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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

The family had always counted on her income, and now, more than ever, it was her job at Langley that provided all of them with economic stability.

Many was the evening when she came home from work to make dinner, and after putting the meal on the table, walked out the door and took a walk around the block until the children were done eating. Only then would she serve herself from the leftovers. She didn’t want to face the temptation of eating even one morsel herself that could nourish their growing bodies.

In 1946, the army decided to make Langley Field the headquarters of its Tactical Air Command, one of the major commands of the US Army Air Corps. One year later, the importance of the airplane to US defense was underscored when the Army Air Corps was elevated to the status of an independent branch of the military: the United States Air Force.

Hampton Roads had become the embodiment of what Cold War president Dwight D. Eisenhower would a decade later dub the “military-industrial complex.”

The employee newsletter Air Scoop was replete with tales of the sparkler spotted on the ring finger of this bachelorette in the personnel department or the happy ending for that starry-eyed couple who found true love over model tests in the Free-Flight Tunnel.

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.

In three years at Langley, Dorothy Vaughan had proven to be more than equal to the job, handing off error-free work to Marge Hannah and Blanche Sponsler and managing the constant deadlines with ease, garnering “excellent” ratings from her bosses.

Perhaps it was no surprise that Dorothy was a keeper, but it must have come as a relief when, in 1946, she was made a permanent Civil Service employee.

Working as a research mathematician at Langley was a very, very good black job—and it was also a very, very good female job.

A woman who worked in the central computing pools was one step removed from the research, and the engineers’ assignments sometimes lacked the context to give the computer much knowledge about the afterlife of the numbers that bedeviled her days. She might spend weeks calculating a pressure distribution without knowing what kind of plane was being tested or whether the analysis that depended on her math had resulted in significant conclusions.

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.

The development of the turbojet engine in the early 1940s meant that Langley engineers finally had a powerful enough propulsion system to make their high-speed wing concepts, like R. T. Jones’s swept-back delta wings, which were angled backward like the wings of a swift—a high-flying bird—really fly.

The speed of sound, about 761 miles per hour at sea level in dry air at 59 degrees Fahrenheit, varied depending on temperature, altitude, and humidity. It was long thought to be a physical limit on the maximum speed of an object moving through the air. As an airplane flying at sea level in dry air approached Mach 1, or 100 percent of the local speed of sound, air molecules in front of the flying plane piled up and compressed, forming a shock wave, the same phenomenon that caused the noise associated with the crack of a bull whip or the firing of a bullet.

But on October 14, 1947, pilot Chuck Yeager, flying over the Mojave Desert in an NACA-developed experimental research plane called the Bell X-1, pierced the sound barrier for the first time in history, a fact that was corroborated by the female computers on the ground who analyzed the data that came from the instruments on Yeager’s plane.

Over the course of twelve years, Virginia Tucker, the lab’s Head Computer, had ascended from a subprofessional employee to the most powerful woman at the lab. She had done much to transform the position of computer from a proto-clerical job into one of the laboratory’s most valuable assets.

Between 1942 and 1946, four hundred Langley computers received training on Tucker’s watch.

In 1947, the laboratory disbanded East Computing, rerouting all open assignments to West Computing. Virginia Tucker, too, decided to head west. She accepted a job at the Northrop Corporation, one of many aviation companies tucked into the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles. The company hired her as an engineer.

Dorothy Hoover—West Computing’s other Dorothy, one of the three shift supervisors—had earned an undergraduate degree in math from Arkansas AM&N, a black college that had been active in the World War II ESMWT training programs. She knocked off a master’s degree in mathematics from Atlanta University, and then taught school in Arkansas, Georgia, and Tennessee before coming to Langley in 1943, where she was hired as a P-1 mathematician. Like Doris Cohen, Dorothy Hoover was exceptionally fluent in abstract mathematical concepts and complex equations, and Marge Hannah channeled the rigorous mathematical assignments that came to the group from R. T. Jones’ Stability Analysis Section to Hoover.

As a talented, possibly gifted mathematician with a similarly independent mind, Dorothy Hoover was a perfect fit for the section, and in 1946 R. T. Jones invited her to work directly for him.

Marge’s upward move resulted in opportunity down the line: Blanche Sponsler stepped into Marge’s position as head of the group. Just two years younger than Dorothy, Blanche was a thirty-five-year-old newlywed in 1947. Originally from Pennsylvania, she bowled in Langley’s Duckpin bowling league and was a faithful member of the Bridge Club. She and her sister, the wife of a soldier stationed at Fort Monroe, entered the laboratory’s Duplicate Bridge tournament in 1947 and took second place. Also interested in a move west, Blanche requested a transfer to the Ames Laboratory. Her Langley supervisors wrote letters of recommendation—since coming to the lab in 1940, she had received strong reviews and steady promotions—but at the time there were no open positions, so she continued as head of the West Computing group.

A small elite, like Dorothy Hoover, were endowed with an aptitude for complex math so strong that it exceeded the ability of many of the engineers at the lab.

It wasn’t the way Dorothy would have wanted to take the next step in her career, but Blanche’s tragedy pushed her up the ladder nonetheless. In April 1949, six weeks after Blanche left the office for the last time, the laboratory appointed Dorothy Vaughan acting head of West Computing.

It would take Dorothy Vaughan two years to earn the full title of section head.

Whatever skepticism might have existed among the powers that be about Dorothy’s qualifications, whatever lobbying and advocacy may have been required on Dorothy’s part, the outstanding issue was resolved by a memo that circulated in January 1951. “Effective this date, Dorothy J. Vaughan, who has been acting head of the West Area Computers unit, is hereby appointed head of that unit.”

History would prove them all right: there was no one better qualified for the job than Dorothy Vaughan.

Home by the Sea

It was no small irony that Woodrow Wilson, the president who had authorized the creation of the NACA and who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his promotion of humanitarianism through the League of Nations, was the very same one who was hell-bent on making racial segregation in the Civil Service part of his enduring legacy.

Many of the West Computers, including Dorothy Vaughan, were members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority that Mary had pledged as an undergraduate at Hampton Institute. Mary graduated in 1938 with highest honors from Phenix High School.

Most of Hampton Institute’s female students earned their degrees in home economics or nursing, but Mary Jackson had a strong analytical bent, and she pushed herself to complete not one but two rigorous majors, in mathematics and physical science.

While the women in Hampton Institute’s Engineering for Women courses were preparing for their new careers as computers, Mary Jackson managed the USO’s modest financial accounts and welcomed guests at the club’s front door.

The end of the war brought the closing of the King Street USO and the end of Mary’s job there. She worked for a brief period as a bookkeeper at Hampton Institute’s Health Service but left after the birth of her son, Levi Jr., in 1946.

With a full calendar of child care, family commitments, and volunteer activities, she was as busy as a stay-at-home mother as she had been working outside her home.

Mary didn’t have the power to remove the limits that society imposed on her girls, but it was her duty, she felt, to help pry off the restrictions they might place on themselves. Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status—none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions. You can do better—we can do better, she told them with every word and every deed. For Mary Jackson, life was a long process of raising one’s expectations.

When Levi Jr. turned four, Mary Jackson filed an application with the Civil Service, applying both for a clerical position with the army and as a computer at Langley. In January 1951, she was quickly called up to work at Fort Monroe as a clerk typist.

Again the NACA angled to benefit from increased international tension, handing Congress a proposal to double its agency-wide employment level from seven thousand in 1951 to fourteen thousand in 1953.

With its many new facilities coming into operation, the laboratory again cast its net for the female alchemists who could turn the numbers from testing into aeronautical gold. With Mary’s abilities, it was no surprise that Uncle Sam decided she would be of better use as an NACA computer than as a military secretary. After three months at Fort Monroe, she accepted an offer to work for Dorothy Vaughan.

The feat of smashing through the sound barrier scored a Collier Trophy, the aeronautics industry’s most prestigious award, for Yeager, Lawrence Bell—whose company, Bell Aircraft, produced the X-1—and John Stack, Langley’s assistant director, who had championed the plane’s development as a research tool.

As a plane accelerated from high subsonic speeds to low supersonic speeds, passing through the unsteady “transonic” region between Mach .8 and Mach 1.2, the simultaneous presence of subsonic and supersonic flows caused buffeting and instability.

The telltale sonic boom indicated that the plane had pushed through the volatile transonic region into the state of smoother, all-supersonic flows.

The details of something mysteriously known only as Project 506 was revealed in 1950 to be a hypersonic wind tunnel, with a test section of just eleven inches, but capable of subjecting models to wind speeds close to Mach 7. That test facility, and a large complex under construction called the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, which would be capable of wind tunnel tests up to Mach 18, tipped the agency’s interest in flight so fast that it could occur only at the limits of Earth’s atmosphere.

The progressives of the Stability Research group, regardless of their actual political practices, were certainly open to accusations of subversion for their embrace of “dangerous” ideas like racial integration, civil rights, and equality for women.

The Red scares and Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s destroyed reputations, lives, and livelihoods, as Matilda West’s situation proved. The fear of Communism was a bonanza for segregationists like Virginia senator Harry Byrd. Byrd painted the epithet “Communist” on everyone and everything that threatened to upend his view of “traditional” American customs and values, which included white supremacy. (One sequence in the film He May Be a Communist not so subtly showed a dramatized protest march in which participants held signs reading END KKK TERROR and NO WAR BASES IN AFRICA.)

In 1947, a Mississippi hotel denied service to the Haitian secretary of agriculture, who had come to the state to attend an international conference. The same year, a restaurant in the South banned Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi’s personal doctor from its premises because of his dark skin. Diplomats traveling from New York to Washington along Route 40 were often rejected if they stopped for a meal at restaurants in Maryland. The humiliations, so commonplace in the United States that they barely raised eyebrows, much less the interest of the press, were the talk of the town in the envoys’ home countries. Headlines like “Untouchability Banished in India: Worshipped in America,” which appeared in a Bombay newspaper in 1951, mortified the US diplomatic corps. Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal.

Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America’s model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them?

“The laboratory has one work unit composed entirely of Negro women, the West Area Computers, which may fall into the category of a segregated work unit,” wrote Langley’s administrative officer, Kemble Johnson, in a 1951 memo. “However, a large percentage of employees are usually detailed to work in non-segregated units for periods of one week to three months. Members of this unit are frequently transferred to other research activities at Langley, where they are integrated into non-segregated units. The same promotional activities are available to the West Area Computers as to other computers at Langley.”

Christine Richie heard about West Computing in the Huntington High School teachers’ lounge. Aurelia Boaz, a 1949 Hampton Institute graduate, got the word through the college grapevine. It seemed that every black church on the peninsula had at least one member who worked out at Langley.

Mary Jackson was connected to so many computers in so many different ways that the only surprising thing about her arrival at Langley was that it had taken so long.

Chapter Eleven

The Area Rule

Mary Jackson was a soft-spoken individual, but she was also forthright and unambiguous. She chose to speak to everyone around her in the same serious and direct fashion, whether they were adolescents in her Girl Scout troop or engineers in the office.