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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

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.

With men off to the front, womanpower picked up the slack, and local businesses went to extraordinary lengths to recruit and retain female employees.

Between 1940 and 1942, the region’s civilian population exploded from 393,000 to 576,000, and that was before accounting for the tenfold increase in military personnel, from 15,000 to more than 150,000.

But talented computers, particularly those with years of experience, were valuable resources. The ink was barely dry on the bulletin in Air Scoop announcing the reduction in force before Melvin Butler released a plan to offer permanent appointments to war service employees. Some top-ranked managers went out of their way to keep the most productive women on the job by giving them the flexibility they needed to take care of their families.

Computing pools attached to specific tunnels or branches grew larger, spawned their own supervisors, and gave the female professionals the opportunity to specialize in a particular subfield of aeronautics. A computer who could process data on the spot and understand how to interpret it was more valuable to the team than a pool computer with more general knowledge. That kind of specialization would be the key to managing the increasingly complex nature of aeronautical research in the postwar era.

Truman issued Executive Order 9980, sharpening the teeth of the wartime mandate that had helped bring West Area Computing into existence. The new law went further than the measure brought to life by A. Philip Randolph and President Roosevelt by making the heads of each federal department “personally responsible” for maintaining a work environment free of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. The

It was the proximity to professional equality that gave the slight such a surprising and enduring sting.

Each new facility the laboratory built fueled the demand for specialization among its professionals. As the answers to the

fundamental problems of flight became clearer, the next level of questioning required finer, more acute knowledge, making the idea of a central computing pool—generalists with mechanical calculating machines, capable of handling any type of overflow work—redundant.

Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well. Without it, women remaining in the segregated pool were left in a state of technical limbo.

Though many competitors within the US government were vying to lead the space effort—among them the US Air Force, the US Naval Research Observatory in Washington, DC, and Wernher von Braun and the Germans who ran the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama—it was the NACA that was chosen as the repository for all of America’s disparate space operations. The NACA—civilian and innocuous, abundant in engineering talent—was the perfect container. In October 1958, with Mother Langley as the nucleus, the US government fused all the competing operations, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, into the NACA. The expanded mission called for a new name: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.

Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth.

Because of the overwhelmingly white public face of the space program, the black engineers, scientists, and mathematicians who were deeply involved with the space race nevertheless lived in its shadows, even within the black community.

The power of the history of NASA’s black computers is that even the Firsts weren’t the Onlies.