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

By Margot Lee Shetterly

Today, my hometown-the hamlet that in 1962 dubbed itself “Spacetown USA”-looks like any suburban city in a modern and hyperconnected America. People of all races and nationalities mingle on Hampton’s beaches and in its bus stations, the WHITES ONLY signs of the past now relegated to the local history museum and the memories of survivors of the civil rights revolution. Mercury Boulevard no longer conjures images of the eponymous mission that shot the first Americans beyond the atmosphere, and each day the memory of Virgil Grissom fades away from the bridge that bears his name. A downsized space program and decades of government cutbacks have hit the region hard; today, an ambitious college grad with a knack for numbers might set her sights on a gig at a Silicon Valley startup or make for one of the many technology firms that are conquering the NASDAQ from the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington, DC.

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female. For a group of bright and ambitious African American women, diligently prepared for a mathematical career and eager for a crack at the big leagues, Hampton, Virginia, must have felt like the center of the universe.

(Shetterly 2017, xviii)

The system that kept the black race at the bottom of American society was so deeply rooted in the nation’s history that it was impervious to the country’s ideals of equality. Restaurants that refused to serve Dorothy Vaughan had no problem waiting on Germans from the prisoner-of-war camp housed in a detention facility under the James River Bridge in Newport News. The contradiction ripped Negroes asunder, individually and as a people, their American identities in an all-out, permanent war with their black souls, the agony of the double consciousness given voice by W. E. B. Du Bois in his illuminating book The Souls of Black Folk.

The most outspoken members of the community refused to internalize the contradiction, openly equating the foreign racists America was moved to destroy with the American racists it chose to abide. “Every type of brutality perpetrated by the Germans, in the name of race, is the Negro in our southland as regularly as he receives his daily bread” said Vernon Johns, the husband of Dorothy Vaughan’s former colleague Altona Trent Johns. The “brilliant scholar-preacher” of Farmville had gained national renown for his eloquent sermons and maverick views on racial progress. His ideas were radical for the time.However, his no-compromise policy on racial slights of any sort would have a direct and indirect influence on the civil rights actions of the 1950s and 1960s.

(Shetterly 2017, 33-34)

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 American and the American dilemma. It obscured the anger that blacks knew could have life-changing—even life-ending-consequences if displayed openly.That day, however, as Mary Jackson ran into Kazimierz Czarnecki on the west side of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, there was no turning inward, no subversion, and no dissembling. Mary Jackson let her mask slip to the ground and answered Czarnecki’s greeting with a Mach 2 blowdown of frustration and resentment, letting off steam as she ranted about the insult she had experienced on the East Side.

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. Mary was also a shrewd and intuitive judge of character, an emotionally intelligent woman who paid close attention to her surroundings and the people around her. Whether her outpouring in front of Czarnecki was the spontaneous result of having reached a breaking point or something more astute, she picked the right person to vent to. What had started as one of the worst workdays Mary Jackson had ever had would end up being the turning point of her career.

“Why don’t you come work for me?” Czarnecki asked Mary. She didn’t hesitate to accept the offer.

(Shetterly 2017, 109-110)

While students and teachers hoped their desks and basements would stand up to the power of a nuclear blast, the country’s leaders also prepared for a possible attack-in high style. In one of the Cold War’s most unbelievable episodes, in 1959 President Eisenhower authorized the construction of a secret bunker deep under the Greenbrier hotel, the resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where Katherine Goble, her father, Joshua Coleman, and Dorothy Vaughan’s husband, Howard, had all worked. 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.

(Shetterly 2017, 151-152)

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References

Shetterly, Margot L. 2017. Hidden Figures Illustrated Edition: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. N.p.: HarperCollins.

ISBN 978-0-06-279895-4