Hidden Figures

“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.” 

This passage gives a sense of the watershed event that was President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802. The jobs it opened for African Americans, like the one Dorothy would take at Langley, were not even on their radar. By making these jobs available, the federal government was making a step in the direction of equality by providing equal opportunity. The women profiled in the book took up the call to make this equality a reality. 

“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.’” 

Shetterly uses the idea of the “Double V” to illustrate that the careers of the main characters had a dual purpose. The term is originally used here, in reference to World War II, but victory over “enemies” could also be extended to the space race against the Soviets during the Cold War. The women’s work at NASA contributed to this. At the same time, they strove throughout their lives to ensure equal opportunities and treatment for African Americans.

“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.”

This quotation makes clear the contradictory forces at work that influence the African Americans working at Langley. On the one hand, the federal government is liberalizing its policies to reduce discrimination; on the other hand, state laws still mandate that Black and white employees be segregated. This scene is also an example of Shetterly’s writing style. She uses concrete details to show that the Black computers like Dorothy did the same work as the white computers, just in a different room. 

“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.” 

Shetterly describes the humiliating situation the African American women faced when they started at Langley. Despite their job as skilled professionals, they were constantly reminded that they were not seen as truly equal in the eyes of their employer or white colleagues. Over time, the situation did improve. A computer named Miriam kept removing the sign until one day it wasn’t replaced. As the women increasingly worked side by side with white colleagues in various research groups, they earned the respect and friendship of their peers. 

“With the goal of turning lady math teachers into crack junior engineers, the laboratory sponsored a crash course in engineering physics for new computers, an advanced version of the class offered at Hampton Institute. Two days a week after work, Dorothy and the other new girls filed into a makeshift classroom at the laboratory for a full immersion in the fundamental theory of aerodynamics. They also attended a weekly two-hour laboratory session for hands-on training in one of the wind tunnels, shouldering an average of four hours of homework on top of a six-day workweek. Their teachers were the laboratory’s most promising young talents, men such as Arthur Kantrowitz, who was simultaneously an NACA physicist and a Cornell PhD candidate under the supervision of atomic physicist Edward Teller.” 

This shows the intense workload that Dorothy and her fellow computers undertook. It also gives a sense of the caliber of the talent at Langley, with staff from top schools who studied under world-renowned scientists. This was the norm, and it was expected that everyone keep up, or they wouldn’t last long. That the four women profiled in the book had long careers at Langley thus demonstrates the value of their own abilities. 

“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.” 

This quotation describes an inflection point in American history for women and their fight for equal employment opportunities. The labor shortage during the war drew many women into the workforce for the first time. When the war ended, they were expected to return home while men took over their jobs. Some did, but others enjoyed the benefits of working. The labor market for women would change more dramatically after the 1960s, but the roots of that change came in the wake of World War II. 

“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.” 

This passage is an example of the barriers African Americans faced from racial discrimination. It also illustrates how Shetterly includes aspects of the civil rights movement in her narrative. The tales of the women at NASA and the development of equal rights are intertwined like this throughout the book. 

“But on October 14, 1947, pilot Chuck Yeager, flying over the Mojave Desert in an NACA-developed experimental research plane called the Bell X-1, pierced the sound barrier for the first time in history, a fact that was corroborated by the female computers on the ground who analyzed the data that came from the instruments on Yeager’s plane.” 

Shetterly brings together the tale of the “hidden figures” she writes about with that of one of the most famous pilots of the 20th century, Chuck Yeager. Yeager’s life story is well known, and Shetterly is capitalizing on that to show the connection with the human computers behind the scenes—women like Dorothy. It’s one tool Shetterly uses to illustrate their importance: Their work contributed to many of the famous events in postwar flight. 

“Her family’s motto was ‘sharing and caring,’ and even in a community of active citizens, the Winstons distinguished themselves with their tireless service, religious devotion, and humanitarianism. Mary’s father, Frank Winston, was ‘a pillar’ of Olde Hampton’s Bethel AME Church. Her sister Emily Winston received a citation from President Roosevelt, thanking her for more than one thousand hours of meritorious service as a nurse’s aide during the war. The Winstons were the embodiment of the Double V, and Mary took her duties as secretary as seriously as if she were the head of the club.” 

This refers to Mary, when she became a secretary and bookkeeper at the USO in Hampton. Shetterly shows how involved the whole family was in the community, making service to others a priority. She again mentions the term “Double V” (see Index of Terms), which touches on the theme of perseverance. All the women profiled were involved in their community, part of the effort to ensure that full democracy and equal opportunity were achieved at home.

“John Becker gave Mary Jackson the instructions for working through the calculations. She delivered the finished assignment to him just as she completed her work for Dorothy Vaughan, double-checking all numbers, confident that they were correct. Becker reviewed the output, but something about the numbers didn’t seem right to him. So he challenged Mary’s numbers, insisting that her calculations were wrong. Mary Jackson stood by her numbers. She and her division chief went back and forth over the data, trying to isolate the discrepancy. Finally, it became clear: the problem wasn’t with her output but with his input. Her calculations were correct, based on the wrong numbers Becker had given her.

John Becker apologized to Mary Jackson. The episode earned Mary a reputation as a smart mathematician who might be able to contribute more than just calculations to her new group. Her showdown with John Becker was the kind of gambit that the laboratory expected, encouraged, and valued in its promising male engineers. Mary Jackson—a former West Computer!—had faced down the brilliant John Becker and won. It was a cause for quiet celebration and behind-the-scenes thumbs-up among all the female computers.” 

John Becker was one of the leading lights at Langley, and stood three levels above Mary’s boss, Kaz, on the organizational chart. It would have been easy (and maybe prudent) to defer to him, but Mary was confident in her own abilities and stood by her calculations. When it turned out she was right, her true mettle was apparent. Not only was she intellectually up to the task, she held up in the hothouse environment of strong minds and egos. 

“Or maybe it was her father’s pragmatic dictum—‘You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you’—that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing. With her father’s words to buoy her, Katherine Goble observed the manifestations of segregation at Langley, decried the injustice they represented, yet did not feel their weight on her own shoulders. Once she crossed the threshold of Building 1244, she entered a world of equals, and she refused to behave in any way that would contradict that belief.” 

This sums up Katherine’s approach to her work and the challenges that racism presented. She certainly knew racism existed, but she did not let it gain the upper hand by eating away at her. For example, she didn’t make a big deal out of the segregated restrooms at Langley; she just used the white restrooms and that was that. She maintained a realistic yet magnanimous outlook that kept her optimistic and open-minded—not assuming that she knew everyone’s motivations. In that regard, she gave people the benefit of the doubt just as she expected they would for her.

“Across the country, the United States debated the quality of its schools, concerned with how American students matched up to the Soviets in math and the sciences. The imperative to raise the general level of technical proficiency had only grown stronger as the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union grew more inflamed. While the discussion in World War II had centered on using white women in engineering and science, the 1950s debate had expanded to a broad discussion of the participation of Negroes in the technical fields as well. Virtually every review of the situation questioned how much desperately needed brainpower was being squandered by the intentional neglect of America’s Negro schools.” 

“Across the country, the United States debated the quality of its schools, concerned with how American students matched up to the Soviets in math and the sciences. The imperative to raise the general level of technical proficiency had only grown stronger as the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union grew more inflamed. While the discussion in World War II had centered on using white women in engineering and science, the 1950s debate had expanded to a broad discussion of the participation of Negroes in the technical fields as well. Virtually every review of the situation questioned how much desperately needed brainpower was being squandered by the intentional neglect of America’s Negro schools.” 

“Hampton High School was a dilapidated, musty old building.

A stunned Mary Jackson wondered: was this what she and the rest of the black children in the city had been denied all these years? This rundown, antiquated place? She had just assumed that if whites had worked so hard to deny her admission to the school, it must have been a wonderland. But this? Why not combine the resources to build a beautiful school for both black and white students? Throughout the South, municipalities maintained two parallel inefficient school systems, which gave the short end of the stick to the poorest whites as well as blacks. The cruelty of racial prejudice was so often accompanied by absurdity, a tangle of arbitrary rules and distinctions that subverted the shared interests of people who had been taught to see themselves as irreconcilably different.” 

This passage refers to the time that Mary needed to take classes outside the Langley campus as part of her training to become an engineer. She had to petition the city of Hampton for special permission to attend a class held at the high school because, under segregation laws in Virginia, she was normally not allowed in. This was her thought when she finally saw the inside. It underscores that racism is illogical and harms everyone involved. Much is lost for all by going to great lengths to exclude some. This is echoed in the story of the space race when the Soviets took an early lead with Sputnik, causing some Americans to wonder what talent was being lost to segregation (see previous quotation).

“For the third time in the century, the United States found itself trailing technologically during a period of rising international tension. On the cusp of World War I, the country’s inadequate supply of aircraft had given birth to the NACA. The mediocre American aircraft industry of the 1930s rose to preeminence because of the challenge of World War II. What would it take for the country to prevail against this latest threat?” 

This quotation refers to the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union. It’s a reminder that history sometimes forces the hand of policy-makers by chance. The first set of circumstances related to World War I created the NACA, while the second set (World War II) gave African American women like Dorothy and her colleagues greater opportunities in work and life through that agency. The economic need posed by the war helped break down barriers, and the women made the most of it. Likewise, people like Katherine took advantage of the opportunities that the space race presented.

“Langley Air Force Base and Fort Monroe moved forward to integrate the housing and the schools on their bases; as federal outposts, they were bound to comply with federal law. The state of Virginia, on the other hand, hoisted the Jim Crow flag even higher. In the years following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Senator Harry Byrd’s antipathy toward the law had swelled into a countering movement—Massive Resistance—and he marshaled every resource at his political organization’s disposal to build a firebreak against integration.” 

In discussing the civil rights movement, Shetterly often juxtaposes the federal government’s progress in terms of policies regarding race with the intransigence found in the state of Virginia. The above is an example of that, with Virginia’s government vowing to keep schools segregated despite the Supreme Court’s ruling. This depicts the line the women in the book walked on a daily basis. Half a century after W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about it, the “double-consciousness” lived by African Americans was alive and well. 

“Whatever personal insecurities Katherine Goble might have had about being a woman working with men, or about being one of the few blacks in a white workplace, she managed to cast them aside when she came to work in the morning. The racism stuff, the woman stuff: she managed to tuck all that way in a place far from her core, where it would not damage her steely confidence. As far as Katherine was concerned—as far as she had decided—once they got to the office, ‘they were all the same.’ She was going to assume that the smart fellas who sat across the desk, with whom she shared a telephone line and the occasional lunchtime game of bridge, felt the same. She only needed to break through their blind spots and make her case.” 

This passage summarizes what Katherine and her colleagues were up against. It describes her intense curiosity regarding the planning for space flight and her desire to be a part of the editorial meetings about it. Touching on all three main themes (racism, sexism, and perseverance), Shetterly explains how coolly and rationally Katherine went about obtaining her objective, and indeed she was finally allowed to attend the meetings. It also shows how Katherine approached difficult situations; she didn’t automatically assume the worst in people.

“1958 was a year no Langley employee would ever forget. Leaving work on September 30, they said good-bye to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the esoteric operation that for forty-three years had quietly supervised and directed the airpower revolution, good-bye to the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory of yore. On the morning of October 1, the former NACAites walked into the Langley Research Center, epicenter of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a new American agency whose birth had been induced by a hurtling Soviet sphere. The buildings hadn’t changed, nor had the people, or, for many of them, the work they were charged with. But from sundown one day to sunup the next, they had gone, if only in the public imagination, from erudite and obscure to obvious and spectacular, from the crackpots of the airplane epoch of the 1940s to the guardians of the space-age 1960s.”

This quotation describes the monumental change that Sputnik had on the United States in general and on Langley in particular. The space race provided a new urgency and a new set of goals for the engineers and computers. The year following the Sputnik launch, 1958, was a turning point for the agency, and the NACA was reenvisioned as NASA, with an emphasis on space flight.

“With each passing year, it seemed that the work Mary loved and the community service that gave her life meaning were becoming one and the same. She earned her engineering title through hard work, talent, and drive, but the opportunity to fight for it was made possible by the work of the people who had come before her. Dorothy Vaughan had had a positive impact on her career and on the phenomenon-in-waiting that was Katherine Johnson. Dorothy Hoover had shown that a black woman was capable of the highest level of theoretical aeronautical research. Pearl Young, Virginia Tucker, Kitty Joyner—Mary stood on those white women’s shoulders too. Each one had cracked the hole in the wall a little wider, allowing the next talent to come through. And now that Mary had walked through, she was going to open the wall as wide as possible for the people coming behind her.” 

This passage about Mary refers to all three of the main themes of the book. It alludes to both the racism and sexism that threw up innumerable barriers in the workplace for African Americans and women. It also, however, shows that perseverance pays off. Mary worked hard and became an engineer. Dorothy Hoover’s theoretical work on delta wings led to her publishing a paper in 1951. As the quotation notes, the payoff is both for oneself and for those who come next.

“It was a terrifying prospect—and the most exhilarating thing they had ever heard. Unspoken publicly until that moment, getting to the Moon, one of mankind’s deepest and most enduring dreams, had long been the private dream of many at Langley as well. But with only one operational success under its belt and with six Mercury missions to go—with the orbital flight still on the drawing board—NASA’s road to the Moon seemed unimaginably complex. The engineers estimated that the upcoming orbital flight, including the fully manned global tracking network, required a team of eighteen thousand people. The buildup to a lunar landing would demand many times more people than could be reasonably supported by Mother Langley.” 

The “terrifying prospect” referred to here was President Kennedy’s goal, from a speech in 1961, to send astronauts to the Moon and back by the end of the decade. At the time, it was not at all considered a foregone conclusion that it would be successful—or could even occur at all. Back then, Project Mercury was still young, and no American had yet even orbited the Earth. That NASA met the challenge so successfully is a testament to the high quality of all the work of everyone involved. 

“Meanwhile, away from the front lines, out of sight of the cameras, the black employees, whose numbers had been growing at Langley and all the NASA centers since the end of World War II, busily calculated numbers, ran simulations, wrote reports, and dreamed of space travel alongside their white counterparts, as curious as any other brain buster about what humanity might find once it had ventured far from its spherical island, and just as doggedly pushing for answers to their inquiries.” 

This quotation plays off the words in the title, referring to the fact that the Black employees were “hidden figures” as the space program took center stage. Shetterly writes this after noting that NASA made a documentary film about Project Mercury that was full of “white guys in white shirts” (217). The reality was that African Americans were deeply involved, too, and worked every bit as hard as white employees to make NASA’s goals come true.

“Besides, Katherine always expected the best, even in the most difficult of situations. ‘You have to expect progress to be made,’ she told herself and anyone else who might ask. It had taken more than a decade of data sheets and plotting, IBM punch cards and long days and nights in front of the Friden calculator, delays and tragedies and most of all numbers; at this point, there were more numbers than even she could count. All on top of the long and monotonous years spent learning the basics of the machine that had given birth to the space program.” 

This refers to the successful lunar landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. Katherine was involved in calculating the trajectory necessary for both the landing and the subsequent rendezvous with the command module, and the above shows she had confidence in her numbers. Note that her words can also be read as expectations for the social progress that she and her colleagues made as Black women.

“What she wouldn’t have given for her father to see her—to see his baby girl who used to count the stars now sending men to travel among them. Joshua Coleman knew as if from second sight that Katherine, his brilliant, charismatic, inquisitive youngest child—a black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school—would somehow, someday, unite her story with the great epic of America.”

This quotation puts the accomplishments of Katherine and her colleagues in a larger perspective. It’s another example of how Shetterly uses statistics effectively to show how unlikely their success was and thus how strong their perseverance was. It also highlights how far the civil rights movement progressed in a short time in the mid-20th century.

“But perhaps most important, Katherine Johnson’s story can be a doorway to the stories of all the other women, black and white, whose contributions have been overlooked. By recognizing the full complement of extraordinary ordinary women who have contributed to the success of NASA, we can change our understanding of their abilities from the exception to the rule. Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent. Like the men they worked for, and the men they sent hurtling off into the atmosphere, they were just doing their jobs. I think Katherine would appreciate that.” 

As Shetterly notes, she chose only four out of numerous women with similar stories. While they were exceptional, they should not be seen as the exception; that would be patronizing. They were simply—like the other talented, well-trained professionals at Langley—doing their jobs.