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Chapters Eight–Eleven

Summary: Chapter Eight: Those Who Move Forward

Katherine Coleman was born and raised in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Race relations there were somewhat less tense than in Virginia. Katherine’s father worked at the Greenbrier, where he would one day meet Dorothy’s husband. Katherine also sometimes worked at the resort, as a maid and later as a store clerk. She impressed guests and management with her intelligence and charm. Katherine inherited her father’s unusual gift for mathematics and was academically so talented that she skipped from second grade to fifth. By age fifteen, she was attending West Virginia State College. William Schieffelin Claytor, a brilliant, demanding professor, created advanced classes specially for her and urged her to go to graduate school.

After her 1937 graduation, however, Katherine took a teaching job in Marion, Virginia. There she met Jimmy Goble, a chemistry teacher. They married but kept their marriage quiet, because schools did not generally hire married women. Two years later, Katherine took a better-paying job in Morgantown, West Virginia. The next spring, she was asked to be one of three Black students to integrate West Virginia University by attending its graduate school. She attended the summer session, but she left the program when she became pregnant. She returned to the classroom back in Marion, in 1944, when Jimmy came down with an illness, and his principal offered her the job as Jimmy’s replacement.

Summary: Chapter Nine: Breaking Barriers

Starting in 1945, Dorothy and Howard Vaughan are able to spend a little more time together. By 1947, they have six children. Dorothy and the children are part of a tightly knit group of families that regularly picnic together at an all-Black resort on the James River. Meanwhile, the end of the war has turned out to have only minor economic consequences for Hampton Roads. The area has become a permanent home to multiple military bases and a great deal of military-related industry. Langley has stayed busy, shifting its focus from war-related research to new challenges, such as breaking the sound barrier. Dorothy’s job became permanent in 1946, and she is now one of West Computing’s three shift supervisors, reporting directly to Margery Hannah, the white section head. Elsewhere at Langley, however, changes are underway. Women in East Computing have begun to leave for jobs elsewhere. Some of them go to work directly for one of Langley’s specialized engineering sections. In 1947, East Computing is disbanded. All of its open assignments are shifted to West Computing.

The Black West Area women are more limited in their employment options, but two of them break new ground. Another shift supervisor, known for the depth of her mathematical insight, is hired by the Stability Analysis group. Its engineers are known for their progressive attitudes. The other notable promotion occurs when Margery Hannah transfers out: her Black assistant, Blanche Sponsler, is made section head. In early 1949, however, Blanche suffers a mental breakdown while preparing for a meeting. She is hospitalized, and Dorothy is made acting head of West Area Computers. Blanche dies of unclear causes later that same year. Two years after Blanche’s breakdown, Dorothy’s promotion is made permanent. It is a chance for her to display her organizational gifts, including the ability to choose the right woman on her team for each request coming in from an engineering section.

Summary: Chapter Ten: Home by the Sea

Mary Jackson was born and raised in Hampton, and studied math and physical science at Hampton Institute. After graduating in 1942, she taught high school in Maryland for a year but then returned home to care for her ailing father. Regulations barred her from teaching in the same school system where two of her sisters were already employed. She found work at the Hampton USO, which served as a social club for U.S. servicemen and their families during the war. There she met Levi Jackson. They married in 1944. When the USO closed after the war ended, she stayed home to care for their infant son, Levi, Jr. In her free time, she served as a Girl Scout troop leader.

By early 1951, word has gotten around in the Black community about jobs at Langley for talented women. Mary, ready to rejoin the workforce, applies for a clerical job with the army but also for a position at Langley. The Cold War is at its height, and Russian jets are attacking American bombers over Korea. Within the U.S. government, there are worries about spies passing secrets to the Soviet Union. The FBI has been investigating selected individuals at Langley. Matilda West, a distant relative of Dorothy’s who works at Langley and has social connections to the politically suspect Stability Research group, is fired. At the same time, President Truman has ordered the desegregation of the military and is pushing to eliminate discrimination in the civil service. It is in this environment that Mary, after working just three months for the army as a civilian clerk typist, accepts an offer to join West Computing.

Summary: Chapter Eleven: The Area Rule

Because East Computing has disbanded, engineering teams housed in the older, eastern part of the campus occasionally request that the West Area send someone to help out. On one such occasion, Dorothy sends Mary. Not knowing her way around the East Area, she asks the white women she is working with for directions to the bathroom. She is humiliated by their amused response: they have no idea where her bathroom is. At the end of the day, still fuming, Mary speaks her mind during a conversation with an assistant section head, Kazimierz Czarnecki. Fortunately, she has chosen the right person to be candid with: he invites her to join his team.

Langley has lately been making exciting new discoveries, related to optimizing wind-tunnel design and aircraft body shapes. Mary, with her physics background, thrives in this environment. One day, when she disagrees with a division chief, a careful review of the data and the calculations proves her right. There are women at Langley who are very fast at mental calculations. There are women who have a deep understanding of higher-level mathematics. But Mary has demonstrated another quality, highly prized in engineers: the willingness to stand one’s ground when one is right.

Analysis: Chapters Eight–Eleven

Dorothy and Katherine Johnson have many of the same attributes but achieved their success in different ways, highlighting the advancements of the Civil Rights Movement in the decade between the women’s births. Both women studied with professors who urged them to attend graduate school and both postponed this due to family reasons, but while Dorothy never went, Katherine ultimately integrated the school she attended. The fact that Katherine’s upbringing was in a less racially tense area was due to both the geographic region and the passage of time. Dorothy was old enough to support her family during the Depression, but Katherine was still a child, and she came of age during the war years when many people had begun to see the value of the contributions of Black women and men. When the high school principal offers Katherine the opportunity to replace her husband as a chemistry teacher, it illustrates both the growing confidence in women’s abilities to fill highly skilled positions and the fading of bias against married women being teachers.

The tightly knit community that forms at the all-Black resort symbolizes the potential for happiness when constant reminders of racism are absent. It also foreshadows the strong professional community that Dorothy will create in her new position at Langley. Dorothy has always possessed the necessary skills and expertise to prosper in a rapidly changing climate, but the erosion of some of the racial barriers that she faced when she first started at Langley contribute to her new ability to make impactful decisions. When her promotion becomes permanent as a result of her success in putting together a highly qualified team, it is clear that those in charge have moved beyond their wartime pragmatism in hiring practices and are making a long-term investment in Dorothy’s success.

The FBI’s investigation of staffers at Langley highlights just how important the government considers the threat of communism to be. The same shroud of secrecy during the war that led the townspeople to regard the Langley personnel as “weirdos” now leads colleagues to be suspicious of one another. Unlike signs of racism in the workplace, which often took the form of literal signage, people do not air any anti-American sentiment in public. Mary Jackson’s hiring in the immediate wake of Matilda West’s firing foreshadows how the environment of the Cold War will be just as unpredictable and difficult to navigate as the years during World War II.

Chapter 11 emphasizes the significant divide that still remains between Black women and their white counterparts. Mary’s embarrassing encounter with her white colleagues would not be uncommon outside of Langley, but despite her previous experiences with racism, the incident is especially humiliating in a professional situation. Her subsequent candor in conversation later that day is remarkable not only because it demonstrates her ability to stand up for herself, but also because it shows how a white male in a position of authority over her has never even considered the hindrance of having segregated bathrooms. Even though Mary has a superior education and outperforms her white colleagues, her environment prevents her from taking care of her most basic human needs.

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