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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

Dorothy Hoover thrived in the Stability Analysis Division. By 1951, she had earned the lofty title of aeronautical research scientist, graded GS-9 in the government’s revamped rating system.

Dorothy Hoover, Doris Cohen, and at least three other women published one or more reports with the group between 1947 and 1951.

But even though it was the black women who broke Langley’s color barrier, paving the way for the black men now being hired, the women would still have to fight for something that the black men could take for granted: the title of engineer.

Chapter Twelve

Serendipity

Hotels in the South denied service to black patrons; blacks of all social strata knew to make arrangements with friends and family, or even strangers known for opening their homes to guests, rather than risk embarrassment or possibly danger while traveling.

“Why don’t y’all come home with us too?” Eric asked Katherine. “I can get Snook a job at the shipyard,” he said, using Jimmy’s family nickname. “In fact, I can get both of you jobs.” There’s a government facility in Hampton that’s hiring black women, Eric told Katherine, and they’re looking for mathematicians. It’s a civilian job, he told her, but attached to Langley Field, in Hampton.

Only after exhausting all the other stories of the wedding did they broach the topic that occupied both of their minds. Taking the road to Newport News would mean making a decision quickly.

It would have been easy to continue with the stable small-town life they had created. But the possibility of this new job tugged at the curiosity that was at the core of Katherine Goble’s nature. “Let’s do it,” she whispered.

Langley’s personnel department approved Katherine’s 1952 application, but with a June 1953 appointment.

Working closely in a team was key to the entire operation, and Dorothy had both a license and an obligation to see to it that her computers were set off on the best career paths possible.

For two weeks, Katherine worked the desk, learning the ropes.

“The Flight Research Division is requesting two new computers,” Vaughan said. “I’m sending you two. You’re going to 1244.” For Katherine, being selected to rotate through Building 1244, the kingdom of the fresh-air engineers, felt like an unexpected bit of fortune, however temporary the assignment might prove to be.

Outside the gates, the caste rules were clear. Blacks and whites lived separately, ate separately, studied separately, socialized separately, worshipped separately, and, for the most part, worked separately. At Langley, the boundaries were fuzzier. Blacks were ghettoed into separate bathrooms, but they had also been given an unprecedented entrée into the professional world. Some of Goble’s colleagues were Yankees or foreigners who’d never so much as met a black person before arriving at Langley. Others were folks from the Deep South with calcified attitudes about racial mixing. It was all a part of the racial relations laboratory that was Langley, and it meant that both blacks and whites were treading new ground together.

West Virginia never left Katherine’s heart, but Virginia was her destiny.

Chapter Thirteen

Turbulence

Katherine could have been classified as a permanent member of West Computing, like the rest of the women who reported to Dorothy, available to rotate through other groups on temporary assignments. Or Henry Pearson could make Katherine an offer to officially join his group, as Kazimierz Czarnecki had done with Mary Jackson. One way or the other, however, Dorothy Vaughan and Henry Pearson needed to resolve Katherine Goble’s situation.

The meeting between Dorothy Vaughan and Henry Pearson ended as they both knew it would, with Pearson offering Katherine Goble a permanent position in his group, the Maneuver Loads Branch, with a corresponding increase in salary.

She couldn’t believe her good fortune, getting paid to do math, the thing that came most naturally to her in the world.

Though bathrooms for the black employees were clearly marked, most of the bathrooms—the ones implicitly designated for white employees—were unmarked. As far as Katherine was concerned, there was no reason why she shouldn’t use those as well. It would be a couple of years before she was confronted with the whole rigmarole of separate bathrooms. By then, she simply refused to change her habits—refused to so much as enter the Colored bathrooms. And that was that. No one ever said another word to her about it.

Katherine’s confidence and the bright flame of her mind were irresistible to the guys in the Flight Research Division. There was nothing they liked more than brains, and they could see that Katherine Goble had them in abundance. As much as anything, they responded to her exuberance for the work. They loved their jobs, and they saw their own absorption reflected back at them in Katherine’s questions and her interest that went so far beyond just running the numbers.

James Francis Goble died on a Thursday, just five days before Christmas 1956. Three days later, Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church filled with mourners, the community offering its condolences and support to the young widow and her three adolescent daughters. Joylette, Kathy, and Connie would never again be able to experience the joy of the holiday season without also reliving the ache that came from their father’s death. Both Jimmy’s parents and Katherine’s parents stayed in town through the end of the year. Katherine’s in-laws and their families, particularly the Eppses and the Kanes, who lived in Newport News, shared the burden of grief. Jimmy’s Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brothers and Katherine’s Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters kept watch over them, bringing food and running errands and taking care of the mundane necessities that seemed impossible to deal with in the face of such a profound loss.

With her daughters, she established the new rules of a household run by a single mother: “You will have my clothes ironed and ready in the morning, and dinner ready when I come home,” she instructed. Katherine was now the mother and father, the love and the discipline, the carrot and the stick, and the sole breadwinner.

Or maybe it was her father’s pragmatic dictum—“You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you”—that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing. With her father’s words to buoy her, Katherine Goble observed the manifestations of segregation at Langley, decried the injustice they represented, yet did not feel their weight on her own shoulders. Once she crossed the threshold of Building 1244, she entered a world of equals, and she refused to behave in any way that would contradict that belief.

Perhaps as much as Katherine’s expectation that she should be treated as the equal of the engineers she worked with was her willingness to treat them as equals—to acknowledge that their intellect and curiosity matched hers, that they were bringing to the professional relationship the same sense of fairness and respect and goodwill that she was—that paved the way for her ultimate success.

In January 1957, Katherine’s daughters went back to school, and she went back to work: the second act of her life was about to begin.

Chapter Fourteen

Angle of Attack

The female mathematicians’ job security wasn’t immediately threatened by the machines, but Dorothy Vaughan perceived that mastering the machine would be the key to long-term career stability.

Harry Byrd, had in mind. “If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that, in time, the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South,” Byrd said in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.

From the beginning, Czarnecki had put Mary at the controls in the wind tunnel, showing her how to fire up the tunnel’s roaring sixty-thousand-horsepower engines (the noise from years of work in the tunnel eventually damaging Mary’s hearing). He showed her how to work with the mechanics to correctly position a model in the test section. One test required Mary to clamber onto the catwalk of the wind tunnel, measuring how rivets disrupted the airflow over a particular model. Another involved turning the tunnel’s Mach 2 winds on a series of sharp-nosed metal cones to discover the point at which the smooth air flowing over the cones became turbulent. The research had application to the design of missiles, of great interest as the United States sought to gain every possible military and technological advantage over the Soviet Union. The results of the work would come to fruition in 1958, in Mary’s first report, coauthored with Czarnecki: “Effects on Nose Angle and Mach Number on Transition on Cones at Supersonic Speeds,” published in September 1958.

Throughout the South, municipalities maintained two parallel inefficient school systems, which gave the short end of the stick to the poorest whites as well as blacks. The cruelty of racial prejudice was so often accompanied by absurdity, a tangle of arbitrary rules and distinctions that subverted the shared interests of people who had been taught to see themselves as irreconcilably different.

Chapter Fifteen

Young, Gifted, and Black

Nine black teenagers trying to integrate all-white Central High School had turned the state’s capital city into a military battleground. At the command of the governor, Orval Faubus, the Arkansas National Guard had been called out to prevent the black students from entering the school. Three days later President Eisenhower trumped the state, federalizing the state’s guard and sending in US Army troops to escort the nine through the school’s doors. The crisis unfolded over days, each morning a new installment, and always accompanied by photos that were as difficult to look at as they were to look away from: images of black students Christine’s age, their arms heavy with books, struggling to maintain composure as a phalanx of military men protected them from the screaming, spitting, bottle-throwing white crowd that surrounded them. All for wanting the key to what Central High School and the all-white schools across the South had kept locked away from black students like her.

“Red-Made Satellite Flashes Across US,” printed the Daily Press in Newport News. “Sphere Tracked in 4 Crossings Over US,” ran the New York Times headline. It took no time for the mysterious name to pass from Soviet mouths to American ears: Sputnik.

October 4, 1957, was the midnight of the postwar era, and the end of the naive hope that the conflict that was ended by an atomic bomb would give way to an era of global peace.

Dubbed “Project Greek Island,” in the event of an attack on Washington, DC, senators and congressional representatives were to be evacuated from the nation’s capital by railroad and delivered to the Greenbrier’s bunker. There was no room in the bunker for spouses or children, but it was stocked with champagne and steaks for the politicians themselves. The luxury underground fortress remained operational and ready to receive its political guests until a 1992 exposé by Washington Post reporter Ted Gup blew the operation’s cover.

Christine also took umbrage at the Soviets’ excursion into the heavens. From her core came the desire to rise up to meet the gauntlet they had thrown down. She was an American, after all, and the Russians were the enemy! We can’t let them beat us, she thought, echoing the sentiments of virtually every American citizen. It would take time for her to work it out, but somehow, even in those first moments of learning of the Soviet accomplishment, she believed that this was her fight too.

She opened herself to new friends, the stern but doting Methodist faculty, and the school’s routine and rituals. A charismatic eleventh-grade geometry teacher stoked her interest in math, and for the first time, she entertained the idea of a future that took advantage of her knack for numbers and all things analytical.

Living in Monroe, Christine had always been someone’s little sister. At Hampton, she thought, she would become her own woman. In the fall, she applied to the school, with Fisk as her backup plan. Hampton responded with an offer letter and a scholarship covered by the United Negro College Fund. “I’ve been accepted at Hampton,” Christine wrote her mother in a letter in early 1958. “I have a scholarship at Hampton, and so there is no reason why you shouldn’t let me go.” Desma Mann fretted at the idea of her baby going off so far away, all alone, but she had always known that day would come.

While “Red engineering schools” in the Soviet Union were “loaded with women”—one-third of Soviet engineering grads were female, the Washington Post reported in 1958—the United States still struggled to find a place for women and Negroes in its science workplace, and in society at large.

Chapter Sixteen

What a Difference a Day Makes

Around Hampton Roads and throughout America, citizens turned their eyes skyward with a mixture of terror and wonder, eager to know if the 184-pound metal sphere launched into orbit by the Russians could see them as they tried to see it from their backyards. They surfed the radio dial trying to lock on to the artificial moon’s beeping, its sound like an otherworldly cricket.

In reality, the United States wasn’t trailing the Soviet Union quite as badly as it appeared in the wake of the Sputnik crisis. The US Army’s Jupiter-C missile had been tested successfully on several occasions, and the Americans were ahead of the Russians in terms of the systems that guided missiles on their trajectories into space. But President Eisenhower had insisted that the nation’s first foray into space be presented as a peaceful effort, rather than an explicitly military operation that risked triggering a dangerous retaliation by the Soviet Union. The Americans had planned to launch the first satellite into orbit as part of the International Geophysical Year, a cooperative global science project that ran from July 1957 to December 1958.

Trumped by Sputnik, the Americans played catch-up. The US Army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully orbited the Explorer I satellite in January 1958. Two months later, Project Vanguard, managed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, also managed to launch a satellite, though the achievement was overshadowed by Vanguard’s many rocket failures.

Space had long been a “dirty word” for the airplane-minded Langley. Congress admonished the brain busters not to waste taxpayer money on “science fiction” and dreams of manned spaceflight. Even in the Langley Technical Library, which was arguably the world’s best collection of information on powered flight, engineers were hard-pressed to find books on spaceflight.

Any craft that traveled into space first had to traverse the layers of Earth’s atmosphere, accelerating through the sound barrier and increasing numbers on the Mach speed dial, before escaping the pull of Earth’s gravity and settling into the eighteen-thousand-mile-per-hour speed that locked objects into low Earth orbit, following a circuit of between 134 and 584 miles above the planet. On the return trip, the vehicle skidded through the friction of the increasingly dense atmosphere, building up heat that could reach 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.