Hidden Figures

Kaz Czarnecki wasn’t about to leave brainpower on the table. He only learned of Mary Jackson’s double major in math and science after he made her the offer to join the Four-Foot SPT group. Even so, without having reviewed her résumé, something about her gave him the idea that she was both qualified and the right fit for the job. He was white, male, Catholic, and a Yankee. She was a black woman from the South, a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It would have been easy for each of them to look past the other, to see the outside and assume that they could have nothing in common. But what Kaz Czarnecki intuited and what the years would bear out was this: Mary Jackson had the soul of an engineer.

From the beginning, Czarnecki had put Mary at the controls in the wind tunnel, showing her how to fire up the tunnel’s roaring sixty-thousand-horsepower engines (the noise from years of work in the tunnel eventually damaging Mary’s hearing). He showed her how to work with the mechanics to correctly position a model in the test section. One test required Mary to clamber onto the catwalk of the wind tunnel, measuring how rivets disrupted the airflow over a particular model. Another involved turning the tunnel’s Mach 2 winds on a series of sharp-nosed metal cones to discover the point at which the smooth air flowing over the cones became turbulent. The research had application to the design of missiles, of great interest as the United States sought to gain every possible military and technological advantage over the Soviet Union. The results of the work would come to fruition in 1958, in Mary’s first report, coauthored with Czarnecki: “Effects on Nose Angle and Mach Number on Transition on Cones at Supersonic Speeds,” published in September 1958.

It wasn’t long before Mary’s new boss suggested that she enroll in the laboratory’s engineer training program; her ability and her passion for the work were abundantly clear. Most important, she now had a sponsor, a mentor willing to make her career and prospects for advancement his responsibility. The majority of Langley’s female professionals had spent their time at the laboratory classified as computers. Some, like Dorothy Vaughan and Dorothy Hoover, made the grade as mathematicians from day one; others earned the designation over time. In the mid-1950s, a woman named Helen Willey led a successful charge to have every female computer with a math degree upgraded to mathematician, a title that automatically applied to men with the same credential. Regardless of this gain, nearly all the women still worked at the behest of an engineer. It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians. Engineers gave direction to the craftsmen who made the wind tunnel models and to the technicians and mechanics who manipulated the models. It was the engineer who faced the firing-squad editorial review board to defend the collective effort represented by the research report, and it was the engineer who took the victory lap when the report was published.

Most of the country’s top engineering schools didn’t accept women. Kitty O’Brien Joyner, the laboratory’s first female engineer from the time Pearl Young left until the middle of the 1950s, had been forced to sue the University of Virginia to enroll in the school’s all-male undergraduate engineering school in 1939. As for black female engineers, there weren’t enough of them in the country to constitute a rounding error. In 1952, Howard University had had only two female engineering graduates in its history. Being an engineer, Mary Jackson would eventually learn, meant being the only black person, or the only woman, or both, at industry conferences for years. Kaz’s endorsement put Mary on the engineering track, essentially promising a promotion when she successfully completed a few core courses. For Mary, differential equations were the first step. Actually, it was not that simple. The first step was to get permission to enter Hampton High School. If Mary had applied for a job as janitor, the doors to the school would swing wide open. As a professional engineer-in-training with a plan to occupy the building for the nefarious purpose of advancing her education, she needed to petition the city of Hampton for “special permission” to attend classes in the whites-only school.

Mary was seeking to make herself more useful to her country, and yet it was she who had to go hat in hand to the school board. It was a grit-your-teeth, close-your-eyes, take-a-deep breath kind of indignity. However, there was never any doubt in Mary’s mind that it must be done. She would let nothing-not even the state of Virginia’s segregation policy–stand in the way of her pursuit of the career that had rather unexpectedly presented itself to her. She had worked too hard, her parents had worked too hard; a love of education and a belief that their country would eventually heed the better angels of its nature was one of their great bequests to their eleven children.

The City of Hampton granted Mary the dispensation. The pass gave her access to the classes, though it did not make them broadly available to others. Whatever pain securing the permit exacted, it was more than offset by the victories lying in wait. She began her coursework at Hampton High School in the spring of 1956.

Mary Jackson had passed by the old Hampton High School building too many times to count. The local landmark was located in the middle of the city, not far from her home downtown. Her night school classmates were the same daytime colleagues she had known for five years, but it was only natural that she should be anxious at the thought of meeting them on the other side of the physical, emotional -and legal- threshold she was about to cross. Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the shock that awaited her when she walked through the long-closed door.

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.

It was the kind of thing Mary would shake her head about, laughing to keep from crying, with Thomas Byrdsong, a black engineer who had come to Langley in 1952. Byrdsong was a Newport News native who served in World War II in the Montford Point Marines, the first group of black men permitted to join that previously restricted branch of the American military. Another University of Michigan engineering grad who followed Jim Williams’s path to Langley, Thomas Byrdsong was a frequent guest at Mary and Levi Jackson’s welcoming dinner table, always pleased to sample Levi Jackson’s delicious home cooking and enjoy the warmth of an evening unwinding with the down-to-earth couple. There, they could talk Reynolds numbers and aeronautical shop and let their guard down about the challenges of their jobs. Being on the leading edge of integration was not for the faint of heart.

Fresh out of the University of Michigan, Thomas Byrdsong had been assigned to Gerald Rainey, a senior engineer in the Sixteen-Foot Transonic Dynamics Tunnel. Rainey instructed Byrdsong in the procedures for conducting his first test in the tunnel, assigning an experienced mechanic to assist his wet-behind-the-ears engineer. The mechanic, a white man with many years of service at the laboratory, sabotaged Byrdsong’s experiment by incorrectly affixing the model to its sting in the tunnel’s test section. The problem, and the cause of it, was obvious to Rainey as soon as he sat down with Byrdsong to review the test data, which had been contaminated by the mechanic’s vicious prank. Rainey upbraided the mechanic in Thomas Byrdsong’s presence. “You will never do that again to this man or anyone else, do you understand me?” Rainey shouted at the mechanic.

As a son of the South, Thomas Byrdsong knew all too well the consequences that might befall a black man who openly expressed his anger in front of white people. He went out of his way to maintain a calm demeanor at work, but internalized anger came at a cost, and he took to frequenting the bar at the local Holiday Inn after work- one of the few integrated public places in the city–for a little liquid attitude adjustment before going home to his family.

In general, the black men at Langley-in 1955, Lawrence Brown joined Jim Williams and Thomas Byrdsong- were more likely to run into the minefield of race than the women. Their impeccable manners and graciousness did not offer complete protection from the reactions some of the staff had to the presence of black men in professional positions at the laboratory. Most white engineers were cordial with the black men, even anxious to protect them against racist incidents, as Rainey had Byrdsong. It was from the blue-collar mechanics, model makers, and technicians, many of whom hailed from local “sundown towns” such as Poquoson, where blacks were not welcome, that they usually caught hell.

Tall, brown-skinned, and unmistakably black, there would be no tiptoeing into the white bathrooms for Jim Williams and Thomas Byrdsong. Like Katherine Goble, however, they also figured a way to opt out of the segregated facilities. Each day at lunchtime they escaped to a black-owned restaurant just outside the entrance to the air force base for relief and a little home cooking, circumventing both the cafeteria and the Colored men’s bathroom at Langley.

The events of the next few years would test the United States on every front: on secret battlefields in faraway countries, in the classrooms and voting booths of the South, in the halls of Congress and on the streets of Washington, DC. The competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for control of the heavens and the earth was about to escalate in a way that would push the steely intellect of every single one of the brain busters on the NACA rolls to its limits. Each upheaval caused Americans of every background to ask themselves and each other, What are we fighting for? Black Americans knew, and they answered as they had each time their country called: for democracy abroad and at home. So they took up arms again: on the battlefields, in the classrooms and voting booths, in the nation’s capital- and in the offices of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory.