Hidden Figures Read online

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Duration

  The first time Dorothy Vaughan traveled the road between Farmville and Newport News was far from the last, though the unrelenting pace of research at Langley made anything but the shortest trips home impossible. With the Full-Scale Tunnel running around the clock and the rest of the engineering groups pushing the limits of their capacity, Dorothy became an expert in the eighteen-hour day, when she could find the time, taking the earliest possible bus to Farmville. She lingered over her children as long as she could before a late-night return to her corner of the war machine, the numbers on her data sheets swimming before her tired eyes the next day. Even time off over holidays, which were more flexible but still considered workdays, was hard to come by, particularly as she was still classified as a temporary war service employee.

  When and if the laboratory would make her a permanent offer of employment was a matter for the future. But over the July Fourth holiday in 1944, Dorothy Vaughan decided to convert her own status as a temporary resident of Newport News into something much longer lasting. She signed a lease on a new two-bedroom apartment in Newsome Park, picking up the keys to a white dwelling with black shutters, identical to the 1,199 others that had been built there. Protective paper—pink, inexplicably—covered the floors, and long after the apartments themselves ceased to exist, their first occupants would remember that first look at the pink-paper-covered floors. As if she were unwrapping a big present, Dorothy Vaughan pulled it up, making the apartment hers.

  Or, more accurately, theirs. Just as she had gone back to visit Farmville, she had, once or twice since coming to Newport News, brought Farmville down to her, arranging for the children to stay with her during a school break. It wasn’t so much that she had devised a plan out of whole cloth, more that the plan had faded into place, like a slow sunrise, as she identified the factors that would tip the balance of her life from an oscillation between Farmville and Newport News to a life fully at rest in the new city.

  Finding a suitable place to live hadn’t been easy. There simply wasn’t enough supply to meet the demands of a growing black population, most of whom considered a comfortable and safe place to live at the top of the list of the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt elucidated during the war. Aberdeen Gardens, a Depression-era subdivision built “for blacks by blacks” on 440 acres that included farmland bought from Hampton Institute, had recently been joined by Mimosa Crescent, a “high type suburban community for Negro families” and smaller black neighborhoods like Lassiter Courts, Orcutt Homes, and Harbor Homes.

  Reviewing her budget, her needs, and the ongoing demands of her job, Dorothy decided that Newsome Park, more or less in the same neighborhood she had come to know in the last nine months, was the best option. Although originally earmarked for shipyard workers and defense employees like Dorothy, the neighborhood was starting to attract Negroes from all income classes. Domestic workers, laborers, small-business owners, and many of the doctor-lawyer-preacher-teacher class moved in alongside the drillers, riggers, and civil servants. Its eventual demolition had been planned from its inception: both Newsome Park and next-door Copeland Park, for whites, were mandated to last only as long as the war. But the migrants settled in as if their temporary homes were built on bedrock.

  Newsome Park was an outsize replica of virtually every Negro community in the South, where racial segregation fostered economic integration. The government outfitted the development with the perks that it felt were key to keeping home-front morale high. The Newsome Park Community Center boasted a kitchen and banquet space, rooms for craft courses and club meetings, basketball and tennis courts, and a baseball diamond for the semipro Newsome Park Dodgers. The center’s director, Eric Epps, a former teacher at one of the Negro high schools whose activism in favor of teacher salary equalization had led to his dismissal, exhorted residents to turn out for chest X-rays and diabetes screenings at the center and solicited local fraternal and civil organizations for funds to support after-school programs.

  The tidy green-painted Newsome Park shopping center included a grocery store, a drugstore, a barbershop, a beauty shop, a beer joint, a cleaners, and a TV repair shop. And what wasn’t for sale in the stores came knocking at the front door: the coal man, the milkman, the iceman, the fishmonger, the vegetable man, and more made the rounds, peddling their wares to the neighbors. There was a nursery school for the tiniest tots, a boon to the mothers working six-day weeks during the war. Most importantly for Dorothy, Newsome Park Elementary was walking distance from the new apartment. It was her apartment, her name on the lease for the first time since she had been a young teacher.

  Dorothy’s mother-in-law tried to dig in her heels against the growing distance between her son and daughter-in-law that she must have surmised for some time to be inevitable. “You’re not going to take my babies,” she said to Dorothy, struggling against the changes that had been set in motion by Langley’s letter, but which had roots much deeper than that. A year after Dorothy left Farmville, so did her four children, starting the fall 1944 school year at Newsome Park Elementary School. The babysitter, who had come down with them to ease the transition, crowded into the apartment as well. Howard continued his itinerant hotel job. Dorothy had put herself and the children on a separate path forward, whereas the cycle of Howard’s life, despite the extensive travel to the exotic locations, still began and ended in Farmville. He made it down to Newport News when he could: it was too crowded, too noisy, too far away from his now elderly mother for him to convince himself to stay too long. Dorothy would send the children back home for summer vacations, and went back herself as she could, unwilling and unable to sever the ties with the people she loved deeply and would always consider her family. Her marriage with Howard settled into a state of limbo, never together but never completely apart either. It was a stable instability that would endure for the rest of Howard’s life, which was destined to be many decades shorter than Dorothy’s.

  By 1945, five out of ten people in southeastern Virginia worked for Uncle Sam, directly or indirectly. The sylvan fields, forests, and shores had been mowed down, paved over, and built up with roads, bridges, hospitals, boatyards, jails, and military bases, cities in and of themselves. Housing developments sprawled for miles, a new feature of the landscape, neither urban nor rural but something in between; the names of the new asphalted places were reflections of the green spaces they replaced: Ferguson Park, Stuart Gardens, Copeland Park, Newsome Park, Aberdeen Gardens. On the peninsula was Military Highway, a modern ribbon of road whose wide, smooth lanes now connected all the you-can’t-get-there-from-here points along the finger of land from Old Point Comfort at Fort Monroe to the Newport News shipyard, with stops along the way at Langley Field and Langley. All of it was the product of the war emergency. But what was a war boomtown without the war?

  V-J Day came on August 15, 1945, at 7:03 p.m. Eastern War Time. Into the vacuum of waiting and anxiety flooded “joyous tumult.” All the pent-up emotions of a nation weary from four years of war exploded in a paroxysm, nowhere as much as in the war communities leading the home-front effort. From Camp Patrick Henry and Naval Station Norfolk, Langley Field and Fort Monroe, soldiers and civilians streamed into the streets. Bars and USO clubs filled in a grand hurrah. Business owners locked their doors and joined the uncounted thousands of servicemen and civilians in the celebration that lasted through the night. Spontaneous parades erupted on Washington Avenue in Newport News. In Norfolk, middies held hands and formed a human chain, dancing around cars like kindergartners, madly encircling the standstill traffic. Cries of human jubilation and “indescribable noise-making devices” sounded off into the night. Makeshift confetti snowed from windows onto the celebrants in the streets below. Some exuberant revelers piled the paper into heaps and set them on fire, the bonfires further enhancing the primal joy of the outcry. The faithful filled churches, giving thanks and imploring their creator to allow this one to be the war to truly end all wars.

  A
fter the deluge, the uncertainty settled in. Three weeks after V-J Day, the Norfolk Journal and Guide reported layoffs of 1,500 Newport News shipyard workers and a “decrease for women workers, both white and colored.” “It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that employment in the shipyards and governmental establishments in the Hampton Roads area will be drastically curtailed,” commented the Washington Post. Returning servicemen were expected to have first claim on what jobs remained in the peacetime economy. Just as “victory” had been the watchword for the past four years, now “reconversion” came to the fore, with the United States trying to adjust its psyche and its economy to the peace. The war had been a freight train, traveling headlong at top speed. What now of the passengers inside, still moving forward with tremendous inertia? The word “reconversion” itself implied the possibility of returning to an earlier time, of a reversal even, in the changes large and small that had transformed American life.

  With the war emergency fading into the past and without war production pressures, there would be no hire-at-all-costs demand for women. Two million American women of all colors received pink slips even before the final curtain fell in August. Many anticipated a happy return to domestic life. Others, fulfilled by their work, resisted the expectation that they should be reconverted back to the kitchen and the nursery. With work had come economic security, and a greater say in household affairs, which put some women on collision courses with their husbands. “Many husbands will return home to find that the helpless little wives they left behind have become grown, independent women,” wrote columnist Evelyn Mansfield Swann in the Norfolk Journal and Guide.

  With victory over the enemies from without assured, Negroes took stock of their own battlefield. Almost immediately after V-J Day, some employers returned to their white, Gentile-only employment policies. The FEPC, however feeble it might have been in reality during the war, had nonetheless become a powerful symbol of employment progress for Negroes and other ethnic minorities. With labor markets loosening, the dream that many black leaders had of establishing a permanent FEPC slipped away with the war emergency, in spite of President Truman’s support.

  No one was more opposed to the FEPC than Virginia’s Democratic senator, Harry Byrd, who called it “the most dangerous idea ever seriously considered” and likened it to “following the Communists’ lead,” an explosive epithet as the United States began to view its wartime ally Russia as the new threat. Byrd, a former governor, descended from a “First Family of Virginia,” one of the state’s multigenerational ruling elite. Heir to a newspaper and apple-growing fortune, Byrd treated segregation as a religion and ran a powerful political machine that kept the poor of all races divided against each other and at the bottom of the economic pyramid. “The Byrd Machine is the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America,” wrote journalist John Gunther in his 1947 bestselling book Inside USA. Byrd’s father, who had also been a powerful state politician, had helped fellow Virginian Woodrow Wilson win the White House in 1912. It seemed too early to say if the activism and the economic gains made during the war years would carry forward into the future or give way in the face of subversion by politicians like Byrd, as they had after World War I. The generals of the Negroes’ war, however—leaders such as Randolph, Houston, and Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as an advisor to President Roosevelt—did not let their guard down one bit, preparing to rouse the troops for the next offensive. But Dorothy and the others who had built new lives during the war weren’t waiting for leaders or politicians to take the lead. They voted with their feet, betting their new lives that the social and economic changes brought about by the four-year conflict would last.

  It wasn’t a risk-free wager. Dorothy committed to the lease on the apartment in Newsome Park even though Langley had not converted her wartime employee status to permanent. The future of the neighborhood itself was also uncertain. Neighbors in nearby Hilton Village, a World War I–era housing project for white, middle-class shipyard managers, were attempting to dismantle Newsome and Copeland Parks under slum clearance laws. Federal authorities planned to pry the houses off their bases and send the units to “war-devastated populations in Europe.” While the government and neighbors went back and forth over Newsome Park’s status—it was declared to be “not temporary in character,” yet “not permanent in its current location”—the residents brimmed with postwar idealism, calling upon each other to create a “model community, not just for Newport News, but for the entire United States.” And why would Newsome Park disappear? The great groaning defense machine and all the nooks and communities it had built in the last four years weren’t about to disappear. Gone were the small-town rhythms and the day of the waterman, replaced by connections to the larger world and the vitality of middle-class dreams. The jobs, the housing, the relationships, the routines—so many aspects of life that had been cut out of the whole cloth of the war emergency were now so intrinsic that it was easy to believe things had always been this way. Despite the best intentions of returning to their former lives, the come-heres tarried, realizing in small sips of awareness over the course of the war years—or with great gulping realizations at the war’s abrupt end—that they would not, or could not, go home again.

  Dorothy’s older children had mourned the loss of their small-town freedom and the space that had come with the big house in Farmville. As talented as Dorothy was as a mathematician, she might have missed her calling in the military: she ran the Newport News household with the authority of a general and the economy of a quartermaster, eventually sending the babysitter back to Farmville and offering room and board to a returning military man and his wife in exchange for keeping the children during the day.

  While her children went to school, managing the transition from being well-known faces in a small town to faces in a large crowd, Dorothy began to knit together the pieces of life she had been working on since her arrival, hosting a party for nearly twenty people in the little home on Forty-Eighth Street. Some she had met at work; others came from the neighborhood or St. Paul’s AME Church. She grew closer to Miriam Mann and her family, the two women and their children becoming like one large extended family, often taking advantage of the many activities available on the Hampton Institute campus. From the moment the acclaimed contralto Marian Anderson announced a performance at the college’s Ogden Hall, the two women knew they would go together. Anderson had taken the stage there many times since her earliest professional performances as a teenager. She had gone on to sing on four continents, but there was perhaps no place she was as warmly and enthusiastically welcomed as the Hampton Institute theater; many patrons there had come out for every recital. Dorothy and Miriam Mann bought tickets in advance to secure their seats. On the evening of the concert, the Vaughans dressed up and met the Manns at the theater, arriving early so that their large group could all sit together.

  It was an exceptional performance. Dorothy looked over at her children, still so young but entranced by the contralto voice that seemed to each person in the audience to be singing to them, only to them. It was, she knew right then, a moment they would never forget.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Those Who Move Forward

  Katherine Goble would have eventually found her way back to the classroom, but a fever hastened the process: in 1944, her husband, Jimmy, the chemistry teacher at the Negro high school in Marion, Virginia, had fallen ill with undulant fever. The illness, which came from drinking unpasteurized milk, had sickened at least eight people in Smyth County that summer. Weeks, sometimes months, of sweats, fatigue, poor appetite, and pain lay in store for the unfortunate victims. There was no way Jimmy would be able to start the school year that fall, so the principal offered Jimmy’s yearlong contract to Katherine instead. Despite being a full-time wife and mother for the last four years, Katherine had been careful to keep her teaching certificate current.

  It would be her second time around as a teacher at the school. In 1937, newly graduated from West Virginia State In
stitute, eighteen-year-old Katherine applied for a position at the Marion school, which was just on the Virginia side of the border. “If you can play the piano, the job is yours,” the telegram read. She bade farewell to her home state and boarded a bus in Charleston, the state capital, settling in for the three-hour ride to Marion. Upon entering Virginia, she and the other black passengers, who had been interspersed with whites throughout the bus, were ordered to move to the back. A short time later, the driver evicted the black passengers, announcing that service wouldn’t continue into the town’s Negro area. Katherine paid a cab to take her to the house of the principal of the Marion school, where she had arranged to rent a room.

  For the two years she taught in Marion, Katherine earned $50 a month, less than the $65 the state paid similarly trained white teachers in the county. In 1939, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit against the state of Virginia on behalf of a black teacher at Norfolk’s Booker T. Washington High School. The black teacher and her colleagues, including the principal, made less money than the school’s white janitor. The NAACP’s legal eagles, led by the fund’s chief counsel, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Houston’s top deputy, a gangly, whip-smart Howard University law school grad named Thurgood Marshall, shepherded the Alston v. Norfolk case to the US Supreme Court, which ordered Virginia to bring Negro teachers’ salaries up to the white teachers’ level. It was a victory, but a year too late for Katherine: when a $110-a-month job offer came from a Morgantown, West Virginia, high school for the 1939 school year, Katherine jumped at it. Pay equalization might have been a battle in Virginia, but West Virginia got on board without a fight.