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January 28, 2018 - October 2, 2020
Even with a salary of $2,000 a year—the average monthly wage for black women in the 1940s was just $96—providing for the needs of six children meant that outings like the ones at Log Cabin Beach did not come often or easily.
Working as a research mathematician at Langley was a very, very good black job—and it was also a very, very good female job.
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.
Mathematician Doris Cohen, a native New Yorker who started working at the laboratory in the late 1930s, was for many years the NACA’s lone female author. Not even Pearl Young, the NACA’s first female engineer and the founder of the agency’s rigorous editorial review process, left behind research with her name on it.
Getting one’s name on a research report was a necessary first step in the career of an engineer. For a woman, it was a significant and unusual achievement.
While the East Computers had flowed out of their office and into the larger operations of the laboratory like a river, segregation kept the out-migration of West Computing to a trickle.
while even lower-level male managers might supervise the work of female computers, it was simply unthinkable for a man to report to a woman.
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.
Once at a troop meeting at Bethel AME, Mary was leading her charges in a rendition of the folk tune “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” complete with a pantomime of a slave working in the fields.
Sometimes, she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions.
You can do better—we can do better, she told them with every word and every deed.
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.
Negotiating racial boundaries was a daily fact of Negro life. Mary wasn’t naive about the segregation at Langley—it was no different than anywhere in town.
Most blacks automatically put on a mask around whites, a veil that hid the “dead-weight of social degradation” that scholar W. E. B. Du Bois gave voice to so eloquently in The Souls of Black Folk. The mask offered protection against the constant reminders of being at once American, and the American dilemma. It obscured the anger that blacks knew could have life-changing—even life-ending—consequences if displayed openly.
When the engineers analyzed Katherine’s reduced data, they were fascinated, realizing they were uncovering something they had not quite seen before. It turned out that the Piper had flown perpendicularly across the flight path of a jet plane that had just passed through the area. A disturbance caused by a plane could trouble the air for as long as half an hour after it flew through. The wake vortex of the larger plane had acted like an invisible trip wire: upon crossing the rough river of air left behind by the jet, the propeller plane stumbled in midair and tumbled out of the sky.
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, on the other hand, like the engineers around her, got into the habit of reading newspapers and magazines for the first few minutes of the day. She perused Aviation Week, trying to connect the dots between the latest industry advance and the torrent of numbers flowing through her calculating machine.
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.
Black newspapers and their readers wasted no time in making the link between America’s inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South.
the prospect of integration planted a new fear in the souls of Christine and fellow members of the Brown v. Board of Ed generation: that as blacks, they would not be good enough—smart enough—to sit next to whites in a classroom and succeed.
From the beginning of the computing pools, the women easily hurdled the engineers’ expectations, raising the bar as they did it. As the days of World War II receded into memory, so did the notion that riveters and gas station attendants and munitions experts and, yes, even mathematicians would, or even should, be female.
if a woman wanted to get promoted, she had to leave the computing pool and attach herself to the elbow of an engineer, figure out how to sit at the controls of a wind tunnel, fight for the credit on a research report. To move up, she had to get as close as she could to the room where the ideas were being created.
Langley Air Force Base and Fort Monroe moved forward to integrate the housing and the schools on their bases; as federal outposts, they were bound to comply with federal law. The state of Virginia, on the other hand, hoisted the Jim Crow flag even higher.
In forcing the United States to compete for the allegiance of yellow and brown and black countries throwing off the shackles of colonialism, the Soviets influenced something much closer to Earth, and ultimately more difficult than putting a satellite, or even a human, into space: weakening Jim Crow’s grip on America.
As far as the segregationists were concerned, racial integration and Communism were one and the same and posed the same kind of threat to traditional American values.
The NACA was quiet, obscure, and largely overlooked. NASA would be high-profile, high-stakes, and scrutinized by the world.
“She was the smartest of all the girls,” Katherine Goble would say of her colleague, years into her own retirement.
James A. Johnson, born in rural Suffolk, Virginia, had moved with his family to Hampton as an adolescent. He attended Phenix High School, and in fact Mary Jackson had been one of his student teachers.
Despite the relatively large group of women now working at the center, most female technical professionals, black and white—even someone as gifted as Katherine Johnson—were classified as mathematicians or computers, ranked below engineers and paid less, even if they were doing the same work.
What do you want to be when you grow up? the Norfolk Journal and Guide reporter must have asked. “I want to be an engineer like my mother,” Levi said.
