Hidden Figures Read online

  Negro resistance to this injustice had been a constant ever since the first ship carried enslaved Africans to Old Point Comfort on Hampton’s shores in 1609. The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. “Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world” were entitled to “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address. He committed the United States to vanquishing the dictators who would deprive others of their freedom. Negroes joined their countrymen in recoiling at the horrors Germany visited upon its Jewish citizens by restricting the type of jobs they were allowed to hold and the businesses they could start, imprisoning them wantonly and depriving them of due process and all citizenship rights, subjecting them to state-sanctioned humiliation and violence, segregating them into ghettos, and ultimately working them to death in slave camps and marking them for extermination. How could an American Negro observe the annihilation happening in Europe without identifying it with their own four-century struggle against deprivation, disenfranchisement, slavery, and violence?

  Executive Order 8802 and the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee brought about an upswell of optimism, with many in the black community hopeful that the gates of opportunity, finally opening, would never close again. But nearly three decades earlier, World War I had also been heralded as the event that would break the back of race prejudice. “With thousands of your sons in the camps and in France, out of this conflict you must expect nothing less than the enjoyment of full citizenship rights—the same as are enjoyed by every other citizen,” President Woodrow Wilson, a native Virginian, vowed to American blacks during the previous conflict. Even then, Negroes were ready to redeem their lives for their long overdue inheritance. But the military forbade them from serving with whites, deeming them mentally deficient for the rigors of combat. Most were attached to labor battalions, as cooks and stevedores, laborers and gravediggers. The few who clawed their way into the ranks of officers still encountered filthy toilets, secondhand uniforms, segregated showers, and disrespect from white soldiers. And a man who survived the dangers of the battlefield courted danger by walking the streets of his hometown in uniform.

  Charles Hamilton Houston’s unyielding opposition to America’s institutionalized discrimination came in part from his experiences as a young soldier in France during World War I. The man who would become the NAACP’s top lawyer and the other colored soldiers in his regiment suffered endless abuse at the hands of white officers. Finally back in the United States, Houston and a friend, still in uniform, were returning home on a train when a white man refused to sit next to them in the dining car. “I felt damned glad I had not lost my life fighting for my country,” he remembered in a 1942 column published in the Pittsburgh Courier.

  After the Civil War and during the Reconstruction era, the federal government had opened jobs to blacks, providing social mobility particularly for those from educated backgrounds. Civil service reform in the late nineteenth century reduced patronage and corruption and introduced a merit system that allowed blacks to get a foot in the door. 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. From agencies as diverse as the Bureau of Engraving, the US Post Office, and the Department of the Navy, Wilson officials conducted a rout, purging the rolls of high-ranking black officials. Those who remained were banished to segregated areas or hidden behind curtains so that white civil servants and visitors to the offices wouldn’t have to see them.

  The intransigence of the forces opposed to the Negro’s drive for equality was made almost unbearably plain in a 1943 comment by Mark Etheridge, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, who had served as the first head of Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee. “There is no power in the world—not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis—which would now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation,” said Etheridge, a white liberal often vilified for his support of Negro advancement. 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 visited upon 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.

  Black newspapers—unabashedly partisan on issues pertaining to the Negro—refused to censor themselves, despite the federal government’s threat to level sedition charges against them. “Help us to get some of the blessings of democracy here at home first before you jump on the ‘free other peoples’ bandwagon and tell us to go forth and die in a foreign land,” said P. B. Young, the owner of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, in a 1942 editorial. As with all matters that pertained to the Negro’s safety, education, economic mobility, political power, and humanity, the black press put their readers’ mixed feelings about the war on full display.

  James Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker, eloquently articulated the Negro dilemma in a letter he wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier: “Being an American of dark complexion,” wrote Thompson, “these questions flash through my mind: ‘Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?’ . . . ‘Is the kind of America I know worth defending?’ . . . ‘Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?’ These and other questions need answering; I want to know, and I believe every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know.”

  What are we fighting for? they asked themselves and each other.

  The question echoed off the vaulted ceilings of the auditorium at Hampton Institute’s Ogden Hall. It resounded in the sanctuaries of First Baptist and Queen Street Baptist and Bethel AME and thousands of black churches around the country. It hovered in the air at the King Street United Service Organization (USO) Club, one of many centers designed to keep home-front morale high; even the USO was segregated, with separate clubs for Negroes, whites, and Jews. It dominated the headlines of the Pittsburgh Courier, the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and every other Negro newspaper in the country. The black community posed the question in private and in public, and with every possible inflection: rhetorically, angrily, incredulously, hopefully. What did this war mean for “America’s tenth man,” the one in ten citizens who were part of the country’s largest minority group?

  It wasn’t northern agitators who pushed Negroes to question their country, as so many southern whites wanted to believe. It was their own pride, their patriotism, their deep and abiding belief in the possibility of democracy that inspired the Negro people. And why not? Who knew American democracy more intimately than the Negro people? They knew
democracy’s every virtue, vice, and shortcoming, its voice and contour, by its profound and persistent absence in their lives. The failure to secure the blessings of democracy was the feature that most defined their existence in America. Every Sunday they made their way to their sanctuaries and fervently prayed to the Lord to send them a sign that democracy would come to them.

  When American democracy beckoned them again, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they closed ranks, as they had done in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and every other American war; they geared up to fight, for their country’s future and for their own. The black churches, the black sororities and fraternities, the Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, Les Femmes Sans Souci, the Bachelor-Benedicts, black colleges across the country—they moved with an organization that shadowed the government’s. The Negro press was a signal corps, communicating between leaders and the ground troops, giving the watchword so that the Negro community moved forward in sync with America, but more importantly, as a unified whole. Every action carried the hope for the ultimate victory.

  From the fissure of their ever-present double consciousness sprang the idea of the double victory, articulated by James Thompson in his letter to the Pittsburgh Courier: “Let colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory; the first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies within. For surely those who perpetrate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”

  On the first day of December 1943, as the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and Russia concluded a conference in Tehran in which they planned a summer 1944 invasion of France—an operation that would be known to history as D-Day—Dorothy Vaughan stepped behind the Colored line on the Citizens Rapid Transit bus and headed to her first day of work at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Manifest Destiny

  On her first day at Langley, Dorothy Vaughan spent the morning in the personnel department filling out the requisite paperwork. Holding up her right hand, she swore the US Civil Service oath of office, confirming her status as an employee of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. But it was her employee badge—a blue metal circle dominated by an image of her face, with the winged NACA logo on either side—that sealed her status as a member of the club, the bearer of a token that allowed her free access to the laboratory’s facilities. Entering the waiting Langley shuttle bus, Dorothy Vaughan headed to her final destination in the laboratory’s West Area.

  “If the Placement Officer shall see fit to assign thee to a far-off land of desolation, a land of marshes and mosquitoes without number known as the West Area, curse him not. But equip thyself with hip-boots, take heed that thy hospitalization is paid up and go forth on thy safari into the wilderness and be not bitter over thy sad fate,” joked a contributor to the weekly employee newsletter, Air Scoop.

  Since its establishment in 1917, the laboratory’s operations had been concentrated on the campus of the Langley Field military base on the bank of Hampton’s Back River. Beginning in the Administration Building, with a single wind tunnel, the lab grew until space limits pushed it to expand to the west onto several large properties tracing their provenance to colonial-era plantations. Some Hamptonites still recalled how the strange folks at the laboratory saved the town from the economic despair of Prohibition. With a disproportionate number of Hampton citizens earning a living from the liquor industry in the early days of the twentieth century, the alcohol drought that was rolling across the country was potentially devastating. The city’s clerk of courts, Harry Holt, working with a cabal including oyster magnate Frank Darling, whose company, J. S. Darling and Son, was the world’s third largest oyster packer, endeavored to clandestinely purchase parcels that were once the homesteads of wealthy Virginians, including George Wythe. Holt consolidated the parcels and sold them to the federal government for the flying field and laboratory. “The future of this favored section of Virginia is made,” crowed the local newspaper. It was the biggest thing to happen to the area since Collis Huntington set up his shipyard in Newport News. Locals were so happy about the “life-giving energy” of federal money that they didn’t even begrudge Holt and his business cronies the tidy profit they made on their real estate speculation.

  Construction of the West Area began in earnest in 1939. Now, as Dorothy and the other passengers in the shuttle bus came to the end of the forested back road that connected the two sides of the campus, the view opened onto a bizarre landscape consisting of finished two-story brick buildings and cleared construction sites with half-complete structures reaching up out of what was still mostly a thicket of woods and fields. Towering behind one building was a gigantic three-story-high ribbed-metal pipe, like a caterpillar loosed from the mind of H. G. Wells. This racetrack of air called the Sixteen-foot High-Speed Tunnel was completed just two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor and formed a closed rectangular circuit that stretched three hundred feet wide and one hundred feet deep. Adding to the futuristic aspect of the landscape was the fact that all the buildings on the West Side—indeed, all the laboratory’s buildings and everything on the air base as well—had been painted dark green in 1942 to camouflage them against a possible attack by Axis forces.

  The shuttle bus made the West Side rounds, stopping to deposit Dorothy at the front door of an outpost called the Warehouse Building. There was nothing to distinguish the building or its offices from any of the other unremarkable spaces on the laboratory’s register: same narrow windows with a view of the fevered construction taking place outside, same office-bright ceiling lights, same government-issue desks arranged classroom style. Even before she walked through the door that would be her workaday home for the duration, she could hear the music of the calculating machines inside the room: a click every time its minder hit a key to enter a number, a drumbeat in response to an operations key, a full drumroll as the machine ran through a complex calculation; the cumulative effect sounded like the practice room of a military band’s percussion unit. The arrangement played in all the rooms where women were engaged in aeronautical research at its most granular level, from the central computing pool over on the East Side to the smaller groups of computers attached to specific wind tunnels or engineering groups. The only difference between the other rooms at Langley and the one that Dorothy walked into was that the women sitting at the desks, plying the machines for answers to the question what makes things fly, were black.

  The white women from the State Teachers College across from Dorothy’s house in Farmville, and their sisters from schools like Sweetbriar and Hollins and the New Jersey College for Women, performed together in the East Area computing pool. In the West Area computing office where Dorothy was beginning work, the members of the calculating machine symphony hailed from the Virginia State College for Negroes, and Arkansas AM&N, and Hampton Institute. This room, set up to accommodate about twenty workers, was nearly full. Miriam Mann, Pearl Bassette, Yvette Brown, Thelma Stiles, and Minnie McGraw filled the first five seats at the end of May. Over the following six months, more graduates of Hampton Institute’s Engineering for Women training class joined the group, as well as women from farther afield, like Lessie Hunter, a graduate of Prairie View University in Texas. Many, like Dorothy, brought years of teaching experience to the position.

  Dorothy took a seat as the women greeted her over the din of the calculating machines; she knew without needing to ask that they were all part of the same confederation of black colleges, alumni associations, civic organizations, and churches. Many of them belonged to Greek letter organizations like Delta Sigma Theta or Alpha Kappa Alpha, which Dorothy had joined at Wilberforce. By securing jobs in Langley’s West Computing section, they now had pledged one of the world’s most exclusive sororities. In 1940, just 2 percent of all black women earned college degrees, and 60 percent of those women became
teachers, mostly in public elementary and high schools. Exactly zero percent of those 1940 college graduates became engineers. And yet, in an era when just 10 percent of white women and not even a full third of white men had earned college degrees, the West Computers had found jobs and each other at the “single best and biggest aeronautical research complex in the world.”

  At the front of the room, like teachers in a classroom, sat two former East Area Computers: Margery Hannah, West Computing’s section head, and her assistant, Blanche Sponsler. Tall and lanky, with enormous eyes and even bigger glasses, Margery Hannah started working at the lab in 1939 after graduating from Idaho State University, not long after the East Area Computing pool outgrew the office it shared with Pearl Young. Young, hired in 1922, and for the better part of two decades the laboratory’s only female engineer, now served as the laboratory’s technical editor (the “English critic,” as she was usually called) and managed a small, mostly female staff responsible for setting the standards for the NACA’s research reports. Virginia Tucker, who had ascended to the position of head computer, ran Langley’s entire computing operation of over two hundred women, and supervised Margery Hannah and the other section heads. The work that came to a particular section usually flowed down from the top of the pyramid: engineers came to Virginia Tucker with computing assignments; she parceled out the tasks to her section heads, who then divided up the work among the girls in their sections. Over time, engineers might bring their computing directly to the section head, or even to a particular girl whose work they liked.

  With labor shortages affecting the laboratory’s ability to execute time-sensitive drag cleanup and other tests designed to make military aircraft as powerful, safe, and efficient as possible, the West Computers added much-needed minds to the agency’s escalating research effort. The NACA planned to double the size of Langley’s West Area in the next three years. Mother Langley had even given birth to two new laboratories: the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in Moffett Field, California, in 1939, and the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1940. Both laboratories siphoned off Langley employees, including computers, for their startup staffs. The agency scrambled to keep up with the production miracle that was the American aircraft industry, which had gone from the country’s forty-third largest industry in 1938 to the world’s number one by 1943.