Introduction
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Women are barely represented in most of our popular depictions of historical events, especially those involving science, engineering, and math – Black women even less so.
And yet the truth of the matter is, Black women were integral to many landmark achievements in the twentieth century, including the Apollo mission that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon.
In this bedtime biography, we’re telling the story of Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, and Mary Jackson – three Black women whose contributions to the development of World War II machines, the Space Race, and civil rights helped define the world we live in today.
Chapter 1
Before there was NASA, there was NACA, or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
In May 1943, NACA was having a problem.
The need for more warplanes in World War II triggered a rapid expansion of the US aircraft industry and put pressure on the agency to keep up with demand.
At the same time, the war was draining the usual pool of hires who'd fill the new, open positions – namely, men.
So, for the first time, women were hired to perform mathematical computations.
This earned them the nickname “Computers.
” But it was an era in which only 10 percent of white women received college degrees, and so there just weren’t enough qualified white mathematicians to go around.
Before 1941, the workplace was still segregated – and there were specific jobs that had been designated for Black people, like domestic or farm work, or being a teacher or lawyer.
In 1940, of the 2 percent of university-educated Black women, 60 percent became teachers; zero percent became engineers.
But things were about to change.
In 1941, civil-rights activist A.
Philip Randolph threatened to send 100,000 protestors to march on the capitol to bring workplace discrimination to national attention.
In response, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which desegregated the defense industry, and Executive Order 9346, which created the Fair Employment Practices Committee.
This advancement in civil rights, coupled with NACA’s desperate need, finally opened the door for Black female mathematicians to work at the Langley Aeronautical Lab.
The door may have been open, but when the first group of Black women were recruited in 1943, the lab’s practices were not very welcoming.
The women were separated from their white colleagues and made to work on the West Side of Langley’s campus, earning them the moniker, the “West Computers.
” They had to endure separate bathrooms, separate water fountains, and a dining hall sign reading “Colored Computers,” which indicated where they were supposed to eat.
Even finding housing in Hampton, Virginia, was a struggle.
While the white Computers could live in a subsidized dormitory and use a special bus to get to Langley, the Black Computers were forced to fend for themselves and secure private housing in a neighborhood much further away from work – which meant commuting on crowded, segregated busses.
Still, the West Computers were determined to prove themselves equal or better than their colleagues.
Despite the degrading circumstances, long hours, and high stakes, they wanted to set a positive example with grace and strength – both for themselves and their Black female successors.
After all, for an ambitious young mathematician, there wasn’t a more exciting place to be.
One of these ambitious pioneers was Dorothy Vaughan.
Born in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri, Dorothy had always been bright.
After her mother died when she was just two years old, Dorothy’s father remarried, and her stepmother took her under her wing.
She taught Dorothy to read before starting school, which allowed her to skip two grades, and encouraged her musical talent with piano lessons.
Fifteen-year-old Dorothy won a full scholarship to Wilberforce University, the country’s oldest private Black college in Xenia, Ohio.
There, she chose to major in math.
To Dorothy, a good education was the most important thing a Black person could have in a world that would require more of – and offer less to – her and her future children.
When she graduated, she felt it was her responsibility to help provide for her family and ensure that her sister, too, would be able to attend college.
With that in mind, she decided to become a teacher.
She taught Math and English at a number of different schools before landing in Farmville, Virginia.
There, she met Howard Vaughan, whom she’d later marry and start a family with.
Dorothy enjoyed a relatively predictable life, raising her children, teaching at the local high school, and playing piano every Sunday at church.
But one day in the spring of 1943, Dorothy spotted a notice on a bulletin board at the post office.
A federal agency in Hampton was looking for female mathematicians to do work on warplanes.
A feeling of excitement stirred in Dorothy; she’d always wanted to be part of something cutting-edge.
She immediately filled out the application for NACA.
One of the questions asked how soon she’d be able to start work.
Her answer?
Forty-eight hours.
When the letter from Langley arrived months later, she accepted its offer without hesitation; the pay was more than twice the annual $850 she’d earned as a teacher.
Her new job required six-day work weeks and was too far away to commute, so she’d have to leave Howard and their children at their Farmville home with her in-laws.
She gave them a round of hugs, said, “I’ll be back for Christmas,” and that was that.
As she entered Langley’s campus for the first time, Dorothy was confronted with a bizarre sight.
Both finished and half-finished brick structures, all painted dark green as camouflage against a possible attack, rose out of the surrounding fields and forest.
A 16-foot high-speed wind tunnel used to test aircrafts loomed mysteriously in the background.
Even before she walked into the room that she’d spend so much time in throughout the coming years, she could hear the loud clacking of the calculating machines.
The room was filled with nearly 20 other Black Computers, many of them former teachers – just like her.
After greeting them, Dorothy immediately got busy learning the ropes, paying special attention to the expectations: “Accuracy of operations.
Skill in the application of techniques and procedures.
Accuracy of judgments or decisions.
Dependability.
Initiative.
” She was not going to let this chance go to waste.
Dorothy’s calculations, using data taken from manometers and strain gauges on test flights, ensured that warplanes like the North American P-51 Mustangs delivered on their promise to get pilots up in the air, let them do their job, and bring them safely back to earth.
She and her fellow Computers also took crash courses in engineering physics, learning the basics of aerodynamics and shouldering hours of homework on top of their already demanding schedules.
But Dorothy didn’t mind; the work was more intense and interesting than she could have ever imagined.
Chapter 2
Once the war had ended, the United States had to reconcile both its collective psyche and its economy with the ensuing peace.
Female employees across the country, both Black and white, were no longer in high demand.
Many – two million, to be exact – were fired and expected to go back to domestic life.
A lot of them welcomed the change and were happy to give up the stressful wartime work in favor of marrying and starting families with the men they’d met on the job.
But some, like Dorothy, had built new lives during the war and didn’t want to leave.
Langley acknowledged that her years of experience made her an invaluable resource to the agency and offered her a permanent position.
And so, in the same way she’d had to figure out aeronautical research techniques on the job, she now had to navigate more uncharted territory: figuring out how to advance as a woman in a profession dominated by men.
Of course, the women of Langley’s West Computer division not only had to endure racial discrimination, they also had to deal with the frustrations of gender discrimination.
All this time, their work had been totally anonymous; they’d never been told how their calculations played out in real life, and they weren’t given author recognition on research papers.
As a result, it was almost impossible for the West Computers to get promoted, no matter how deserving they were.
For a Black woman, the highest managerial position to aim for was supervisor of the West Computers.
This is the position that Dorothy reached in 1951, becoming Langley’s first Black manager.
There was no one better qualified for the job.
Throughout her career, Dorothy would use her influence in this role to help other women, both Black and white, receive deserved promotions.
The United States had been increasingly worried about a Russian threat since the end of World War II; this anxiety only grew in 1949 when the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb.
Interestingly, NACA actually benefited from the increased tension, and so aimed to double its headcount from 7,000 in 1951 to 14,000 in 1953.
By that time, it’d become obvious that women were an important force in the aeronautical research process – so much so that skin color didn’t seem to matter anymore.
One of these new hires was Mary Jackson, who went to work for Dorothy in 1951.
Mary had grown up listening to the work songs and stories of elders who’d witnessed the emancipation proclamation.
In fact, her childhood neighborhood in Virginia, called Olde Hampton, was founded by enslaved people who’d freed themselves during the Civil War.
Before joining the West Computers at Langley, Mary had followed in the footsteps of her parents and many of her ten older siblings by enrolling at Hampton Institute, where she double-majored in math and physical science.
The plan was to become a math teacher.
But after graduating in 1942 and teaching for a year, she returned to Hampton to take care of her ailing father – “sharing and caring” was her family’s motto.
Back in Hampton, Mary accepted a position at the local USO, a recreation center for uniformed military personnel, expanding on her job description of secretary and bookkeeper to include counselor, event-planner, and guide for her Black community.
It was there that she met her future husband, Levi.
After getting married and becoming a mother, Mary invested what little free time she had in the Girl Scouts.
The organization’s mission of preparing young women for the world – as well as promoting honesty, loyalty, and a sense of duty – resonated with her family values growing up.
Mary became a surrogate mother to the girls in her troop, many of whom were from poorer families.
She helped with math homework, sewed prom dresses, and encouraged them to go to college.
More than anything, she opened their eyes to what could be, providing experiences that would broaden their minds and spark their curiosity for the world.
At NACA, the can-do attitude she’d nurtured helped her excel at work.
But having to negotiate the racism at Langley was a thorn in her side.
Two years after Mary joined West Computing, Dorothy staffed her on a project alongside several white Computers on Langley’s East Side.
At some point, unfamiliar with that part of the complex, Mary asked her colleagues to direct her to the nearest bathroom.
They responded that they didn’t know where her bathroom was.
With no recourse for this blatant racism, Mary was forced to go looking for a bathroom marked “Colored.
” But what started off as a humiliating day turned into a serendipitous turning point in her career when she ran into Kaz Czarnecki.
A good-natured man from Massachusetts, Kaz was an assistant section head in the Four-by-Four-Foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel.
He'd previously crossed paths with Mary while working in the same building as West Computing.
Mary vented to him about the injustice, and he countered with a job offer.
She immediately accepted.
Soon after she started work in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, Mary had a showdown with John Becker – the chief of her division and one of the world's top aerodynamicists.
He tasked her with some calculations, which she worked through as she always did: meticulously and confidently.
But something wasn’t right with the numbers.
When he challenged her work, she stood up for herself.
And, as it turned out, it wasn’t her output that was at fault – it was his input.
John Becker apologized, and Mary received recognition as a sharp mathematician with an admirable amount of chutzpah.
Kaz, though, already knew that Mary had talent.
From the beginning of their time working together, he’d acted as her mentor.
He’d challenged her to push herself, putting her at the controls in the wind tunnel and coauthoring a paper with her based on the research she’d conducted.
Later, he would encourage her to enroll in the lab’s engineer training program; she clearly possessed the ability and passion.
His endorsement put her on track to becoming one of the first female Black engineers in the country.
Chapter 3
In 1953, Katherine Goble joined the ranks of NACA’s West Computers.
Katherine had inherited her father’s talent with people and math, and she’d taken to heart a lesson he instilled in her: “You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you.
” A truly remarkable person, young Katherine would often leave her own classroom to help her older brother with his lessons.
And, over the course of one summer, she picked up fluent French at the hotel her father worked at by eavesdropping on an actress’s telephone calls and practicing with the cook.
Like Dorothy, Katherine started college on a full scholarship at just 15-years-old.
By 18, she’d graduated with degrees in math and French, and had planned on pursuing math in graduate school.
But becoming a mother put her dream of being a research mathematician on hold.
Chance and opportunity, though, would eventually lure it back.
Two weeks into her new role as a West Computer, Katherine was loaned out to the Flight Research Division for temporary work.
She did such a good job there that the engineering head decided not to return her to the computer pool.
Katherine’s new engineering colleagues immediately warmed to her insatiable curiosity and prowess of conceptual mathematics.
They were a brainy, free-thinking, high-energy bunch; she couldn’t ask for more.
Following their lead, she would read Aviation Week at the beginning of her day, trying to connect the dots of her calculations to the real world.
And her work had immediate, lasting impact.
One of her first assignments involving an analysis of wake vortices – the rough streams of air left behind by jets – resulted in updated air traffic regulations.
Unlike many of her fellow Black colleagues, Katherine didn’t seem to perceive the persistent racial segregation at Langley.
She used the unmarked bathrooms designed for white employees and brought her lunch to work, eating with her colleagues in the office, thus bypassing the demeaning cafeteria signage.
It wasn’t that she was blind to the racism – she just willed into existence an environment that matched the idea she had of herself and her stature among her colleagues.
As far as she was concerned, once she crossed the threshold of her building, she was in a world of equals.
She approached loss in the same, pragmatic way.
When her beloved husband, James Goble, died of a brain tumor just before Christmas in 1956, Katherine grieved, and then quickly and quietly packed her feelings of bereavement and chaos away.
She wanted to hold true to the promise she’d made him to keep their daughters on a path to success.
So, at school, on their first day back after the holidays, she took her daughters to speak with the school principal.
Katherine asked him not to ease up on them or show preferential treatment: she said, “They are going to college, and they need to be prepared.
” At home, she maintained a similarly strict mandate for them: “You will have my clothes ironed and ready in the morning,” she said, “and dinner ready when I come home.
” Now that she was a single mother and the family’s sole breadwinner, she had to run a loving – but tight – ship.
On the morning of October 5, 1957 people across the US woke up to the news that a Russian satellite had been launched and would fly over the country.
“Sputnik” was all anyone talked about.
The Space Age had officially dawned and, once more, international tension became an important catalyst for technological and scientific innovation.
“Space” used to be a dirty word for airplane-focused Langley.
It was viewed as the stuff of science-fiction dreams and a waste of taxpayer money.
But by 1957, the public mindset had shifted: “First in space means first, period,” as Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson succinctly put it.
In 1958, NACA was chosen to lead the nation’s space effort and was combined with the competing operations in the country.
The expanded mission called for a new name, and NASA was born.
Two years later, it would move its center of operations to Houston, Texas, and almost overnight, the agency went from being a behind-the-scenes operation to existing in, and for, the limelight.
It was also in 1958 that Katherine, now 40, started to fall in love again.
James A.
Johnson, a 32-year-old former Army captain, had returned to Hampton after his service and taken a job as a mail carrier.
Soon after meeting at church, they started showing up to dances and dinner parties together.
Jim shared Katherine’s sense of purpose and respected her dedication to her work at Langley – where, incidentally, things were accelerating for her at a rapid pace.
Like many visionaries of the time, Katherine had an innate desire to know what lay beyond the confines of our world – to go where no human had gone before.
The years she’d spent at Langley had fueled her already burning curiosity, which only made her love her job more.
As her department’s focus shifted from aeronautics to space, she wanted to be where the action was: in the lectures and editorial meetings where engineers scrutinized and stress-tested preliminary research reports just as they did with their aircraft.
Katherine didn’t understand why she wasn’t ever included in the process; they were using her numbers, after all.
And so one day she asked her colleagues, who were all male, why she couldn’t attend the editorial meetings.
The reply – shocking after she’d proven herself time and time again – was simply, “Girls don’t go to meetings.
” But there was no official rule prescribing this, and she didn’t accept their “no” for an answer.
That would be a betrayal to her own self-confidence, and to everyone who’d helped her get this far.
So Katherine kept asking, wore down her male colleagues, and, finally, made it into the editorial meetings of the Guidance and Control Branch of NASA’s Aerospace Mechanics Division.
Chapter 4
In 1959, NASA decided it was time to put an American man into space.
The agency presented the “Mercury Seven” astronauts to the world – men who’d been selected according to Goldilocks-like requirements: not too tall, not too heavy, not too old .
.
.
the list went on and on.
One of these men was former marine test pilot John Glenn, who’d go on to become the first American to make an orbital flight around Earth.
This feat required the utmost precision and accuracy: he’d have to be launched at exactly the right angle and with the perfect amount of force so that his capsule would shoot up through the atmosphere, orbit Earth, come back down, and land close to the Navy ships waiting to retrieve him.
Katherine Goble had developed a reputation for being as reliable as a Swiss watch when it came to numbers, and she was adept at high-level conceptual thinking.
She didn’t hesitate to ask her supervisor to let her handle this enormous task.
“Tell me where you want the man to land,” she said, “and I’ll tell you where to send him up.
” So she started calculating the trajectory.
She traced out, in detail, the exact path that the spacecraft would travel across the Earth’s surface from the second it lifted off the launchpad, to the moment it splashed into the Atlantic.
One false calculation could mean shooting the astronaut into oblivion, or losing him at sea.
For months and months she calculated, producing a 34-page behemoth called “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite over a Selected Earth Position.
” This immense report included “22 principal equations, 9 error equations, 2 launch case studies, 3 reference texts, 2 tables with sample calculations, and 3 pages of charts.
” After receiving its finishing touches the day after Thanksgiving 1959, the Azimuth Angle report went through ten months of editorial meetings and revisions.
Published in September 1960, it was the first ever paper to come out of Langley’s Aerospace Mechanics Division by a female author.
For Katherine, it marked the start of a new phase, both at Langley and in her personal life.
Somewhere between those long days at her desk, she’d accepted Jim Johnson’s marriage proposal, and in August 1959, they were married in a small ceremony.
When she signed the finalized Azimuth Angle report, she used a new name that would go down in history: Katherine G.
Johnson.
As outlandish as American space ambition might have once seemed, flying a man to the stars was starting to feel like a walk in the park compared to getting Black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.
Even after the landmark Supreme Court decisions of Brown v.
Board of Education in 1954, which declared that “separate but equal” schools were not, in fact, equal, there was still an uphill battle to fight.
And Langley’s home state of Virginia was an arena in which many of these battles took place.
Local lawmakers threatened to defund Virginia education facilities in which integration persisted, which resulted in years of school closures.
Parents like Dorothy, Mary, and Katherine strove to influence what they could control – encouraging their children to excel in their segregated schools and getting them into college.
Beyond their lives at Langley, they had close bonds with their families, were active in their communities and churches, and faced the same challenges other Black people faced.
Exceptionally talented as they were, their lives outside work were not unlike many other Black parents in America.
It was February 20, 1962, and John Glenn was about to be sent into orbit around Earth.
He had tirelessly prepared for this day, making sure his body and mind were in peak condition through daily physical training and endless flight simulations.
But, a few days before handing himself over to his destiny – a flight in which so many things could go wrong in an instant – he’d had just one last request for the engineers.
He wanted a human to review the orbital trajectory that the IBM 7090 computer had generated – specifically, Katherine Johnson.
“Get the girl to check the numbers,” he said.
If she was confident, then he was confident.
Langley had acquired its first IBM computers in the mid-1950s.
Originally destined for the finance department, some enterprising engineers had realized they could use them for calculations on early rocket planes.
But the computers made mistakes; they needed a watchful human eye.
Working backward and using her calculator to run through all the simulation inputs the computer had received, Katherine checked through the calculations.
It took a day and a half of exacting, eye-blurring work to go through every minute of the mission, but her efforts paid off in the best possible way: by the end of the task, each and every number she’d generated matched the computer’s output.
On February 20, with 135 million people watching, John Glenn was launched into space and orbited the Earth three times.
A mere five hours later, the astronaut was fished out of the Atlantic by the USS Noa.
In what seemed like the blink of an eye, Glenn had become an American hero.
But he wasn’t the only one receiving the country’s praise.
News of Katherine Johnson’s role in his successful mission spread through the Black community like wildfire, and she was featured on the front page of the Pittsburgh Courier.
She humbly accepted the recognition, but to her, it was all in a day’s work – and besides, there were other exciting projects to tackle.
Years later, in July 1969, Katherine watched the Apollo 11 astronauts journey to the moon – another trajectory she helped calculate.
She saw Neil Armstrong take his famous first step and wished her father could’ve witnessed his daughter, who used to count the stars, now send men to fly among them.
Katherine Johnson considered her work on that lunar voyage to be her greatest contribution to NASA.
Mary Jackson, who’d always been invested in the community around her, worked to promote interest in science and engineering among Black youth throughout her later years at NASA.
Hoping to inspire the next generation to dream big and enhance their view of themselves in the world, she gave impassioned talks at local schools and started an after-school science club.
She continued to volunteer as a Girl Scout leader and helped her son design an aerodynamic soap-box derby car with which he won first place.
All the while, Mary continued to pursue the research she’d engaged with since becoming an engineer in 1958, which involved investigating the impact of a moving object’s surface roughness on a thin layer of air.
In 1979, with numerous papers to her name, she switched gears and took on a more managerial role, becoming the Federal Women’s Program Manager of NASA.
In her new position, she helped pave the path for many more female engineers from every background and at every level.
As she saw it, supporting women – and teaching them to support each other – was the best way to bridge the racial divide.
Dorothy Vaughan, the original trailblazer, once said, “What I could, I changed; what I couldn’t, I endured.
” She was never one to dwell on the past; instead, she focused on improving the present, and looking ahead to the future.
And she was always learning.
In the 1960s, as rapidly changing times called for new expertise, she reinvented herself as a computer programmer at the age of 50.
Dorothy retired from NASA in 1971 after 28 years of service.
Although her name didn’t appear on a single research report, she had directly and indirectly contributed to a countless number of them.
Her legacy lives on in the generations of younger women who stand on the shoulders of the West Computers.
By the 1970s, technological advances rendered the role of human computers obsolete.
But in getting hired by Langley as professional mathematicians 30 years prior, the West Computers had made a revolutionary stride for Black women everywhere.
There were many other West Computers who shaped the course of the future, both in space and here on Earth: Dorothy Hoover, a physicist and mathematician who would go on to be published and whose research was used in the development of America’s first jet fighter.
Miriam Mann, a mathematician who removed the “Colored Computers” sign that designated where in the cafeteria they were supposed to sit – over and over until the sign, one day, stopped reappearing.
Christine Darden, who became one of the world’s top experts on supersonic flight and sonic booms.
The stories of these courageous, determined, and brilliant women are a gateway to the stories of all the other women at NASA, Black or white, whose contributions to progress have been overlooked.
You’ve reached the end of this Bedtime Biography.
The End
Thank you for listening.
Why not pause listening now so you can stay in a relaxed state?
And if you’re off to bed now, I wish you a good night’s sleep.