Hidden Figures Read online

  Katherine always made sure that people knew she was from West Virginia, not Virginia. West Virginia’s hilly terrain offered cool evening breezes, whereas Virginia was sweltering and malarial. The antebellum plantation system had never taken root in West Virginia the way it had farther east and south. During the Civil War, the mountain state seceded from Virginia and joined the Union. This didn’t make West Virginia an oasis of progressive views on race—segregation kept blacks and whites separate in lodging, schools, public halls, and restaurants—but the state did offer its tiny black population just the slightest bit more breathing room. Compared to West Virginia, the state’s Negro residents thought, Virginia was the South.

  Born and raised in White Sulphur Springs, Katherine was the youngest of Joshua and Joylette Coleman’s four children. “You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you,” Joshua told his children, a philosophy he embodied to the utmost. Dressed neatly in a coat and tie whenever he was on business in town, Joshua quietly commanded admiration from both blacks and whites in tiny White Sulphur Springs; you never had to tell anybody to respect Josh Coleman.

  Though educated only through the sixth grade, Katherine’s father was a mathematical whiz who could tell how many board feet a tree would yield just by looking at it. As soon as their youngest daughter could talk, Joshua and Joylette realized that she’d inherited her father’s winning way with people and his mind for math. Katherine counted whatever crossed her path—dishes, steps, and stars in the nighttime sky. Insatiably curious about the world, the child peppered her grammar school teachers with questions and skipped ahead from second grade to fifth. When teachers turned around from the blackboard to discover an empty desk in Katherine’s place, they knew they’d find their pupil in the classroom next door, helping her older brother with his lesson. The children’s school, the only one in the area for Negroes, terminated with the sixth grade. When Katherine’s older sister, Margaret, graduated from the White Sulphur Springs schoolhouse, Joshua rented a house 125 miles away so that all four children, supervised by their mother, could continue their education at the laboratory school operated by West Virginia State Institute.

  Income from the Coleman farm slowed to a trickle during the hardscrabble years of the Depression. Anxious for a way to support the household and cover the cost of the children’s education, Joshua moved the family into town and accepted a job as a bellman at the Greenbrier, the country’s most exclusive resort. (It was here, years later, that he met Dorothy Vaughan’s husband, Howard.) The enormous white-columned hotel, built in the classical revival style, sprawled on a manicured estate in the middle of White Sulphur. Joseph and Rose Kennedy spent their 1914 honeymoon in room 145 of the hotel. Bing Crosby, the Duke of Windsor, Lou Gehrig, Life magazine publisher Henry Luce, actress Mary Pickford, a young Malcolm Forbes, the emperor of Japan, and assorted Vanderbilts, Du Ponts, and Pulitzers all converged on White Sulphur Springs throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, where they Charlestoned, cha-chaed, and rumbaed the night away. Even as breadlines snaked through America’s main streets and drought broke the backs of tens of thousands of farm families, “Old White” remained a magnet for glamorous international guests who golfed, took the waters at the resort’s famed springs, and basked in its unbridled luxury.

  The Greenbrier segmented its serving class carefully. Negroes worked as maids, bellmen, and kitchen help, while Italian and Eastern European immigrants attended the dining room. During summers home from Institute, the Coleman boys pulled stints as bellmen, and Katherine and her sister took jobs as personal maids to individual guests. Accommodating the every need of the visiting gentry—cleaning their rooms; washing, ironing, and setting out their clothes; anticipating their desires while appearing invisible—was a sow’s ear of a job that Katherine deftly spun to silk. One demanding French countess, with a habit of holding forth for hours on the telephone to friends in Paris, began to suspect that her walls had ears. “Tu m’entends tout, n’est-ce pas?” the countess inquired, seeing the reserved Negro maid paying close attention to her every bon mot. Katherine nodded sheepishly. The countess marched Katherine down to the resort’s kitchen, and for the rest of the summer, the high school student spent her lunchtime in conversation with the Greenbrier’s Parisian chef. Katherine’s development from solid high school French student to near-fluent speaker with a Parisian accent astonished her language teacher that fall. The following summer the hotel placed Katherine as a clerk in its lobby antiques store, making much better use of her charisma. Henry Waters Taft, a well-known antitrust lawyer and brother to President William Howard Taft, frequented the Greenbrier, and one day in the store, Katherine taught him Roman numerals.

  In 1933, Katherine entered West Virginia State College as a fifteen-year-old freshman, her strong high school performance rewarded with a full academic scholarship. The college’s formidable president, Dr. John W. Davis, was, like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, part of the exclusive fraternity of “race men,” Negro educators and public intellectuals who set the debate over the best course of progress for black America. Though not as large or as influential as schools like Hampton, Howard, or Fisk, the college nonetheless had a solid academic reputation. Davis pushed to bring the brightest lights of Negro academe to his campus. In the early 1920s, Carter G. Woodson, a historian and educator who had earned a PhD in history from Harvard seventeen years after Du Bois, served as the college’s dean. James C. Evans, an MIT engineering graduate, ran the school’s trade and mechanical studies program before accepting a position as a Civilian Aide in the War Department in 1942.

  On staff in the math department was William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, movie-star handsome with nut-brown skin and intense eyes fringed by long eyelashes. Just twenty-seven years old, Claytor played Rachmaninoff with finesse and a mean game of tennis. He drove a sports car and piloted his own plane, which he once famously flew so low over the house of the school’s president that the machine’s wheels made a racket rolling over the roof. Math majors marveled to hear Dr. Claytor, originally from Norfolk, advancing sophisticated mathematical proofs in his drawling “country” accent.

  Claytor’s brusque manner intimidated most of his students, who couldn’t keep up as the professor furiously scribbled mathematical formulas on the chalkboard with one hand and just as quickly erased them with the other. He moved from one topic to the next, making no concession to their bewildered expressions. But Katherine, serious and bespectacled with fine curly hair, made such quick work of the course catalog that Claytor had to create advanced classes just for her.

  “You would make a good research mathematician,” Dr. Claytor said to his star seventeen-year-old undergraduate after her sophomore year. “And,” he continued, “I am going to prepare you for this career.”

  Claytor had taken an honors math degree from Howard University in 1929 and, like Dorothy Vaughan, had received an offer to join the inaugural class of the school’s math graduate program. Dean Dudley Weldon Woodard supervised Claytor’s thesis and recommended that he follow his footsteps to the University of Pennsylvania’s doctoral program. Claytor’s dissertation topic, regarding point-set topology, delighted the Penn faculty and was acclaimed by the mathematical world as a significant advance in the field.

  Brilliant and ambitious, Claytor waited in vain to be recruited to join the country’s top math departments, but West Virginia State College was his only offer. “If young colored men receive scientific training, almost their only opening lies in the Negro university of the South,” commented W. E. B. Du Bois in 1939. “The [white] libraries, museums, laboratories and scientific collections in the South are either completely closed to Negro investigators or are only partially opened and on humiliating terms.” But as was the unfortunate case in many Negro colleges, the position at the college came with a “very heavy teaching load, scientific isolation, no scientific library, and no opportunity to go to scientific meetings.”

  As if trying to redeem his own professional
disappointment through the achievements of one of the few students whose ability matched his impossibly high standards, Claytor maintained an unshakable belief that Katherine could meet with a successful future in mathematical research, all odds to the contrary. The prospects for a Negro woman in the field could be viewed only as dismal. If Dorothy Vaughan had been able to accept Howard University’s offer of graduate admission, she likely would have been Claytor’s only female classmate, with virtually no postgraduate career options outside of teaching, even with a master’s degree in hand. In the 1930s, just over a hundred women in the United States worked as professional mathematicians.

  Employers openly discriminated against Irish and Jewish women with math degrees; the odds of a black woman encountering work in the field hovered near zero.

  “But where will I find a job?” Katherine asked.

  “That will be your problem,” said her mentor.

  Katherine and Jimmy Goble met while she was teaching at Marion. Jimmy was a Marion native, home on college break. They fell in love, and before she headed off to West Virginia, they got married, telling no one. West Virginia might have come to equalization, but it still held the line on barring married women from the classroom.

  In the spring of 1940, at the end of a busy school day, Katherine was surprised to find Dr. Davis, the president of her alma mater, waiting outside her classroom. After exchanging pleasantries with his former student, Davis revealed the motive for his visit. As a board member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Davis worked closely with Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall in the slow, often dispiriting, and sometimes dangerous prosecution of legal cases on behalf of black plaintiffs in the South. The Norfolk teachers’ case was just one of many in their master plan to dismantle the system of apartheid that existed in American schools and workplaces.

  In anticipation of the day that had now come, Davis, as shrewd a political operative as he was an educator, had walked away from an offer of $4 million from the West Virginia legislature to fund a graduate studies program at West Virginia State College. Davis’s gamble was that if there was no graduate program at the Negro college, all-white West Virginia University would be compelled to admit blacks to its programs under the Supreme Court’s 1938 Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada decision. West Virginia’s Governor Homer Holt saw the writing on the wall: the choice was to integrate or, like its neighbor to the east, dig in and contest the ruling. Rather than fight, Holt moved to integrate the state’s public graduate schools, asking his friend Davis in a clandestine meeting to handpick three West Virginia State College graduates to desegregate the state university, starting in the summer of 1940.

  “So I picked you,” Davis said to Katherine that day outside her classroom; two men, then working as principals in other parts of West Virginia, would join her. Smart, charismatic, hardworking, and unflappable, Katherine was the perfect choice. As Katherine walked out of the door on her last day at the Morgantown high school, her principal, who was also an adjunct professor in West Virginia State’s math department, presented her with a full set of math reference books to use at the university, a hedge against any “inconveniences” that might arise from her need to use the white school’s library.

  She enrolled in West Virginia University’s 1940 summer session. Katherine’s mother moved to Morgantown to room with her daughter, bolstering her strength and confidence during her first days at the white school. Katherine and the two other Negro students, both men entering the law school, chatted during registration on the first day. She never saw them again on campus and sailed off alone to the math department. Most of the white students gave Katherine a cordial welcome; some went out of their way to be friendly. The one classmate who protested her presence employed silence rather than epithet as a weapon. Most importantly, the professors treated her fairly, and she more than met the academic standard. The greatest challenge she faced was finding a course that didn’t duplicate Dr. Claytor’s meticulous tutelage.

  At the end of the summer session, however, Katherine and Jimmy discovered that they were expecting their first child. Being quietly married was one thing; being married and a mother was quite another. The couple knew they had to tell Joshua and Joylette about their marriage and impending parenthood. Joshua had always expected that Katherine would earn a graduate degree, but the circumstances made finishing the program impossible. Katherine’s love for Jimmy and her confidence in the new path her life had taken softened her father’s hard line on graduate school, and he certainly couldn’t resist the thrill of the family’s first grandchild. Though disappointed, neither he nor the other influential men in her life—Dr. Claytor and Dr. Davis—would ever have asked her to deny love or sacrifice a family for the promise of a career.

  In the four years since leaving graduate school, Katherine had not once regretted her decision to exchange the high-profile academic opportunity for domestic life. Most days she felt like the luckiest person in the world, in love with her husband and blessed with three daughters she adored. In idle moments her thoughts turned to Dr. Claytor and the phantom career he had assiduously prepared her for. In truth, the idea of becoming a research mathematician had always been an abstraction, and with the passage of time, it was easy to believe that the job was something that existed only in the mind of her eccentric professor. But in Hampton, Virginia, Dorothy Vaughan and scores of other former schoolteachers were proving that female research mathematicians weren’t just a wartime measure but a powerful force that was about to help propel American aeronautics beyond its previous limits.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Breaking Barriers

  After the war ended, the Japanese and Italian prisoners of war interned at the Greenbrier went home, but Howard Vaughan stayed on, continuing his summer work at the grand hotel alongside Joshua Coleman. The parallel lives that he and Dorothy Vaughan now led intersected often enough in Farmville and Newport News for the couple to add two more children to their family, Donald in 1946 and Michael in 1947. The youngest Vaughan children were Newport News natives, and Newsome Park was the only town they had ever known. For them, the rambling family house in Farmville was where they went on holidays and summer vacations, not a home they had left behind.

  There was never a question that Dorothy would return to work as soon as possible after the births of her last two children, as soon as they were old enough to thrive in the nexus of siblings and babysitters and boarders that provided their daily lives with care and structure. An extended stay at home to care for them simply wasn’t an option. The family had always counted on her income, and now, more than ever, it was her job at Langley that provided all of them with economic stability.

  The older Vaughan siblings were adjusting to the changes that had expanded their lives in some ways and contracted them in others. Newsome Park came with its own set of friends and boundaries, one of which was the pond their neighborhood shared with adjoining Copeland Park. Leonard Vaughan and his friends had it all figured out: if they got to the pond first, it was theirs for the day. If the white kids showed up first, they had dibs. If they both showed up at the same time, they shared the pond, stealing curious glances at one another and making occasional small talk as they swam and played.

  An adopted extended family from the West Computing office stepped into the void left by the aunts and uncles and cousins in Farmville. Dorothy Vaughan, Miriam Mann, and the Peddrews—Kathryn (known as “Chubby” because of her voluptuous figure) and her sister-in-law Marjorie, who would join the office in the late 1940s—bonded over pressure distribution curves in the office and their children and community lives outside of it. Dorothy even had a real family connection in the group: Matilda West, related to Howard Vaughan’s sister-in-law, had followed Dorothy from Farmville to Hampton with her husband and two young sons during the war. In the summers, the families began the tradition of organizing a picnic at Log Cabin Beach, a wooded resort overlooking the James River, built exclusively “for members of the race.” The women spent weeks organizi
ng the menu, hopping on and off the phone with one another before the big day as they prepared the culinary delights for the outing. Seven Vaughans, five Manns, and two sets of four Peddrews, including Chubby Peddrews’s dog, caravanned up Route 60 to the riverside retreat, enjoying a rollicking day of fun topped off by roasting marshmallows over a fire.

  It felt fresh and new, that kind of free-form entertainment, away from the traditional, structured socializing that occurred for most blacks at home or in church, or in the nest of interconnected social and civil organizations that absorbed the precious free time of the incipient black middle class. Negro tourists had enjoyed sun and fun and amusement at Hampton’s Bay Shore Beach ever since a group of black businessmen, including Hampton Institute’s bookkeeper and local black seafood entrepreneur John Mallory Phillips, founded the resort in 1898. But Bay Shore, separated as it was by a rope from larger, whites-only Buckroe Beach, still reminded clients that there was Negro sand and there was white sand. At Log Cabin, Negroes with the means to take advantage of its charms left the “colored” signs behind completely. They could occupy the entirety of the space, free from the signs constricting their physical movements and the double consciousness that throttled their souls.

  Dorothy loved allowing her children to take unguarded steps into the world; having access to a broader base of experiences was one of the most compelling reasons for turning their world on its head with the move to Hampton Roads. Even with a salary of $2,000 a year—the average monthly wage for black women in the 1940s was just $96—providing for the needs of six children meant that outings like the ones at Log Cabin Beach did not come often or easily. With the shadow of the Depression always at the back of her mind, Dorothy Vaughan sewed clothes for herself and her children, clipped coupons, and wore shoes until her feet started to push through the worn soles. If she could give more to her children by sacrificing her own comforts, she did it. Many was the evening when she came home from work to make dinner, and after putting the meal on the table, walked out the door and took a walk around the block until the children were done eating. Only then would she serve herself from the leftovers. She didn’t want to face the temptation of eating even one morsel herself that could nourish their growing bodies.