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 East Area Computing gone, West Area Computing was boxed in on two fronts. Not only was the group all black, it was also the only stand-alone all-female professional section left at the laboratory, and by the late 1950s, that had become an anachronism. The black men, like Thomas Byrdsong and Jim Williams and Larry Brown, certainly had to spar with racial prejudice, but they started their Langley careers with all the privileges of being a male engineer. And although the lacunae of computing pools attached to PARD and Flight Research and the plethora of tunnels were also staffed and supervised by women, those women, including the newly integrated black computers, reported directly to researchers, and they were closely tethered to the work and the status of the male engineers whose spaces they shared. Like Virginia Tucker before her, Dorothy Vaughan now presided over an appendix, still attached to the research operation but whose function had attenuated over time.