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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

On the first day of December 1943, as the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and Russia concluded a conference in Tehran in which they planned a summer 1944 invasion of France—an operation that would be known to history as D-Day—Dorothy Vaughan stepped behind the Colored line on the Citizens Rapid Transit bus and headed to her first day of work at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

Manifest Destiny

The only difference between the other rooms at Langley and the one that Dorothy walked into was that the women sitting at the desks, plying the machines for answers to the question what makes things fly, were black.

In 1940, just 2 percent of all black women earned college degrees, and 60 percent of those women became teachers, mostly in public elementary and high schools. Exactly zero percent of those 1940 college graduates became engineers. And yet, in an era when just 10 percent of white women and not even a full third of white men had earned college degrees, the West Computers had found jobs and each other at the “single best and biggest aeronautical research complex in the world.”

Mother Langley had even given birth to two new laboratories: the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in Moffett Field, California, in 1939, and the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1940. Both laboratories siphoned off Langley employees, including computers, for their startup staffs. The agency scrambled to keep up with the production miracle that was the American aircraft industry, which had gone from the country’s forty-third largest industry in 1938 to the world’s number one by 1943.

Flanking John Becker were more female faces—brown faces, peering out from the middle distance. Thelma Stiles smiled, Pearl Bassette’s glasses caught the light of the flash. Tiny Miriam Mann’s head was barely visible over the shoulders of the crowd. Who would have thought that such a mélange of black and white, male and female, blue-collar and white-collar workers, those who worked with their hands and those who worked with numbers, was actually possible? And who would guess that the southern city of Hampton, Virginia, was the place to find it?

They tried to ignore the sign, push it aside during their lunch hour, pretend it wasn’t there. In the office, the women felt equal. But in the cafeteria, and in the bathrooms designated for colored girls, the signs were a reminder that even within the meritocracy of the US Civil Service, even after Executive Order 8802, some were more equal than others.

Irene Morgan worked at the Baltimore-based aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin Company, assigned to the production line of the B-26 Marauder. In the summer of 1944 she came home to Virginia on the Greyhound bus to visit her mother, but was arrested on the return trip to Baltimore for refusing to move to the Colored section. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund took the case and planned to use it to challenge segregation rules on interstate transportation. In 1946, the Supreme Court, in Morgan v. Virginia, held that segregation on interstate buses was illegal.

Some of Langley’s white employees openly defied southern conventions. Head computer Margery Hannah went out of her way to treat the West Area women as equals, and had even invited some of them to work-related social affairs at her apartment. This was nearly unheard of, and made Marge a pariah as far as some white colleagues were concerned.

Robert “R. T.” Jones, whose theory on triangular delta-shaped airplane wings would revolutionize the discipline, was walking through the streets of Hampton one evening when he came upon a group of Hampton police officers harassing a black man. The cops were on the verge of beating the man up when Jones shouted at them to stop. They left the man alone and allowed him to leave, deciding instead to take Jones into custody. He spent the night in the city hoosegow for his trouble. Another engineer, Arthur Kantrowitz, bailed Jones out the next morning.

At some point during the war, the COLORED COMPUTERS sign disappeared into Miriam Mann’s purse and never came back. The separate office remained, as did the segregated bathrooms, but in the Battle of the West Area Cafeteria, the unseen hand had been forced to concede victory to its petite but relentless adversary.

War Birds

Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and the 332nd Fighter Group took the war to the Axis powers from thirty thousand feet.

Initially serving in Bell P-39 Airacobras, they moved on to Republic P-47 Thunderbolts, and by the summer of 1944 the 332nd was flying North American P-51 Mustangs.

With a big four-blade propeller and a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, the Mustang sped into the sky like a champion racehorse. Once aloft, it soared for an eternity, pushing up against 400 miles per hour with the ease of a family sedan out for a Sunday drive. And it was a damn fierce contender in a dogfight. As far as the Tuskegee airmen were concerned, it was the best plane in the world.

The distance between the NACA’s discovery of new aerodynamic concepts and their application to pressing engineering problems was so short, and the pace of their research and development so constant, that an entry-level position at the laboratory was the best engineering graduate school program in the world. Eager front-row boys from the lecture halls of MIT and Michigan and Purdue and Virginia Tech angled for a shot at getting in the door where Dorothy now sat.

One of the NACA’s great contributions to aerodynamics was a series of laminar flow airfoils, wing shapes designed to maximize the flow of smooth air around the wing.

The P-51 Mustang was the first production plane to use one of the NACA’s laminar airfoils, a factor that contributed to its superior performance.

At its simplest, a wind tunnel was a big box attached to a big fan. Engineers blasted air over planes, sometimes full-sized vehicles or fractional-scale models, even disembodied wings or fuselages, closely observing how the air flowed around the object in order to extrapolate how the object would fly through the air.

The Full-Scale Tunnel’s thirty-by sixty-foot test section opened wide enough to swallow a full-sized plane. Though the West Area’s Sixteen-Foot High-Speed Tunnel had an exoskeleton the size of a battleship, the test section—the area where engineers, sitting at a control panel, observed the air flowing over the model—was only the size of a rowboat. But in order to accelerate the air to the necessary speed, giant wooden turbines had to accelerate the blast through the entirety of the tunnel’s circuit.

Like Darwin’s finches, the mechanical birds had begun to differentiate themselves, branching into distinct species adapted for success in particular environments. Their designations reflected their use: fighters—also called pursuit planes—were assigned letters F or P: for example, the Chance Vought F4U Corsair or the North American P-51 Mustang. The letter C identified a cargo plane like the Douglas C-47 Skytrain, built to transport military goods and troops and, eventually, commercial passengers. B was for bomber, like the mammoth and perfectly named B-29 Superfortress. And X identified an experimental plane still under development, designed for the purpose of research and testing. Planes lost their X designation—the B-29 was the direct descendant of the XB-29—once they went into production.

After several rounds of refinement in the Langley wind tunnels, the Mustang achieved its apotheosis with the P-51D. Discoveries large and small contributed to the speed, maneuverability, and safety of the machine that symbolized the power and potential of an America that was ascending to a position of unparalleled global dominance.

For seven months Dorothy Vaughan had apprenticed as a mathematician, growing more confident with the concepts, the numbers, and the people at Langley. Her work was making a difference in the outcome of the war. And the devastation Henry Reid described … she had a part in that as well. Honed to a razor’s edge by the women and men at the laboratory—flying farther, faster, and with a heavier bomb load than any plane in history—B-29s dropped precision bombs over the country of Japan from high in the sky. They brought destruction at close range with incendiary bombs, and they released annihilation—and a new, modern fear—with the atomic bombs they delivered.

Dorothy would be one of the NACA nuts.

The Duration

With the Full-Scale Tunnel running around the clock and the rest of the engineering groups pushing the limits of their capacity, Dorothy became an expert in the eighteen-hour day, when she could find the time, taking the earliest possible bus to Farmville.

Reviewing her budget, her needs, and the ongoing demands of her job, Dorothy decided that Newsome Park, more or less in the same neighborhood she had come to know in the last nine months, was the best option.

The government outfitted the development with the perks that it felt were key to keeping home-front morale high. The Newsome Park Community Center boasted a kitchen and banquet space, rooms for craft courses and club meetings, basketball and tennis courts, and a baseball diamond for the semipro Newsome Park Dodgers.

Most importantly for Dorothy, Newsome Park Elementary was walking distance from the new apartment.

A year after Dorothy left Farmville, so did her four children, starting the fall 1944 school year at Newsome Park Elementary School.

Dorothy would send the children back home for summer vacations, and went back herself as she could, unwilling and unable to sever the ties with the people she loved deeply and would always consider her family. Her marriage with Howard settled into a state of limbo, never together but never completely apart either. It was a stable instability that would endure for the rest of Howard’s life, which was destined to be many decades shorter than Dorothy’s.

V-J Day came on August 15, 1945, at 7:03 p.m. Eastern War Time. Into the vacuum of waiting and anxiety flooded “joyous tumult.” All the pent-up emotions of a nation weary from four years of war exploded in a paroxysm, nowhere as much as in the war communities leading the home-front effort.

After the deluge, the uncertainty settled in. Three weeks after V-J Day, the Norfolk Journal and Guide reported layoffs of 1,500 Newport News shipyard workers and a “decrease for women workers, both white and colored.”

With the war emergency fading into the past and without war production pressures, there would be no hire-at-all-costs demand for women. Two million American women of all colors received pink slips even before the final curtain fell in August.

With work had come economic security, and a greater say in household affairs, which put some women on collision courses with their husbands. “Many husbands will return home to find that the helpless little wives they left behind have become grown, independent women,” wrote columnist Evelyn Mansfield Swann in the Norfolk Journal and Guide.

The generals of the Negroes’ war, however—leaders such as Randolph, Houston, and Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as an advisor to President Roosevelt—did not let their guard down one bit, preparing to rouse the troops for the next offensive. But Dorothy and the others who had built new lives during the war weren’t waiting for leaders or politicians to take the lead. They voted with their feet, betting their new lives that the social and economic changes brought about by the four-year conflict would last.

Dorothy’s older children had mourned the loss of their small-town freedom and the space that had come with the big house in Farmville. As talented as Dorothy was as a mathematician, she might have missed her calling in the military: she ran the Newport News household with the authority of a general and the economy of a quartermaster, eventually sending the babysitter back to Farmville and offering room and board to a returning military man and his wife in exchange for keeping the children during the day.

Those Who Move Forward

Despite being a full-time wife and mother for the last four years, Katherine had been careful to keep her teaching certificate current.

“If you can play the piano, the job is yours,” the telegram read.

During the Civil War, the mountain state seceded from Virginia and joined the Union. This didn’t make West Virginia an oasis of progressive views on race—segregation kept blacks and whites separate in lodging, schools, public halls, and restaurants—but the state did offer its tiny black population just the slightest bit more breathing room. Compared to West Virginia, the state’s Negro residents thought, Virginia was the South.

Katherine counted whatever crossed her path—dishes, steps, and stars in the nighttime sky. Insatiably curious about the world, the child peppered her grammar school teachers with questions and skipped ahead from second grade to fifth.

In 1933, Katherine entered West Virginia State College as a fifteen-year-old freshman, her strong high school performance rewarded with a full academic scholarship.

Though not as large or as influential as schools like Hampton, Howard, or Fisk, the college nonetheless had a solid academic reputation.

Claytor’s brusque manner intimidated most of his students, who couldn’t keep up as the professor furiously scribbled mathematical formulas on the chalkboard with one hand and just as quickly erased them with the other. He moved from one topic to the next, making no concession to their bewildered expressions. But Katherine, serious and bespectacled with fine curly hair, made such quick work of the course catalog that Claytor had to create advanced classes just for her.

In the 1930s, just over a hundred women in the United States worked as professional mathematicians. Employers openly discriminated against Irish and Jewish women with math degrees; the odds of a black woman encountering work in the field hovered near zero. “But where will I find a job?” Katherine asked. “That will be your problem,” said her mentor.

The Norfolk teachers’ case was just one of many in their master plan to dismantle the system of apartheid that existed in American schools and workplaces.

In truth, the idea of becoming a research mathematician had always been an abstraction, and with the passage of time, it was easy to believe that the job was something that existed only in the mind of her eccentric professor.

But in Hampton, Virginia, Dorothy Vaughan and scores of other former schoolteachers were proving that female research mathematicians weren’t just a wartime measure but a powerful force that was about to help propel American aeronautics beyond its previous limits.

Breaking Barriers