Hidden Figures Read online

  For most of its existence a small and contained operation, the NACA’s flagship laboratory was now a many-layered bureaucracy flush with new faces. As engineering groups grew in number and complexity, an employee’s daily routine was pegged less to the revolutions of the laboratory as a whole and more to the ebb and flow of their individual work groups. Employees sat elbow to elbow with the same people during their morning coffee, ate lunch in their designated time slot in the cafeteria as a group, and left together to catch the evening shuttle bus. Air Scoop published everything from recaps of presentations by aeronautical notables to the scores from the intramural softball league and the dance schedule for the Noble Order of the Green Cow, the club for the laboratory’s fashionable white social set. The weekly dispatch kept employees abreast of the constant activity and fostered morale, but in a breathless year in which the laboratory staff would come close to doubling, it wasn’t easy for the employees themselves to absorb the full impact of the organization’s unusual mission or the unusual assemblage of people carrying it out.

  But just one month before Dorothy’s trip from Farmville, Air Scoop covered Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox’s one-day junket to the laboratory. Fifteen hundred employees filed into the Structures Research Laboratory, a cavernous facility located across a dusty clearing from the Warehouse Building, to hear Knox’s address. He congratulated the NACA for leading all federal agencies in employee purchases of war bonds—larger versions of the war stamps on sale at the Moton school—and lauded them for the research that turned an unreliable prototype of a dive bomber into the “slow but deadly” SBD Dauntless, a decisive force in the navy’s June 1942 victory at the Battle of Midway.

  “You men and women working here far from the sound of drums and guns, working in your civilian capacity in accordance with your highly specialized skills, are winning your part of this war: the battle of research,” said Knox. “This war is being fought in the laboratories as well as on the battlefields.”

  The employees spread out from one side of the room to the other, from foreground to background, a mass occupying the enormous space like gas filling a hot air balloon. Knox, a dot at the far end of the room, stood at a podium in front of a giant American flag. White men dominated the crowd from front to back, the majority in some permutation of shirtsleeves and ties or jackets and sweaters, a good number in the coveralls of mechanics and laborers. A cluster of grandees in tweeds and armbands identifying them as minders to the secretary and his entourage stood off to the side in the front. Whiz kids of the day—John D. Bird, Francis Rogallo, John Becker, their names already circulated as being among the top in the discipline—smiled from a few rows back. Clustered in the left corner of the room stood twenty or so black men, all wearing work coats and dungarees, a few sharpening their outfits with newsboy caps or brimmed hats. White women were sprinkled throughout the crowd, many in the front row, their knee-length skirts sensibly accessorized with the practical footwear that could stand up to treks across the Langley campus. Flanking John Becker were more female faces—brown faces, peering out from the middle distance. Thelma Stiles smiled, Pearl Bassette’s glasses caught the light of the flash. Tiny Miriam Mann’s head was barely visible over the shoulders of the crowd. Who would have thought that such a mélange of black and white, male and female, blue-collar and white-collar workers, those who worked with their hands and those who worked with numbers, was actually possible? And who would guess that the southern city of Hampton, Virginia, was the place to find it?

  After the presentation, the women of West Computing walked over to the cafeteria. Employees who never saw one another, who worked in different groups or buildings, might run into one another in the cafeteria, catch a glimpse of Henry Reid or the NACA’s phlegmatic secretary, John Victory, in town for a visit, or maybe get an earful of salty language from John Stack, who oversaw the wind tunnels involved in high-speed research. Thirty minutes and back to work. Just enough time for a hot lunch and a little conversation.

  Most groups sat together out of habit. For the West Computers, it was by mandate. A white cardboard sign on a table in the back of the cafeteria beckoned them, its crisply stenciled black letters spelling out the lunchroom hierarchy: COLORED COMPUTERS. It was the only sign in the West Area cafeteria; no other group needed their seating proscribed in the same fashion. The janitors, the laborers, the cafeteria workers themselves did not take lunch in the main cafeteria. The women of West Computing were the only black professionals at the laboratory—not exactly excluded, but not quite included either.

  In the hierarchy of racial slights, the sign wasn’t unusual or out of the ordinary. It didn’t presage the kind of racial violence that could spring out of nowhere, striking even the most economically secure Negroes like kerosene poured on a smoldering ember. This was the kind of garden-variety segregation that over the years blacks had learned to tolerate, if not to accept, in order to function in their daily lives. But there in the lofty environment of the laboratory, a place that had selected them for their intellectual talents, the sign seemed especially ridiculous and somehow more offensive.

  They tried to ignore the sign, push it aside during their lunch hour, pretend it wasn’t there. In the office, the women felt equal. But in the cafeteria, and in the bathrooms designated for colored girls, the signs were a reminder that even within the meritocracy of the US Civil Service, even after Executive Order 8802, some were more equal than others. Even the group’s anodyne title was both descriptive and a little deceptive, allowing the laboratory to comply with the Fair Employment Act—West Computing was simply a functional description on the organizational chart—while simultaneously appeasing the Commonwealth of Virginia’s discriminatory separate-but-equal statutes. The sign in the cafeteria was evidence that the law that paved the way for the West Computers to work at Langley was not allowed to compete with the state laws that kept them in their separate place. The front door to the laboratory was open, but many others remained closed, like Anne Wythe Hall, a dormitory for single white women working at Langley. While Dorothy walked several blocks each morning from the Lucys’ house to the bus, the women at the dormitory enjoyed special bus service. There was nothing they could do about that, or the separate “Colored girls” bathroom. But that sign in the cafeteria . . .

  It was Miriam Mann who finally decided it was too much to take. “There’s my sign for today,” she would say upon entering the cafeteria, spying the placard designating their table in the back of the room. Not even five feet tall, her feet just grazing the floor when she sat down, Miriam Mann had a personality as outsized as she was tiny.

  The West Computers watched their colleague remove the sign and banish it to the recesses of her purse, her small act of defiance inspiring both anxiety and a sense of empowerment. The ritual played itself out with absurd regularity. The sign, placed by an unseen hand, made the unspoken rules of the cafeteria explicit. When Miriam snatched the sign, it took its leave for a few days, perhaps a week, maybe longer, before it was replaced with an identical twin, the letters of the new sign just as blankly menacing as its predecessor’s.

  The signs and their removal were a regular topic of conversation among the women of West Computing, who debated the prudence of the action. As the sign drama played itself out in the Langley cafeteria, an incident that would have national repercussions took place in Gloucester County, just twenty miles away. Irene Morgan worked at the Baltimore-based aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin Company, assigned to the production line of the B-26 Marauder. In the summer of 1944 she came home to Virginia on the Greyhound bus to visit her mother, but was arrested on the return trip to Baltimore for refusing to move to the Colored section. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund took the case and planned to use it to challenge segregation rules on interstate transportation. In 1946, the Supreme Court, in Morgan v. Virginia, held that segregation on interstate buses was illegal. But what hope had the West Computers of making a federal case out of something so banal as a cafeteria sign? More likel
y, whoever kept the table stocked with signs would just decide that it was time to get rid of the troublemakers. “They are going to fire you over that sign, Miriam,” her husband, William, told her at night over dinner. Negro life in America was a never-ending series of negotiations: when to fight and when to concede. This, Miriam had decided, was one to fight. “Then they’re just going to have to do it,” she would retort.

  The Manns lived on Hampton Institute’s campus. Though the student body was predominantly black, the school’s president and much of the faculty were white. Malcolm MacLean, a former administrator from the University of Minnesota, had taken the helm of the school in 1940, and was determined that the school’s fully committed participation in the war effort would be his legacy. As the aeronautical laboratory expanded west to meet the demands of the war, its twin, Langley Field, sought to grow in order to accommodate the Army Air Corps’ booming operation. A Boston philanthropist had deeded to Hampton Institute a former plantation named Shellbanks Farm, which served as an agricultural laboratory for Negro and Indian students at the school. In 1941, MacLean oversaw the sale of the 770-acre property to the federal government for use by Langley Field, making it one of the largest air bases in the world.

  Under MacLean’s direction, the college also established a US naval training school, effectively turning the campus into an active military base. Military police manned all campus entrances, patrolling the comings and goings of everyone on the grounds. From around the country, more than a thousand black naval recruits were sent to the school to receive instruction in the repair of airplane and boat engines. The graduates then headed off to stateside service at bases like Maryland’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River, ground zero for the navy’s flight test activity. And Hampton was determined to be the leader of all black colleges in providing the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training (ESMWT) programs that had graduated West Computing’s first members. Men and women crowded into Hampton Institute classrooms offering instruction in everything from radio science to chemistry. At a war labor conference that Hampton Institute hosted in 1942, MacLean told attendees that the war could be “the greatest break in history for minority groups.”

  Many local whites considered MacLean distastefully progressive, dangerous even, with his strident calls to boost Negro participation in the war. But it was his comfort with racial mixing in social situations that really fanned the flames. In speeches, he urged white colleges to employ Negro professors. He entertained both white and black guests at the president’s residence (called the Mansion House), even allowing them to smoke. He went so far as to dance with a Hampton coed at a campus mixer, scandalizing the local gentry (and scoring points with the Hampton students). He seemed to be a true believer in the need for the Negro to advance in American society, a true champion of the tenets of the Double V.

  Henry Reid, the engineer in charge of the Langley laboratory, was anything but a firebrand. An understated electrical engineering graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, Reid served as an able ambassador for the Yankee-heavy laboratory, replying to invitations to attend local bridge openings with the same care and promptness he used in corresponding with Orville Wright. He embraced the Hampton and Newport News Kiwanis Club set that MacLean spurned. And yet, in some ways the two men were cut from the same cloth: passionate about their particular fields, pragmatic by nature, come-heres with interests and responsibilities that extended beyond the southern sensibilities and social obligations of the town in which they worked. Almost certainly at some point they found themselves in the same place at the same time, in their hurried efforts to push their respective institutions to keep up with the rhythm of the war. Neither left fingerprints on Langley’s decision to hire black women mathematicians. Keeping a public distance from the matter might have been a strategic decision on the part of both men: if the approval process took place quietly, through the “color-blind” bureaucratic gears of the US Civil Service Commission, there was less chance of derailing an advance that served both their missions. The word about the Colored Computers made the round in the community, naturally, and there were those who saw in their employment evidence that the world was coming to an end. Even among the local gentry who attended concerts and theater at Hampton Institute’s grand concert auditorium, Ogden Hall, there were those who expected to be seated at the front of the hall, apart even from the school’s black faculty and administrators.

  Some of Langley’s white employees openly defied southern conventions. Head computer Margery Hannah went out of her way to treat the West Area women as equals, and had even invited some of them to work-related social affairs at her apartment. This was nearly unheard of, and made Marge a pariah as far as some white colleagues were concerned.

  One of the most brilliant engineers on the laboratory’s staff took an active interest in standing up to the prejudice he saw around town. Robert “R. T.” Jones, whose theory on triangular delta-shaped airplane wings would revolutionize the discipline, was walking through the streets of Hampton one evening when he came upon a group of Hampton police officers harassing a black man. The cops were on the verge of beating the man up when Jones shouted at them to stop. They left the man alone and allowed him to leave, deciding instead to take Jones into custody. He spent the night in the city hoosegow for his trouble. Another engineer, Arthur Kantrowitz, bailed Jones out the next morning.

  Engineers from the northern and western states were probably of mixed minds on the issue of race mixing. While it may have been unthinkable for most to extend their social circles to include black colleagues, within the circumscribed atmosphere of the office, they were cordial, even friendly. They got to know the women by their work, requesting their favorites for projects, open to giving a smart person—black or white, male or female—the chance to work hard and get the numbers right. That pragmatic majority, the West Computers knew, were the ones who had the power to break down the barriers that existed at Langley.

  Their facilities might be separate, but as far as the West Computers were concerned, they would prove themselves equal or better, having internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far. They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons, warding off the presumption of inferiority because they were Negro or female. They corrected each other’s work and policed their ranks like soldiers against tardiness, sloppy appearance, and the perception of loose morals. They warded off the negative stereotypes that haunted Negroes like shadows, using tough love to protect both the errant individual and the group from her failings. And each time the laboratory passed the collection plate for Uncle Sam, the West Computers reached into their purses as they had when they were teachers, so that West Computing could claim 100 percent participation in the purchase of war bonds.

  At some point during the war, the COLORED COMPUTERS sign disappeared into Miriam Mann’s purse and never came back. The separate office remained, as did the segregated bathrooms, but in the Battle of the West Area Cafeteria, the unseen hand had been forced to concede victory to its petite but relentless adversary. Not that the West Computers were hatching plans to invade a neighboring table; they just wanted dominion over their table in the back corner. Miriam Mann’s insistence on sending the humiliating sign to oblivion gave her and the other women of West Computing just a little more room for dignity and the confidence that the laboratory might belong to them as well.

  Perhaps the unseen hand and its collaborators had come to the conclusion that the quiet endurance of the West Computers was a force better engaged than antagonized, for if there was one thing the war had required over the last three years, and one thing Negroes had in abundance, it was endurance. Those forecasting a swift and tidy end to the war had been numerous but wrong. The fight slogged on, requiring more people, more money, more planes and technology. Someday the war would end, but it didn’t look to be happening tomorrow. The tide of the war might be turning, but there were many battles ahea
d to win, and victory would require perseverance.

  Not everyone could take the long hours and high stakes of working at Langley, but most of the women in West Computing felt that if they didn’t stand up to the pressure, they’d forfeit their opportunity, and maybe opportunity for the women who would come after them. They had more riding on the jobs at Langley than most. The relationships begun in those early days in West Computing would blossom into friendships that extended throughout the women’s lifetimes and beyond, into the lives of their children. Dorothy Vaughan, Miriam Mann, and Kathryn Peddrew were becoming a band of sisters in and out of work, each day bringing them closer to each other and tethering them to the place that was transforming them as they helped to transform it.

  Dorothy listened carefully as Marge Hannah took her through the ropes of the job, taking care to note the expectations with the same exacting eye she herself had applied to grading her students at Moton: Accuracy of operations. Skill in the application of techniques and procedures. Accuracy of judgments or decisions. Dependability. Initiative. Even if the job lasted only six months, she was going to make the most of this chance. For an ambitious young mathematical mind—or even one not so young—there wasn’t a better seat in the world.

  CHAPTER SIX

  War Birds