In 1933, Katherine entered West Virginia State College as a fifteen-year-old freshman, her strong high school performance rewarded with a full academic scholarship. The college’s formidable president, Dr. John W. Davis, was, like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, part of the exclusive fraternity of “race men,” Negro educators and public intellectuals who set the debate over the best course of progress for black America. Though not as large or as influential as schools like Hampton, Howard, or Fisk, the college nonetheless had a solid academic reputation. Davis pushed to bring the brightest lights of Negro academe to his campus. In the early 1920s, Carter G. Woodson, a historian and educator who had earned a PhD in history from Harvard seventeen years after Du Bois, served as the college’s dean. James C. Evans, an MIT engineering graduate, ran the school’s trade and mechanical studies program before accepting a position as a Civilian Aide in the War Department in 1942.
On staff in the math department was William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, movie-star handsome with nut-brown skin and intense eyes fringed by long eyelashes. Just twenty-seven years old, Claytor played Rachmaninoff with finesse and a mean game of tennis. He drove a sports car and piloted his own plane, which he once famously flew so low over the house of the school’s president that the machine’s wheels made a racket rolling over the roof. Math majors marveled to hear Dr. Claytor, originally from Norfolk, advancing sophisticated mathematical proofs in his drawling “country” accent.
Claytor’s brusque manner intimidated most of his students, who couldn’t keep up as the professor furiously scribbled mathematical formulas on the chalkboard with one hand and just as quickly erased them with the other. He moved from one topic to the next, making no concession to their bewildered expressions. But Katherine, serious and bespectacled with fine curly hair, made such quick work of the course catalog that Claytor had to create advanced classes just for her.
“You would make a good research mathematician,” Dr. Claytor said to his star seventeen-year-old undergraduate after her sophomore year. “And,” he continued, “I am going to prepare you for this career.”
Claytor had taken an honors math degree from Howard University in 1929 and, like Dorothy Vaughan, had received an offer to join the inaugural class of the school’s math graduate program. Dean Dudley Weldon Woodard supervised Claytor’s thesis and recommended that he follow his footsteps to the University of Pennsylvania’s doctoral program. Claytor’s dissertation topic, regarding point-set topology, delighted the Penn faculty and was acclaimed by the mathematical world as a significant advance in the field.
Brilliant and ambitious, Claytor waited in vain to be recruited to join the country’s top math departments, but West Virginia State College was his only offer. “If young colored men receive scientific training, almost their only opening lies in the Negro university of the South,” commented W. E. B. Du Bois in 1939. “The [white] libraries, museums, laboratories and scientific collections in the South are either completely closed to Negro investigators or are only partially opened and on humiliating terms.” But as was the unfortunate case in many Negro colleges, the position at the college came with a “very heavy teaching load, scientific isolation, no scientific library, and no opportunity to go to scientific meetings.”
As if trying to redeem his own professional disappointment through the achievements of one of the few students whose ability matched his impossibly high standards, Claytor maintained an unshakable belief that Katherine could meet with a successful future in mathematical research, all odds to the contrary. The prospects for a Negro woman in the field could be viewed only as dismal. If Dorothy Vaughan had been able to accept Howard University’s offer of graduate admission, she likely would have been Claytor’s only female classmate, with virtually no postgraduate career options outside of teaching, even with a master’s degree in hand. In the 1930s, just over a hundred women in the United States worked as professional mathematicians.
Employers openly discriminated against Irish and Jewish women with math degrees; the odds of a black woman encountering work in the field hovered near zero.
“But where will I find a job?” Katherine asked.
“That will be your problem,” said her mentor.
Katherine and Jimmy Goble met while she was teaching at Marion. Jimmy was a Marion native, home on college break. They fell in love, and before she headed off to West Virginia, they got married, telling no one. West Virginia might have come to equalization, but it still held the line on barring married women from the classroom.
In the spring of 1940, at the end of a busy school day, Katherine was surprised to find Dr. Davis, the president of her alma mater, waiting outside her classroom. After exchanging pleasantries with his former student, Davis revealed the motive for his visit. As a board member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Davis worked closely with Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall in the slow, often dispiriting, and sometimes dangerous prosecution of legal cases on behalf of black plaintiffs in the South. The Norfolk teachers’ case was just one of many in their master plan to dismantle the system of apartheid that existed in American schools and workplaces.
In anticipation of the day that had now come, Davis, as shrewd a political operative as he was an educator, had walked away from an offer of $4 million from the West Virginia legislature to fund a graduate studies program at West Virginia State College. Davis’s gamble was that if there was no graduate program at the Negro college, all-white West Virginia University would be compelled to admit blacks to its programs under the Supreme Court’s 1938 Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada decision. West Virginia’s Governor Homer Holt saw the writing on the wall: the choice was to integrate or, like its neighbor to the east, dig in and contest the ruling. Rather than fight, Holt moved to integrate the state’s public graduate schools, asking his friend Davis in a clandestine meeting to handpick three West Virginia State College graduates to desegregate the state university, starting in the summer of 1940.
“So I picked you,” Davis said to Katherine that day outside her classroom; two men, then working as principals in other parts of West Virginia, would join her. Smart, charismatic, hardworking, and unflappable, Katherine was the perfect choice. As Katherine walked out of the door on her last day at the Morgantown high school, her principal, who was also an adjunct professor in West Virginia State’s math department, presented her with a full set of math reference books to use at the university, a hedge against any “inconveniences” that might arise from her need to use the white school’s library.
She enrolled in West Virginia University’s 1940 summer session. Katherine’s mother moved to Morgantown to room with her daughter, bolstering her strength and confidence during her first days at the white school. Katherine and the two other Negro students, both men entering the law school, chatted during registration on the first day. She never saw them again on campus and sailed off alone to the math department. Most of the white students gave Katherine a cordial welcome; some went out of their way to be friendly. The one classmate who protested her presence employed silence rather than epithet as a weapon. Most importantly, the professors treated her fairly, and she more than met the academic standard. The greatest challenge she faced was finding a course that didn’t duplicate Dr. Claytor’s meticulous tutelage.