Hidden Figures Read online

  In the summer of 1943, Dorothy jumped at the chance to head to Camp Pickett and earn extra money during the school break. Though teaching offered prestige, the compensation was modest. Nationally, Virginia’s white teachers ranked in the bottom quarter in public school salaries, and their black counterparts might earn almost 50 percent less. Many black teachers in the South gave lessons in one- or two-room schools that barely qualified as buildings. Teachers were called upon to do whatever was necessary to keep the schoolhouses clean, safe, and comfortable for pupils. They shoveled coal in winters, fixed broken windows, scrubbed dirty floors, and prepared lunch. They reached into their own threadbare purses when the schoolroom kitty fell short.

  Another woman in Dorothy’s situation might have seen the laundry job as unthinkable, regardless of the economics. Wasn’t the purpose of a college degree to get away from the need to work dirty and difficult jobs? And the location of the camp, thirty miles southeast of Farmville, meant that she lived in worker housing during the week and got back home only on weekends. But the 40 cents an hour Dorothy earned as a laundry sorter bested what she earned as a teacher, and with four children, a summer of extra income would be put to good and immediate use.

  And Dorothy was of an unusually independent mind, impatient with the pretensions that sometimes accompanied the upwardly mobile members of the race. She did nothing to draw attention to herself at Camp Pickett, nor did she make any distinctions between herself and the other women. There was something in her bearing that transcended her soft voice and diminutive stature. Her eyes dominated her lovely, caramel-hued face—almond-shaped, wide-set, intense eyes that seemed to see everything. Education topped her list of ideals; it was the surest hedge against a world that would require more of her children than white children, and attempt to give them less in return. The Negro’s ladder to the American dream was missing rungs, with even the most outwardly successful blacks worried that at any moment the forces of discrimination could lay waste to their economic security. Ideals without practical solutions were empty promises. Standing on her feet all day in the sweltering laundry was an opportunity if the tumbled military uniforms bought new school clothes, if each sock made a down payment on her children’s college educations.

  At night in the bunk of the workers’ housing, as she willed a breeze to cut through the motionless night air, Dorothy thought of Ann, age eight, Maida, six, Leonard, three, and Kenneth, just eight months old. Their lives and futures informed every decision she made. 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.

  Dorothy was born in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her own mother died when Dorothy was just two years old, and less than a year later, her father, Leonard Johnson, a waiter, remarried. Her stepmother, Susie Peeler Johnson, worked as a charwoman at the grand Union Station train depot to help support the family. She took Dorothy as her own daughter and pushed her to succeed, teaching the precocious girl to read before she entered school, which vaulted her ahead two grades. She also encouraged her daughter’s natural musical talent by enrolling her in piano lessons. When Dorothy was eight, the family relocated to Morgantown, West Virginia, where her father accepted a job working for a successful Negro restaurateur. There she attended the Beechhurst School, a consolidated Negro school located around the corner from West Virginia University, the state’s flagship white college. Seven years later, Dorothy reaped the reward for her hard work in the form of the valedictorian’s spot and a full-tuition scholarship to Wilberforce University, the country’s oldest private Negro college, in Xenia, Ohio. The African Methodist Episcopal Sunday School Convention of West Virginia, which underwrote the scholarship, celebrated fifteen-year-old Dorothy in an eight-page pamphlet that it published and distributed to church members, lauding her intelligence, her work ethic, her naturally kind disposition, and her humility. “This is the dawn of a life, a promise held forth. We who have been fortunate enough to guide that genius and help mold it, even for a little while, will look on with interest during the coming years,” wrote Dewey Fox, the organization’s vice president. Dorothy was the kind of young person who filled the Negro race with hope that its future in America would be more propitious than its past.

  At Wilberforce, Dorothy earned “splendid grades” and chose math as her major. When she was an upperclassman, one of Dorothy’s professors at Wilberforce recommended her for graduate study in mathematics at Howard University, in what would be the inaugural class for a master’s degree in the subject. Howard, based in Washington, DC, was the summit of Negro scholarship. Elbert Frank Cox and Dudley Weldon Woodard, the first two Negroes to earn doctorates in mathematics, with degrees from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, ran the department. The white schools’ prejudice was the black schools’ windfall: with almost no possibility of securing a faculty position at a white college, brilliant black scholars like Cox and Woodard and W. E. B. Du Bois, the sociologist and historian who was the first Negro to receive a doctorate from Harvard, taught almost exclusively at Negro schools, bringing students like Dorothy into close contact with some of the finest minds in the world.

  Howard University represented a singular opportunity for Dorothy, in line with the AME scholarship committee’s lofty expectations. Possessed of an inner confidence that attributed no shortcoming either to her race or to her gender, Dorothy welcomed the chance to prove herself in a competitive academic arena. But the economic reality that confronted Dorothy when she came out of college made graduate study seem like an irresponsible extravagance. With the onset of the Great Depression, Dorothy’s parents, like a third of all Americans, found steady work hard to come by. An extra income would help keep the household above water and improve the odds that Dorothy’s sister might be able to follow her path to college. Dorothy, though only nineteen years old, felt it was her responsibility to ensure that the family could make its way through the hard times, even though it meant closing the door on her own ambitions, at least for the moment. She opted to earn a degree in education and pursue teaching, the most stable career for a black woman with a college degree.

  Through an extensive grapevine, black colleges received calls from schools around the country requesting teachers, then dispatched their alumni to fill open positions in everything from tar paper shacks in the rural cotton belt to Washington, DC’s elite Dunbar High School. New educators hoped to teach in their major subject, of course, but would be expected to assume whatever duties were necessary. After graduation in 1929, Dorothy was sent forth like a secular missionary to join the Negro teaching force.

  Her first job, teaching math and English at a Negro school in rural Tamms, Illinois, ended after her first school year. The Depression-fueled collapse in cotton prices hit the area hard, and the school system simply shut its doors, leaving no public education for the rural county’s Negro students. She fared no better in her next posting in coastal North Carolina, where, in the middle of the school year, the school ran out of money and simply stopped paying her. Dorothy supported herself and contributed to the family by working as a waitress at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia, until 1931, when she got word of a job at the school in Farmville.

  It was no surprise that the newcomer with the beautiful eyes caught the attention of one of Farmville’s most eligible bachelors. Tall, charismatic, and quick with a smile, Howard Vaughan worked as an itinerant bellman at luxury hotels, going south to Florida in the winter and north to upstate New York and Vermont in the summer. Some years he found work closer to home at the Greenbrier, the luxury resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which was a destination for wealthy and fabulous people from around the world.

  Though her husband’s work kept him on the road, Dorothy exchanged her traveling shoes for Farmville life and the routines of family, the stability of regular work, and community. Still, coming of age and entering the workforce in the depths of the Depression perman
ently affected Dorothy’s worldview. She dressed plainly and modestly, spurned every extravagance, and never turned down the chance to put money in the bank. Though she was a member of Farmville’s Beulah AME Church, it was the First Baptist Church that enjoyed her esteemed piano playing come Sunday morning, because they had hired her as their pianist.

  As the war intensified, the town post office was awash in civil service job bulletins, competing for the eyes of locals and college students alike. It was on a trip to the post office during the spring of 1943 that Dorothy spied the notice for the laundry job at Camp Pickett. But the word on another bulletin also caught her eye: mathematics. A federal agency in Hampton sought women to fill a number of mathematical jobs having to do with airplanes. The bulletin, the handiwork of Melvin Butler and the NACA personnel department, was most certainly meant for the eyes of the white, well-to-do students at the all-female State Teachers College there in Farmville. The laboratory had sent application forms, civil service examination notices, and booklets describing the NACA’s work to the school’s job placement offices, asking faculty and staff to spread the word about the open positions among potential candidates. “This organization is considering a plan to visit certain women’s colleges in this area and interview senior students majoring in mathematics,” the laboratory wrote. “It is expected that outstanding students will be offered positions in this laboratory.” Interviews that year yielded four new Farmville girls for the laboratory’s computing sections.

  Dorothy’s house on South Main sat down the street from the college campus. Every morning as she walked the two blocks to her job at Moton High School, a U-shaped building perched on a triangular block at the south end of town, she saw the State Teachers College coeds with their books, disappearing into classrooms in their leafy sanctuary of a campus. Dorothy walked to school on the other side of the street, toeing the invisible line that separated them.

  It would no sooner have occurred to her that a place with so baroque a name as the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory would solicit an application from Negro women than that the white women at the college across the street would beckon her through the front doors of their manicured enclave. Black newspapers, however, worked indefatigably to spread the word far and wide about available war jobs and exhorted their readers to apply. Some were dubbing Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employment Practices Committee “the most significant move on the part of the Government since the Emancipation Proclamation.” Dorothy’s own sister-in-law had moved to Washington to take a job in the War Department.

  In the first week of May 1943, the Norfolk Journal and Guide published an article that would call to Dorothy like a signpost for the road not taken. “Paving the Way for Women Engineers,” read the headline. The accompanying photo showed eleven well-dressed Negro women in front of Hampton Institute’s Bemis Laboratory, graduates of Engineering for Women, a war training class. Founded in 1868, Hampton Institute had grown out of the classes held by the free Negro teacher Mary Peake, in the shade of a majestic tree known as the Emancipation Oak. On the eve of World War II, Hampton was one of the leading Negro colleges in the country and the focal point of the black community’s participation in the conflict.

  The women had come from points up and down the East Coast, and from right there in town. Pearl Bassette, one of several Hampton natives, was the daughter of a well-known black lawyer, her family tracing its roots back to the early days of the city. Ophelia Taylor, originally from Georgia, graduated from Hampton Institute, and prior to starting the class was running a nursery school. Mary Cherry came from North Carolina, Minnie McGraw from South Carolina, Madelon Glenn from faraway Connecticut. Miriam Mann, a tiny firebrand who had taught school in Georgia, had come to the city with her family when her husband, William, accepted a position as an instructor teaching machine shop at the US Naval Training School at Hampton Institute.

  There were black jobs, and there were good black jobs. Sorting in the laundry, making beds in white folks’ houses, stemming in the tobacco plant—those were black jobs. Owning a barbershop or a funeral home, working in the post office, or riding the rails as a Pullman porter— those were good black jobs. Teacher, preacher, doctor, lawyer—now those were very good black jobs, bringing stability and the esteem that accompanied formal training.

  But the job at the aeronautical laboratory was something new, something so unusual it hadn’t yet entered the collective dreams. Not even the long-stalled plan to equalize Negro teachers’ salaries with those of their white counterparts could beat this opportunity. Even if the war ended in six months or a year, a much higher salary even for that brief time would bring Dorothy that much closer to assuring her children’s future.

  So that spring, Dorothy Vaughan carefully filled out and mailed two job applications: one to work at Camp Pickett, where the need for labor was so great, so undifferentiated, that there was virtually no possibility that they would not hire her. The other, much longer application reviewed her qualifications in detail. Work history. Personal references. Schools attended: high school and college. Courses taken, grades received. Languages spoken (French, which she had studied at Wilberforce). Foreign travels (None). Would you be willing to accept a position abroad? (No). Would you be willing to accept a position in Washington, DC? (Yes). How soon could you be ready to start work? She knew the answer before her fingers carved it into the blank: 48 hours, she wrote. I can be ready to go within forty-eight hours.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Past Is Prologue

  The 1943 school year at Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton High School started the same way other years always had: same space, more students. The “new” high school, built in 1939 to accommodate 180 students, had been obsolete almost from its beginning. In the school’s first year of operation, 167 students arrived for classes. Four years later, Dorothy Vaughan and her twelve fellow teachers were welcoming 301 education-hungry youngsters, urged along by parents who wanted more for their children than a life of work in the tobacco factories. The students walked for miles to get to the school or took their chances each morning in barely roadworthy buses that made the rounds in the outer reaches of Prince Edward County.

  As a member of Moton’s parent-teacher association and a founding board member of the Farmville chapter of the NAACP, Dorothy worked hard to improve the long-term educational prospects of the young people of Farmville. As a teacher, her ambitions were more immediate: with only eight classrooms; no gymnasium, lockers, or cafeteria; and an auditorium outfitted with folding chairs, it took all her leadership and creativity to maintain an orderly learning environment. Somehow, she managed to impart the finer points of arithmetic and algebra in the auditorium, with two other classes taking place simultaneously. The school building might have been modest, but Dorothy’s standards were not. She once discovered an error in one of the math textbooks she used in her classroom and dashed off a letter to the publisher informing them of their mistake (they fixed it, and sent her a thank-you letter in return). The Good Lord himself might have squirmed in his seat if Mrs. Vaughan had caught Him out in her class without having done His algebra homework. She devoted time after the end of the school day to tutoring students who required extra help. She also worked with the school choir; under her direction, several of Moton’s vocal quartets had come away victorious in statewide music competitions. In 1935, a Norfolk Journal and Guide article covering the annual event dubbed her “the festival’s most enthusiastic and hardest working director.” In 1943, she and the school’s music teacher, Altona Johns, put students through their paces in preparation for the year’s Christmas cantata, “The Light Still Shines.”

  The feverish summer gave way to fall foliage and brisk mornings, but routines had changed to accommodate the war. The school’s 4-H club made care packages for departing servicemen and hosted a community discussion entitled “What Can We Do to Win the War?” The Moton school office put war stamps on sale, each purchase a small offset against the gargantuan cost of the militar
y production. The community held going-away parties and prepared feasts for the young men heading off to the front. Dorothy updated her classes with a unit called Wartime Mathematics, teaching students to apply arithmetic operations to household budgeting and wartime ration books and updating classic word problems with airplanes instead of cars.

  Sometimes, it seemed as if Dorothy had never been without Farmville or Farmville without her. The town had embraced her with the warmth accorded a native daughter; she had called it home longer than any other place she’d lived in in her thirty-two years. Her life, however, was a model of America’s great love affair with mobility, in every sense. In moments of deepest reflection, as she waited for a response to her application for the job in Hampton, Dorothy might have detected the quickening of something beyond the pragmatic hope for economic advancement, the reigniting of restless embers long quiet in the twelve years since she had come to Farmville.

  Paper resolve was one thing, the messiness of real life another. She was no longer a single student with an itinerant soul but a wife and mother of four children. The job at Langley was a full-time position and required a six-day workweek at an office too far away to come home on weekends, as she had done during the summer at Camp Pickett. And yet, when the half-forgotten, hoped-for letter finally arrived, she had already made up her mind. Once Dorothy made up her mind, no one—not her husband, not her in-laws, not the principal at Moton—would be able to dissuade her from her goal.

  You are hereby appointed Mathematician, Grade P-1, with pay at the rate of $2,000 per annum, for such period of time as your service may be required, but not to extend beyond the duration of the present war and for six months thereafter.