Hidden Figures: Young Readers Edition

The years following World War II saw many technological advancements. As airplanes continued to get faster, engineers began to dream of creating an aircraft that could go to outer space. Electronic computers were becoming more important at the Langley Laboratory, and Dorothy knew that change was coming.

As airplanes got faster and more complicated, the math that went along with them also became more complicated. Some problems could take a human computer a whole month to solve. The new electronic computers were large and difficult to use, but they could do calculations much faster than their human counterparts. Dorothy knew that human computers would need to learn to use electronic calculators if they did not want to become obsolete. She encouraged all the women in her department to take the new computer classes that the laboratory was offering. 

Some of the laboratory’s classes were held at Hampton High School, the all-white public school. All across the country, people were debating school segregation. Fear of Communism and the Soviet Union was still high. Many people believed that the United States was “wast[ing] the much-needed brainpower of black children by sending them to inferior schools” (115). If the United States wanted to be the most technologically advanced nation, it needed help from all its citizens, and people like Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Goble were proving that Black women could make valuable contributions.

Working in the wind tunnel, Mary Jackson continued to impress her boss, and he suggested that she train to become an engineer. At the time, women were not admitted to the country’s best engineering schools. There was only one female engineer in the Langley Laboratory, a white woman named Kitty O’Brien Joyner, and there were also hardly any Black men working as engineers. Mary would become the first female African American engineer, which was almost unimaginable. 

However, since the courses took place at the all-white Hampton High School, Mary needed special permission to enter the building. The permission was granted, and when Mary attended her first day of classes, she was “stunned” to find a “dilapidated, musty old building” (118). She thought that the spaces reserved for white people must be beautiful and pristine. Instead, she realized that both Black and white students suffered from a system of segregation that made the city divide its resources into two schools instead of investing all its money in one. 

While working at Langley, Mary met Thomas Byrdsong, an African American engineer. Byrdsong would come to Mary’s house, and her husband would cook them all dinner. Shetterly notes that African American men often faced more discrimination than women at work and explains how Byrdsong was sabotaged by his white mechanic on his first experiment. Byrdsong’s boss realized the situation and shouted at the mechanic, but the battle against racial discrimination was tiring for Byrdsong. Instead of eating in the cafeteria, he would leave the campus with a friend to eat at a Black-owned restaurant where he felt “he could be himself” (120). The experiences of African American employees at the laboratory reflected the climate in the rest of the United States. All over the country, African American people were fighting for their rights as the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum. Meanwhile, there was still tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, and people began to wonder which country would be the first to get to space.

In schools across the country, girls were starting to imagine that they could be something other than teachers. Christine Mann was a high school senior in Asheville, North Carolina. Before school began, it was her job to open the library, and Christine always read the headlines as she organized the day’s newspapers. Most of the headlines had been about Little Rock, Arkansas, where nine Black teenagers were trying to integrate an all-white high school. On the morning of October 5, 1957, the headlines declared that the Soviet Union had managed to launch Sputnik, a satellite, into space. Christine “felt she had fallen asleep in one world and awakened in another” (124-5); the Space Age had begun. 

The United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the Space Race, and Black people connected “America’s inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South” (126). The United States had to treat its citizens equally to be a true world leader. 

Reading about Sputnik, Christine felt afraid of the possibility of growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union; however, she also felt excited at the thought of exploring space. Christine had been in eighth grade when the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, saying that it was illegal for schools to be segregated. She lived in a segregated neighborhood, surrounded by Black people, and she worried that she wouldn’t be able to keep up with white students. However, her parents were committed to helping her succeed. She graduated from high school and was accepted to the Hampton Institute for college.

Katherine Goble and the other employees at the Langley Laboratory often looked for the flashing light of Sputnik in the night sky. There was a lot of pressure on the United States to catch up with the Soviet Union in the Space Race, but launching objects into space posed many challenges. Traveling to space had long seemed like a waste of time and a silly fantasy compared with more practical airplanes. However, the engineers still dreamed about it, wondering, for example, how a craft could safely pass through Earth’s atmosphere and back. 

Now, however, space travel was no longer theoretical, and the employees and the Langley Laboratory were hard at work. Out of several agencies that wanted to head the space program, the government chose NACA, and the agency was renamed NASA: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Suddenly, all eyes were on the newly renamed agency, and the entire country was invested in their work. Katherine Goble wanted “to do something untried, untested, and unexplored” (136). She wanted to help send a human into space. 

As changes came to NASA, the West Area Computing Unit was dissolved. Most of the women had already been moved to permanent assignments, and the more specialized work that space travel demanded meant that the “central computing pool had become obsolete” (137). Dorothy had been manager of the West Area unit for seven years. The end of the unit meant that the women had been successfully integrated into other teams, working alongside white employees. Dorothy supported these women along the way, and now it was time for a change.

The staff in the Langley Laboratory had to learn a lot to work on space travel, and the agency organized a series of lectures to bring everyone up to speed. Katherine Goble learned everything that she could, asking questions and reading a magazine about flight called Aviation Week. However, she was not allowed in the closed-door meetings where the engineers discussed the most recent research. 

In the Langley Laboratory, many women were still stuck in less important roles, even though they “matched their male colleagues in curiosity, passion, and the ability to withstand pressure” (143). The only way to get ahead was to prove themselves and get noticed by the male engineers. Katherine was determined to be part of “the greatest adventure in the history of humankind” (143). She kept asking to be included in the meetings. Finally, the “exasperated” men let her in.

In 1958, Katherine became part of the research group that aimed to put a human into space. The Space Task Group called their first space mission Project Mercury, after the Roman god of travelers. However, while NASA got to work, the state of Virginia was also receiving national attention for another reason. The US Supreme Court had ordered that schools be integrated “with all deliberate speed” (146), but the governor of Virginia was against integration. He closed the schools instead, and 13,000 Black and white children had nowhere to go to school. While most schools finally reopened in 1959, some were defunded by local governments, and others remained segregated. 

Katherine’s daughters continued to go to a segregated school, but Katherine was too busy with work and life as a single mother to fight with the system. Her daughters were receiving a good education, and that was all that mattered. One day, Katherine met a man at choir practice. His name was James Johnson, and they married in 1960; Katherine would thus be known as Katherine Johnson.

Since the United States was eager to catch up to the Soviet Union, work on Project Mercury involved long hours. A crew of seven astronauts was chosen, and they began intensive training. Katherine’s job was to calculate the spacecraft’s flight trajectories, planning the exact route that the craft would take to leave Earth and return. The mission was a “gargantuan task,” and the Space Task Force needed help from other divisions of NASA, too. Katherine began working on the trajectories for an orbital flight around Earth. After 10 months of hard work, her findings were published in a research paper—the first in the Aerospace Mechanics Division to be signed by a woman.