Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

West Virginia, however, decided to integrate. Quietly, quickly, and without protest, three “unusually capable” Negro students began graduate studies at West Virginia University in Morgantown in the summer of 1940. The Colemans’ daughter Katherine was one of them, a testament to both her academic talent and a strength of character that could stand up to the isolation and scrutiny that came along with being a black student on the front lines of desegregation. But a master’s degree in math would elude Katherine just as it had Dorothy. After the summer session, Katherine decided to leave WVU’s graduate program for a life as a full-time wife and mother, the call of domestic life winning out over career ambition.

Katherine’s parents loved their son-in-law, Jimmy, a chemistry teacher whom Katherine met at her first teaching assignment, and they doted on their three granddaughters. Her choice to prioritize family life did nothing to dampen her parents’ pride in her academic achievements. Did she, like Dorothy, ever wonder about where the opportunity might have taken her? Did she imagine what her talent might look like if it were pushed to the limit? Katherine had made her choice only two years earlier. Dorothy’s first big chance was now fifteen years in the past, long enough ago to assume that the die of her life had been irrevocably cast.

And yet at the end of November 1943, at thirty-two years old, a second chance—one that might finally unleash her professional potential—found Dorothy Vaughan. It was disguised as a temporary furlough from her life as a teacher, a stint expected to end and deposit her back in the familiarity of Farmville when her country’s long and bloody conflict was over. The Colemans’ youngest daughter would eventually find the same second chance years in the future, following Dorothy Vaughan down the road to Newport News, turning the happenstance of a meeting during the Greenbrier summer into something that looked a lot more like destiny.

Out the window of the Greyhound bus, the gentle hills of the Piedmont flattened and broadened and the state capital came and went, and as the coastal plain of the Tidewater region advanced toward Dorothy at forty miles per hour, one of the country’s busiest war boomtowns opened its arms to receive its newest resident.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b9d8d680-bacd-59ce-9786-1469dc128400)

The Double V (#ulink_b9d8d680-bacd-59ce-9786-1469dc128400)

Dorothy Vaughan entered the Greyhound bus in one America and disembarked in another, no less anxious, hopeful, and excited than if she were an immigrant arriving from foreign shores. The cluster of cities and hamlets around the harbor of Hampton Roads—Newport News and Hampton to the north, Portsmouth, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach to the south—boiled over with in-migrants. The region’s day as a rustic land had retreated against the rolling tide of newcomers. From the forests and fisheries and farmlands of an Arcadian state dawned a powerful military capital, a nerve center that had welcomed residents by the hundreds of thousands since the start of the conflict. Now, the chief business of the people of Hampton Roads was the war.

Whether approached by land or by sea, Newport News, with its vast complex of coal piers and scaffolding, cranes and smoke-belching stacks, rails and elevators and berths laid out on the James River, gave a sense of the great power concentrated in America’s military, the scope of a manufacturing and production machine of nearly inconceivable proportions, the consummation of a military-industrial empire unparalleled in the history of humankind. Stevedores and riggers by the hundreds strained against winches and loaded crates of rations and ammunition into the holds of the warships snugged into their berths. Lines of jeeps drove onto the ships, creating traffic jams on the piers greater than any that had been seen on land. Soldiers forced teams of mules up gangways, K9 dogs boarded vessels with their faithful two-legged companions. Allied troops staged at Camp Patrick Henry, five miles up the military highway, then were delivered by train to the pier. The American mosaic was on full display, youngsters barely over the threshold of adolescence and men in the sinewy prime of manhood, fresh from the nation’s cities, small towns, and countrysides, pooling in the war towns like summer rain. Negro regiments piled in from around the country. One detachment was composed entirely of Japanese Americans. Enlistees from Allied countries, like Chinese medical officers and the first Caribbean Regiment, presented themselves to the port’s commanding officers before shipping out. Companies of the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) stood ramrod straight and saluted. The port band sent soldiers off with “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” “Carolina in My Mind,” “La Marseillaise”—the melodies of a hundred different hearts and hometowns.

In the boomtown, much of the work belonged to the women. The sight of coverall-clad women working at filling stations throughout the area became so common they no longer turned heads. Women shined shoes, worked at the shipyard, and staffed the offices at military installations. With men off to the front, womanpower picked up the slack, and local businesses went to extraordinary lengths to recruit and retain female employees. The War Department hired women to pose as mannequins and stand in the windows of Norfolk’s Smith & Welton department store, their task to entice other women to apply for war jobs.

Between 1940 and 1942, the region’s civilian population exploded from 393,000 to 576,000, and that was before accounting for the tenfold increase in military personnel, from 15,000 to more than 150,000. The war operated around the clock—three eight-hour shifts—and businesses sprinted to keep pace. Local commerce was robust—too robust in some cases: a sign reading PLEASE WASH AT HOME awaited customers of a Norfolk Laundromat enjoying too much of a good thing. The Norva Theatre in Norfolk showed movies from 11:00 a.m. to midnight, packing the house with films such as This Is the Army and Casablanca. The flickering images offered escapism and a muscular dose of patriotism. Newsreels before and after the feature crowed about American exploits on the battlefield. Walt Disney even had an entry with an animated featured entitled Victory Through Air Power, extolling the virtues of the flying machine as a weapon of war. Banks, flush with cash, stayed open late to cash checks for workers. Water systems, electrical plants, school systems, and hospitals all struggled to keep pace with the growing population. Newcomers stood three deep in line for hotels, day after day. Landlords doubled their rents and still enjoyed a waiting list.

Nothing, however, quite captured the size, scope, and economic impact of the war on the Hampton Roads area like the federally funded housing development in the East End of Newport News, built to alleviate the critical shortage of homes for war workers. Migrants queued up to rent one of the 5,200 prefabricated demountable homes, 1,200 in Newsome Park, designated for blacks, and 4,000 in physically identical Copeland Park, designed for whites. From Forty-First Street to Fifty-Sixth Street, from Madison Avenue to Chestnut Avenue, the world’s largest defense housing project—two smaller, separate cities within the city—took the edge off the critical housing shortage on the Virginia Peninsula.

Dorothy Vaughan arrived in Newport News on a Thursday and started work at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory the following Monday. The personnel department maintained a file of available housing for new employees, carefully segmented by race to “establish congenial connections” and “avoid embarrassment.” Five dollars a week got Dorothy a place to lay her head, two meals a day, and the kind attentions of Frederick and Annie Lucy, a black couple in their sixties. The Lucys owned a grocery store and opened their spacious home, which was located on the periphery of the Newsome Park development, to boarders. A larger version of what Dorothy had left behind, the East End was populated by stable Negro families in well-maintained homes, thriving local businesses, and a growing middle class, many of them shipyard workers whose tenure predated the boom. On the corner of the Lucys’ block, a pharmacist had purchased a lot with plans to open the city’s first Negro pharmacy. There was even a brand-new hospital nearby: Whittaker Memorial opened earlier in 1943, organized by black doctors and constructed by black architects.

With husband and children now far away, her living space shrunk from a spacious house to a single room, her suitcase now her closet, Dorothy’s daily existence was reduced to its simplest elements. The few days of lead time were just enough to scope out the bare essentials of her new life: the location of the nearest AME church, mealtimes at the Lucy home, and transportation to work.

City buses and trolleys circulated from morning till night, swelling with riders before the orange and pink of dawn, as employees punching out from the graveyard shift met early birds just starting their day. Nowhere was the war strain more evident than in the intimate crowds of strangers who pushed up against one another in the vehicles making their rounds. Managing the multitudes in such a limited space would have been difficult under the best of circumstances, but the convoluted Jim Crow transportation laws turned the commute into a gauntlet for all riders. Whites entered and exited from the front of the bus and sat in the white section in the front. Blacks were supposed to enter and exit from a rear door and find space in back, behind the Colored line; they were also supposed to yield seats to white patrons if the white section was full. A shortage of conductors at the rear door meant that most of the time, blacks actually entered through the front door and had to push through a line of white patrons in order to get to the black section. They then jostled back through to the aisle to the front to leave the bus. And if white passengers on one of the few two-man buses found themselves at the back of the bus, they too had to push through to the front, as the law prohibited whites from using the back door. If the segregation laws were designed to reduce friction by keeping the races apart, in practice they had the opposite effect.

Overcrowded buses; a six-day workweek; constant noise and construction; shortages of sugar, coffee, butter, and meat; long lines for everything from the lunch counter to the gas station … the pressures of daily life in the boomtowns across the country pushed already touchy racial relations to the breaking point. So far, Hampton Roads had avoided the strife that had befallen Detroit, Mobile, and Los Angeles, where tensions between whites and blacks (and in Los Angeles, between Mexican, Negro, and Filipino zoot-suited youths and the white servicemen who attacked them) boiled over into violent confrontations.

Whereas white residents of the boomtowns might have seen these conflicts as caused by the war, Negroes, long conditioned to racial enmity in close quarters, were weary of the same old battles. Blacks caught sitting in white sections of buses or trolleys, no matter how crowded, were subject to fines. More than a few violators were dragged off city buses, some beaten by police. Members of a ladies’ club called Les Femmes wrote a letter to the bus company complaining of the derogatory treatment their drivers routinely directed at Negro women. A bus driver on a route between Newport News and Hampton denied entry to Negro men in military uniform. Across the country, some equated the uniformed black soldiers with people who had stepped beyond their place, provoking slights and even violence against them.

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 (#ulink_e352d51a-22bd-5fb9-8a3c-92fa41c5a91a)

Manifest Destiny (#ulink_e352d51a-22bd-5fb9-8a3c-92fa41c5a91a)

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 physicist Pearl Young. Young, hired in 1922, and for the better part of two decades the laboratory’s only female professional, 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.

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.