The Olde Hampton neighborhood where Mary grew up, in the heart of downtown, was literally built upon the foundations of the Grand Contraband Camp, founded by slaves who had decided to liberate themselves during the Civil War from the families that had stolen their labor and their lives. The refugees sought shelter as “contraband of war” in the Union stronghold at Fort Monroe, located at Old Point Comfort, on the tip of the Virginia Peninsula. The freed colored people raised central Hampton from the ashes of the “Confederate-set inferno” that consumed the city in 1862. Olde Hampton’s street names—Lincoln, Grant, Union, Liberty—memorialized the hopes of a people fighting to unite their story with the epic of America. In the optimistic years after the Civil War, before the iron curtain of Jim Crow segregation descended across the southern United States, Hampton’s black population earned a measure of renown for its “educated young people, ambitious and hardworking adults, its successful businessmen, and its skillful politicians.”
It was no small irony that Woodrow Wilson, the president who had authorized the creation of the NACA and who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his promotion of humanitarianism through the League of Nations, was the very same one who was hell-bent on making racial segregation in the Civil Service part of his enduring legacy. Now, Mary’s presence at the laboratory built on plantation land rebuked the short-sighted intolerance of her fellow Virginian. Mary’s family, the Winstons, had the same deep Hampton roots as Pearl and Ida Bassette. Mary’s sister Emily Winston had worked with Ophelia Taylor in the same nursery school during the war, before Taylor headed off to the Hampton Institute training program. Many of the West Computers, including Dorothy Vaughan, were members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority that Mary had pledged as an undergraduate at Hampton Institute. Mary graduated in 1938 with highest honors from Phenix High School. Phenix, located on the Hampton Institute campus, was like the upper school that Katherine Goble attended on the campus of West Virginia State. It served as the de facto public secondary school for the city’s Negro students, since the city provided schooling for them only through elementary school. Mary followed the family tradition of enrolling in Hampton Institute, which had graduated her father, Frank Winston, her mother, Ella Scott Winston, and several of her ten older siblings. The school’s philosophy of Negro advancement through self-help and practical and industrial training—the “Hampton Idea,” closely associated with Booker T. Washington, the college’s most famous graduate—mirrored the aspirations and philosophy of the surrounding black community.
Most of Hampton Institute’s female students earned their degrees in home economics or nursing, but Mary Jackson had a strong analytical bent, and she pushed herself to complete not one but two rigorous majors, in mathematics and physical science. She intended to put her degree to use as a teacher, of course; there were practically as many teachers in her family as there were Hampton Institute graduates. She fulfilled her student teaching requirements at Phenix High, and after graduating in 1942, accepted a job teaching math at a Negro high school in Maryland. At the end of the school year, however, she returned to Hampton to help care for her ailing father. Nepotism laws forbade her from teaching in one of Hampton’s public Negro elementary schools, since the school system already employed two of her sisters. But her excellent organizing skills, fluency with numbers, and good marks in a college typing course made her the perfect fit for the King Street USO, which in 1943 was looking for a secretary and bookkeeper.
While the women in Hampton Institute’s Engineering for Women courses were preparing for their new careers as computers, Mary Jackson managed the USO’s modest financial accounts and welcomed guests at the club’s front door. Her daily schedule, however, usually overflowed well beyond the job’s narrow duties, since the club quickly became a center for the city’s black community. She helped military families and defense workers find suitable places to live, played the piano during the USO’s rollicking singalongs, and coordinated a calendar of Girl Scout troop meetings and military rallies. She organized dances at the club, making sure that the Junior Hostesses and Victory Debs were on hand to entertain visiting servicemen. The people who came to the club for movie night or cigarette bingo, for tips on where to worship or get their hair cut, or just a hot cup of coffee, appreciated the energy, warmth, and can-do skill of the young woman at the front desk. If Mary Jackson didn’t know how to get something done, you could bet a dollar to a USO doughnut she’d find the person who did.
Her family’s motto was “sharing and caring,” and even in a community of active citizens, the Winstons distinguished themselves with their tireless service, religious devotion, and humanitarianism. Mary’s father, Frank Winston, was “a pillar” of Olde Hampton’s Bethel AME Church. Her sister Emily Winston received a citation from President Roosevelt, thanking her for more than one thousand hours of meritorious service as a nurse’s aide during the war. The Winstons were the embodiment of the Double V, and Mary took her duties as secretary as seriously as if she were the head of the club.
Unsurprisingly, the USO was the scene of many a wartime romance. Negro soldiers from Fort Monroe and Langley Field and the naval training school on the campus of Hampton Institute rested their cares in the company of some of the community’s most eligible bachelorettes. The USO’s dance floor was always full of beautiful young ladies, but one enlistee stationed at the naval school had eyes only for the club’s secretary. Mary’s nimble intellect, her quiet but commanding nature, and her all-embracing humanitarian spirit might have been a red flag for a less secure man, but it was exactly her strength of character that drew Alabama native Levi Jackson to her. Their romance blossomed in the heady days of the war, and they married in 1944 at the Winston family home on Lincoln Street. Ever the independent spirit, Mary eschewed the traditional all-white bridal gown for a shorter white dress with black sequins, topped off with black gloves, black pumps, and a red rose corsage.
The end of the war brought the closing of the King Street USO and the end of Mary’s job there. She worked for a brief period as a bookkeeper at Hampton Institute’s Health Service but left after the birth of her son, Levi Jr., in 1946. While Levi Sr. headed off to work at his job as a painter at Langley Field, Mary doted on her son at home. With a full calendar of child care, family commitments, and volunteer activities, she was as busy as a stay-at-home mother as she had been working outside her home.
Her free time was absorbed by her position as the leader of Bethel AME’s Girl Scout Troop No. 11. Scouting would be one of Mary’s lifelong loves. The organization’s commitment to preparing young women to take their place in the world, its mission to promulgate respect for God and country, honesty and loyalty—it was like a green-sashed version of all that Frank and Ella Winston had taught their children. Many of the girls in Troop 11 were from working-class, even poor, families—children of domestic servants, crab pickers, laborers—whose parents spent most of their waking hours trying to make ends meet. The door to the Jackson home on Lincoln Street was always open to them. Mary became a combination of teacher, big sister, and fairy godmother, helping her girls with algebra homework, sewing dresses for their proms, and steering them toward college.