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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

Like virtually every Negro woman she knew, she struggled to find the balance between spending time with her children at home and spending time for them, for her family, at a job.

During Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, however, the iron curtain of segregation fell on federal employment. A 1915 rule requiring a photo with every application made race a silent consideration for the final decision.

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.

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. Aircraft manufacturers could outfit planes with wings based on a variety of NACA specifications, like choosing kitchen appliances from a catalog for a new house. 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.

If she could give more to her children by sacrificing her own comforts, she did it. 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.

During the war, Dorothy and two other colleagues, Ida Bassette, a Hampton native (cousin to West Computing’s Pearl Bassette), and Dorothy Hoover, originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, had been appointed shift supervisors, each managing one-third of a group that had swelled to twenty-five women.

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. It provided public acknowledgment that she had contributed to a worthy line of inquiry and inked her fingerprints onto findings that would be circulated widely among the aeronautical community.

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. The men she now worked for—Rufus House was her new supervisor—held her in limbo, waiting either until a more acceptable candidate presented herself or until they were confident she was fit to execute the job on a permanent basis.

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.

Vaughan called Katherine Goble and another woman, Erma Tynes, to her desk. “The Flight Research Division is requesting two new computers,” Vaughan said. “I’m sending you two. You’re going to 1244.”

June, 1953

The fact was, the engineers who worked for Henry Pearson realized soon after Katherine Goble took a seat at her desk in 1244 that their new computer was a keeper, and they had no intention of sending her back. Katherine’s familiarity with higher-level math made her a versatile addition to the branch. Her library of graduate-school textbooks crowded onto her desk next to the calculating machine, ready references if she needed them.

Katherine felt completely at home at Langley. Nothing about the culture of the laboratory or her new office rattled her—not even the persistent racial segregation. At the beginning, in fact, she didn’t even realize the bathrooms were segregated. Not every building had a Colored bathroom, a fact that Mary Jackson had discovered so painfully during her rotation on the East Side. 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.

Wow so that powerful scene in the movie really is complete fiction. Likely based on Mary Jackson's experience.

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. “While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,” opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its “Mississippiitis”—that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption—the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership.

In 1958, Katherine Goble finally made it into the editorial meetings of the Guidance and Control Branch of Langley’s Flight Research Division, soon to be renamed the Aerospace Mechanics Division of the nearly-ready-for-prime-time National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Now, she was going to come along with the program.

“Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite over a Selected Earth Position” went through ten months of editorial meetings, analysis, recommendations, and revisions before publication in September 1960—the first report to come out of Langley’s Aerospace Mechanics Division (or its predecessor, the Flight Research Division) by a female author.

At ACD, it was her job to convert the engineers’ equations into the computer’s formula translation language—FORTRAN—by using a special machine to punch holes in 7⅜''×3¼'' cards printed with an array of eighty columns, each column displaying the numbers 0 through 9, each space assigned a number, letter, or character. Once punched, each cream-colored card represented one set of FORTRAN instructions.

On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became in one fell swoop the first human in space and the first human to orbit Earth. “We could have beaten them, we should have beaten them,” Project Mercury flight director Chris Kraft recalled decades later.

It would take a total of 1.2 million tests, simulations, investigations, inspections, verifications, corroborations, experiments, checkouts, and dry runs just to send the first American into space, a precursor to achieving Project Mercury’s goal of placing a man into orbit.

“Get the girl to check the numbers,” said the astronaut. If she says the numbers are good, he told them, I’m ready to go.

NASA was acutely aware that the task before them wasn’t only about making history but also about making a myth, adding a gripping new chapter to the American narrative that worshipped hard work, ingenuity, and the triumph of democracy.

The great American heresy

Katherine Johnson is the most recognized of all the NASA human computers, black or white. The power of her story is such that many accounts incorrectly credit her with being the first black woman to work as a mathematician at NASA, or the only black woman to have held the job. She is often mistakenly reported as having been sent to the “all-male” Flight Research Division, a group that included four other female mathematicians, one of whom was also black. One account implied that her calculations singlehandedly saved the Apollo 13 mission.

The movie made this exact mistake.