s flagship white college. Seven years later, Dorothy reaped the reward for her hard work in the form of the valedictorian’s spot and a full-tuition scholarship to Wilberforce University, the country’s oldest private Negro college, in Xenia, Ohio. The African Methodist Episcopal Sunday School Convention of West Virginia, which underwrote the scholarship, celebrated fifteen-year-old Dorothy in an eight-page pamphlet that it published and distributed to church members, lauding her intelligence, her work ethic, her naturally kind disposition, and her humility. “This is the dawn of a life, a promise held forth. We who have been fortunate enough to guide that genius and help mold it, even for a little while, will look on with interest during the coming years,” wrote Dewey Fox, the organization’s vice president. Dorothy was the kind of young person who filled the Negro race with hope that its future in America would be more propitious than its past.
At Wilberforce, Dorothy earned “splendid grades” and chose math as her major. When she was an upperclassman, one of Dorothy’s professors at Wilberforce recommended her for graduate study in mathematics at Howard University, in what would be the inaugural class for a master’s degree in the subject. Howard, based in Washington, DC, was the summit of Negro scholarship. Elbert Frank Cox and Dudley Weldon Woodard, the first two Negroes to earn doctorates in mathematics, with degrees from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, ran the department. The white schools’ prejudice was the black schools’ windfall: with almost no possibility of securing a faculty position at a white college, brilliant black scholars like Cox and Woodard and W. E. B. Du Bois, the sociologist and historian who was the first Negro to receive a doctorate from Harvard, taught almost exclusively at Negro schools, bringing students like Dorothy into close contact with some of the finest minds in the world.
Howard University represented a singular opportunity for Dorothy, in line with the AME scholarship committee’s lofty expectations. Possessed of an inner confidence that attributed no shortcoming either to her race or to her gender, Dorothy welcomed the chance to prove herself in a competitive academic arena. But the economic reality that confronted Dorothy when she came out of college made graduate study seem like an irresponsible extravagance. With the onset of the Great Depression, Dorothy’s parents, like a third of all Americans, found steady work hard to come by. An extra income would help keep the household above water and improve the odds that Dorothy’s sister might be able to follow her path to college. Dorothy, though only nineteen years old, felt it was her responsibility to ensure that the family could make its way through the hard times, even though it meant closing the door on her own ambitions, at least for the moment. She opted to earn a degree in education and pursue teaching, the most stable career for a black woman with a college degree.
Through an extensive grapevine, black colleges received calls from schools around the country requesting teachers, then dispatched their alumni to fill open positions in everything from tar paper shacks in the rural cotton belt to Washington, DC’s elite Dunbar High School. New educators hoped to teach in their major subject, of course, but would be expected to assume whatever duties were necessary. After graduation in 1929, Dorothy was sent forth like a secular missionary to join the Negro teaching force.
Her first job, teaching math and English at a Negro school in rural Tamms, Illinois, ended after her first school year. The Depression-fueled collapse in cotton prices hit the area hard, and the school system simply shut its doors, leaving no public education for the rural county’s Negro students. She fared no better in her next posting in coastal North Carolina, where, in the middle of the school year, the school ran out of money and simply stopped paying her. Dorothy supported herself and contributed to the family by working as a waitress at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia, until 1931, when she got word of a job at the school in Farmville.
It was no surprise that the newcomer with the beautiful eyes caught the attention of one of Farmville’s most eligible bachelors. Tall, charismatic, and quick with a smile, Howard Vaughan worked as an itinerant bellman at luxury hotels, going south to Florida in the winter and north to upstate New York and Vermont in the summer. Some years he found work closer to home at the Greenbrier, the luxury resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which was a destination for wealthy and fabulous people from around the world.
Though her husband’s work kept him on the road, Dorothy exchanged her traveling shoes for Farmville life and the routines of family, the stability of regular work, and community. Still, coming of age and entering the workforce in the depths of the Depression permanently affected Dorothy’s worldview. She dressed plainly and modestly, spurned every extravagance, and never turned down the chance to put money in the bank. Though she was a member of Farmville’s Beulah AME Church, it was the First Baptist Church that enjoyed her esteemed piano playing come Sunday morning, because they had hired her as their pianist.
As the war intensified, the town post office was awash in civil service job bulletins, competing for the eyes of locals and college students alike. It was on a trip to the post office during the spring of 1943 that Dorothy spied the notice for the laundry job at Camp Pickett. But the word on another bulletin also caught her eye: mathematics. A federal agency in Hampton sought women to fill a number of mathematical jobs having to do with airplanes. The bulletin, the handiwork of Melvin Butler and the NACA personnel department, was most certainly meant for the eyes of the white, well-to-do students at the all-female State Teachers College there in Farmville. The laboratory had sent application forms, civil service examination notices, and booklets describing the NACA’s work to the school’s job placement offices, asking faculty and staff to spread the word about the open positions among potential candidates. “This organization is considering a plan to visit certain women’s colleges in this area and interview senior students majoring in mathematics,” the laboratory wrote. “It is expected that outstanding students will be offered positions in this laboratory.” Interviews that year yielded four new Farmville girls for the laboratory’s computing sections.
Dorothy’s house on South Main sat down the street from the college campus. Every morning as she walked the two blocks to her job at Moton High School, a U-shaped building perched on a triangular block at the south end of town, she saw the State Teachers College coeds with their books, disappearing into classrooms in their leafy sanctuary of a campus. Dorothy walked to school on the other side of the street, toeing the invisible line that separated them.
It would no sooner have occurred to her that a place with so baroque a name as the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory would solicit an application from Negro women than that the white women at the college across the street would beckon her through the front doors of their manicured enclave. Black newspapers, however, worked relentlessly to spread the word far and wide about available war jobs and exhorted their readers to apply. Some were dubbing Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employment Practices Committee “the most significant move on the part of the Government since the Emancipation Proclamation.” Dorothy’s own sister-in-law had moved to Washington to take a job in the War Department.
In the first week of May 1943, the Norfolk Journal and Guide published an article that would call to Dorothy like a signpost for the road not taken. “Paving the Way for Women Engineers,” read the headline. The accompanying photo showed eleven well-dressed Negro women in front of Hampton Institute’s Bemis Laboratory, graduates of Engineering for Women, a war training class. Founded in 1868, Hampton Institute had grown out of the classes held by the free Negro teacher Mary Peake, in the shade of a majestic tree known as the Emancipation Oak. On the eve of World War II, Hampton was one of the leading Negro colleges in the country and the focal point of the black community’s participation in the conflict.
The women had come from points up and down the East Coast, and from right there in town. Pearl Bassette, one of several Hampton natives, was the daughter of a well-known black lawyer, her family tracing its roots back to the early days of the city. Ophelia Taylor, originally from Georgia, graduated from Hampton Institute, and prior to starting the class was running a nursery school. Mary Cherry came from North Carolina, Minnie McGraw from South Carolina, Madelon Glenn from faraway Connecticut. Miriam Mann, a tiny firebrand who had taught school in Georgia, had come to the city with her family when her husband, William, accepted a position as an instructor teaching machine shop at the US Naval Training School at Hampton Institute.
There were black jobs, and there were good black jobs. Sorting in the laundry, making beds in white folks’ houses, stemming in the tobacco plant—those were black jobs. Owning a barbershop or a funeral home, working in the post office, or riding the rails as a Pullman porter— those were good black jobs. Teacher, preacher, doctor, lawyer—now those were very good black jobs, bringing stability and the esteem that accompanied formal training.
But the job at the aeronautical laboratory was something new, something so unusual it hadn’t yet entered the collective dreams. Not even the long-stalled plan to equalize Negro teachers’ salaries with those of their white counterparts could beat this opportunity. Even if the war ended in six months or a year, a much higher salary even for that brief time would bring Dorothy that much closer to assuring her children’s future.
So that spring, Dorothy Vaughan carefully filled out and mailed two job applications: one to work at Camp Pickett, where the need for labor was so great, so undifferentiated, that there was virtually no possibility that they would not hire her. The other, much longer application reviewed her qualifications in detail. Work history. Personal references. Schools attended: high school and college. Courses taken, grades received. Languages spoken (French, which she had studied at Wilberforce). Foreign travels (None). Would you be willing to accept a position abroad? (No). Would you be willing to accept a position in Washington, DC? (Yes). How soon could you be ready to start work? She knew the answer before her fingers carved it into the blank: 48 hours, she wrote. I can be ready to go within forty-eight hours.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_111f1018-fd7b-5488-a38c-2aa4a361aaaa)
Past Is Prologue (#ulink_111f1018-fd7b-5488-a38c-2aa4a361aaaa)
The 1943 school year at Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton High School started the same way other years always had: same space, more students. The “new” high school, built in 1939 to accommodate 180 students, had been obsolete almost from its beginning. In the school’s first year of operation, 167 students arrived for classes. Four years later, Dorothy Vaughan and her twelve fellow teachers were welcoming 301 education-hungry youngsters, urged along by parents who wanted more for their children than a life of work in the tobacco factories. The students walked for miles to get to the school or took their chances each morning in barely roadworthy buses that made the rounds in the outer reaches of Prince Edward County.
As a member of Moton’s parent-teacher association and a founding board member of the Farmville chapter of the NAACP, Dorothy worked hard to improve the long-term educational prospects of the young people of Farmville. As a teacher, her ambitions were more immediate: with only eight classrooms; no gymnasium, lockers, or cafeteria; and an auditorium outfitted with folding chairs, it took all her leadership and creativity to maintain an orderly learning environment. Somehow, she managed to impart the finer points of arithmetic and algebra in the auditorium, with two other classes taking place simultaneously. The school building might have been modest, but Dorothy’s standards were not. She once discovered an error in one of the math textbooks she used in her classroom and dashed off a letter to the publisher informing them of their mistake (they fixed it, and sent her a thank-you letter in return). The Good Lord himself might have squirmed in his seat if Mrs. Vaughan had caught Him out in her class without having done His algebra homework. She devoted time after the end of the school day to tutoring students who required extra help. She also worked with the school choir; under her direction, several of Moton’s vocal quartets had come away victorious in statewide music competitions. In 1935, a Norfolk Journal and Guide article covering the annual event dubbed her “the festival’s most enthusiastic and hardest working director.” In 1943, she and the school’s music teacher, Altona Johns, put students through their paces in preparation for the year’s Christmas cantata, “The Light Still Shines.”
The feverish summer gave way to fall foliage and brisk mornings, but routines had changed to accommodate the war. The school’s 4-H club made care packages for departing servicemen and hosted a community discussion entitled “What Can We Do to Win the War?” The Moton school office put war stamps on sale, each purchase a small offset against the gargantuan cost of the military production. The community held going-away parties and prepared feasts for the young men heading off to the front. Dorothy updated her classes with a unit called Wartime Mathematics, teaching students to apply arithmetic operations to household budgeting and wartime ration books and updating classic word problems with airplanes instead of cars.
Sometimes, it seemed as if Dorothy had never been without Farmville or Farmville without her. The town had embraced her with the warmth accorded a native daughter; she had called it home longer than any other place she’d lived in in her thirty-two years. Her life, however, was a model of America’s great love affair with mobility, in every sense. In moments of deepest reflection, as she waited for a response to her application for the job in Hampton, Dorothy might have detected the quickening of something beyond the pragmatic hope for economic advancement, the reigniting of restless embers long quiet in the twelve years since she had come to Farmville.
Paper resolve was one thing, the messiness of real life another. She was no longer a single student with an itinerant soul but a wife and mother of four children. The job at Langley was a full-time position and required a six-day workweek at an office too far away to come home on weekends, as she had done during the summer at Camp Pickett. And yet, when the half-forgotten, hoped-for letter finally arrived, she had already made up her mind. Once Dorothy made up her mind, no one—not her husband, not her in-laws, not the principal at Moton—would be able to dissuade her from her goal.
You are hereby appointed Mathematician, Grade P-1, with pay at the rate of $2,000 per annum, for such period of time as your service may be required, but not to extend beyond the duration of the present war and for six months thereafter.
The pay was more than twice the $850 annual salary she earned teaching at Moton.
Dorothy’s farewell was as straightforward and unadorned as the letter that had arrived from the NACA that fall. No party or fanfare marked her departure, just a single line in the Farmville section of the Norfolk Journal and Guide: “Mrs. D. J. Vaughan, instructor in mathematics at the high school for several years, has accepted a position at Langley Field, VA.” Never one for the long good-bye, she lingered over her children in the house on South Main only until the bell rang at the front door. “I’ll be back for Christmas,” Dorothy said, with a final round of embraces. For twelve school years, every morning, she had turned left out the front door to get to work. Now the taxi turned right, spiriting her off in the opposite direction.
The Colored waiting room at the Greyhound bus station served as the checkpoint for an in-between world. Dorothy boarded the bus, and with each passing mile, life in Farmville faded into the distance. The job at Langley, an abstraction for half a year, moved into focus. Dorothy’s previous travels—Missouri to West Virginia, Ohio to Illinois, North Carolina to Virginia—dwarfed the mere 137 miles that separated Farmville from Newport News, where she had managed to secure temporary housing using a list of rooms for rent for colored tenants. Surely she had never traveled a greater emotional distance. In the transitional space of the bus, she turned over the questions that had loitered in her mind since sending off her application six months prior. What would it be like to work with white people? Would she sit side by side with young women like the ones at the State Teachers College? Would she miss the rolling blue hills of Virginia’s Piedmont, or fall in love with the great expanse of the Chesapeake Bay and the many rivers, inlets, and wetlands that embroidered the Virginia coast? How would she endure the time and distance that separated her from her children, the warmth of their embraces still fresh on her skin as the bus gained the road south?
Surrounded by grandparents and dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins, in a community where neighbors counted as family, pitching in when relatives couldn’t, Dorothy’s children’s lives would change very little. Accustomed to their mother’s long workdays and their father’s extended absences, they missed Dorothy, but her departure didn’t interrupt their high-spirited lives replete with family, friends, and school.
It would, however, complicate her marriage with Howard, in which time spent apart was already measured in weeks or months rather than days. Dorothy was twenty-two years old in 1932 when they married, and ready to assume the mantle of traditional family life. Dorothy, who grew up without grandparents, basked in the stability and warmth of the extended Vaughan family, but loving in-laws could provide only so much salve for a missing husband’s companionship. The geographic separation between wife and husband was a proxy for the emotional distance that opened between them as the years progressed, exposing an unevenness that was perhaps present from the beginning of their relationship.
When home from the hotel circuit, Howard’s longings were for the simplicities of small-town life: spending time with family and friends and working in the family’s poolroom. Dorothy, on the other hand, filled every spare hour of her week with activity, from NAACP meetings to piano rehearsals at the church. Howard was satisfied with his high school diploma, but years after she chose teaching over a master’s degree from Howard University, Dorothy had decided to travel to the Virginia State College for Negroes near Richmond, Virginia, once a week for a semester to take an evening extension course in education.
Dorothy, who knew the call of the open road so well, could certainly understand some of the appeal of Howard’s unusual and itinerant career, and she supported it as best she could. In 1942, the entire family accompanied him to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, renting a house in town that was close enough for Howard to walk to his job as a bellman at the Greenbrier. Warned by their parents not to even think about setting foot on the hotel grounds, the Vaughan children got as close as they could to the enormous white-columned resort from the periphery, peering through the shrubbery-covered iron fence from the outside so that they might steal a glance at the German and Japanese detainees interned at a makeshift prisoner-of-war camp on the premises.
Their rented house was across the street from the home of an older Negro couple, Joshua and Joylette Coleman. Joshua and Howard shared bellman duties at the front desk of the Greenbrier. While the men worked, Dorothy and the children passed the day with Joylette, a retired schoolteacher. The Vaughan children came to love the Colemans; it was like having another set of grandparents. Dorothy, who had spent seven years of her youth in West Virginia, told stories of living in the state and listened to the Colemans’ proud tales of their children’s exploits, particularly those of their youngest daughter, Katherine.
Charles, Margaret, Horace, and Katherine Coleman had grown up right there in town. Twenty-four-year-old Katherine lived in Marion, Virginia, a speck of a town in the state’s rural southwest. Until settling down and starting a family, Katherine had also worked as a math teacher. Like Dorothy, Katherine’s intellectual gifts particularly her talent for math had skipped her ahead in school. She graduated from high school at fourteen and enrolled at West Virginia State Institute, a black college located just outside of Charleston, the state capital. By her junior year, Katherine had tackled every math course in the school’s catalog and had been taken under the wing of a gifted young math professor named William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, who created advanced math classes just for her. Claytor, who earned a PhD in math from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933, was only the third Negro in the country to obtain the credential. He had graduated from Howard University in 1929 and took a seat in the school’s inaugural one-year master’s degree program in mathematics—the same offer Dorothy had been unable to accept.
Whether or not Dorothy and Katherine ever realized that the brilliant Claytor was one of their shared connections—Dorothy almost never discussed her Howard admittance—Katherine’s path following her graduation from the college, with a summa cum laude degree in math and French, must have felt to Dorothy like an alternate version of her own story. In 1936, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led by Charles Hamilton Houston, successfully argued the Supreme Court case Murray v. Pearson, ending graduate school admission policies that explicitly barred black students. Building on that victory, the organization scored again at the high court with 1938’s Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, requiring states either to provide their black students with separate (but “equal”) graduate and professional school programs or to allow them to integrate the white schools. Some states, like Virginia, simply refused to comply: in 1936, a black student from Richmond named Alice Jackson Houston applied to the University of Virginia to study French, but she was denied admission. The NAACP sued on her behalf, and in response, the state of Virginia set up a tuition reimbursement fund, subsidizing the graduate educations of black students in any place but Virginia, a policy that continued until 1950.
West Virginia, however, decided to integrate. Quietly, quickly, and without protest, three “unusually capable” Negro students began graduate studies at West Virginia University in Morgantown in the summer of 1940. The Colemans’ daughter Katherine was one of them, a testament to both her academic talent and a strength of character that could stand up to the isolation and scrutiny that came along with being a black student on the front lines of desegregation. But a master’s degree in math would elude Katherine just as it had Dorothy. After the summer session, Katherine decided to leave WVU’s graduate program for a life as a full-time wife and mother, the call of domestic life winning out over career ambition.
Katherine’s parents loved their son-in-law, Jimmy, a chemistry teacher whom Katherine met at her first teaching assignment, and they doted on their three granddaughters. Her choice to prioritize family life did nothing to dampen her parents’ pride in her academic achievements. Did she, like Dorothy, ever wonder about where the opportunity might have taken her? Did she imagine what her talent might look like if it were pushed to the limit? Katherine had made her choice only two years earlier. Dorothy’s first big chance was now fifteen years in the past, long enough ago to assume that the die of her life had been irrevocably cast.
And yet at the end of November 1943, at thirty-two years old, a second chance—one that might finally unleash her professional potential—found Dorothy Vaughan. It was disguised as a temporary furlough from her life as a teacher, a stint expected to end and deposit her back in the familiarity of Farmville when her country’s long and bloody conflict was over. The Colemans’ youngest daughter would eventually find the same second chance years in the future, following Dorothy Vaughan down the road to Newport News, turning the happenstance of a meeting during the Greenbrier summer into something that looked a lot more like destiny.
Out the window of the Greyhound bus, the gentle hills of the Piedmont flattened and broadened and the state capital came and went, and as the coastal plain of the Tidewater region advanced toward Dorothy at forty miles per hour, one of the country’s busiest war boomtowns opened its arms to receive its newest resident.

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