Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

by Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

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.

The most outspoken members of the community refused to internalize the contradiction, openly equating the foreign racists America was moved to destroy with the American racists it chose to abide. “Every type of brutality perpetrated by the Germans, in the name of race, is visited upon the Negro in our southland as regularly as he receives his daily bread,” said Vernon Johns, the husband of Dorothy Vaughan’s former colleague Altona Trent Johns.

It wasn’t northern agitators who pushed Negroes to question their country, as so many southern whites wanted to believe. It was their own pride, their patriotism, their deep and abiding belief in the possibility of democracy that inspired the Negro people. And why not? Who knew American democracy more intimately than the Negro people? They knew democracy’s every virtue, vice, and shortcoming, its voice and contour, by its profound and persistent absence in their lives. The failure to secure the blessings of democracy was the feature that most defined their existence in America.

In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn’t good enough for the white pot.

The end of the West Area Computing section was a bittersweet moment for Dorothy Vaughan. It had taken her eight years to reach the seat at the front of the office. For seven years after that she ruled the most unlikely of realms: a room full of black female mathematicians, doing research at the world’s most prestigious aeronautical laboratory. Her stewardship of the section had supported the careers of women like Katherine Goble, who would ultimately receive her country’s highest civilian honor for her contributions to the space program. The standards upheld by the women of West Computing set a floor for the possibilities of a new generation of girls with a passion for math and hopes for a career beyond teaching. Just as the original NACA-ites would forever hold on to their identities as members of that venerable organization, the black women would always feel an allegiance to West Area Computing, and to the woman who led it to its final day, Dorothy Vaughan.

One thing built on the next. Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.