Most of all, she went out of her way to provide them with the kinds of experiences that would expand their understanding of what was possible in their lives. With a leader as creative as Mrs. Jackson, Troop 11 was never inhibited by its modest resources. Rather than sitting down with the Girl Scout manual and going through the badge requirements as if it were simply a weekend version of a social studies class, she turned working toward those cheerfully embroidered green patches into an adventure, taking them on three-mile “country” hikes in local parks or field trips to the crab factory to learn more about what their parents did for work. For the hospitality badge, Mary arranged for the troop to attend an afternoon tea at the Hampton Institute Mansion House, a grand residence now occupied for the first time by a black president, Alonzo G. Moron. Mrs. Moron received the girls in high style, attended by a staff composed of students from the school’s Home Economics Department. It was a sight the girls never forgot: an impeccable black staff in a fabulous house, serving a well-heeled black family. Not even the movies could compare with the glamour of that afternoon.
Once at a troop meeting at Bethel AME, Mary was leading her charges in a rendition of the folk tune “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” complete with a pantomime of a slave working in the fields. It was a well-worn tune, one that she had sung before without much consideration. That day, however, the lyrics (“We’re gonna jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton!”) and the shucky-jivey routine that accompanied it struck her like a bolt of lightning.
“Hold on a minute!” she said suddenly, interrupting the performance in mid-verse. The girls watched Mrs. Jackson, startled. Mary stood silent for a long moment, as if hearing the song for the first time. “We are never going to sing this again,” she told them, trying to explain her reasoning to the surprised youngsters. The song reinforced all the crudest stereotypes of what a Negro could do or be. Sometimes, she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions.
It was a powerful moment for the girls of Troop 11. Mary didn’t have the power to remove the limits that society imposed on her girls, but it was her duty, she felt, to help pry off the restrictions they might place on themselves. Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status—none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions. You can do better—we can do better, she told them with every word and every deed. For Mary Jackson, life was a long process of raising one’s expectations.
When Levi Jr. turned four, Mary Jackson filed an application with the Civil Service, applying both for a clerical position with the army and as a computer at Langley. In January 1951, she was quickly called up to work at Fort Monroe as a clerk typist. The job involved typing, filing, distributing mail, making copies—nothing more exotic than her previous work, but because of the sensitive nature of the documents that passed through the office, she was required to get a secret security clearance. The United States’ anxiety over the threat posed by the Soviet Union had increased steadily since the end of World War II, and escalated in 1949 when the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb. One of the documents that circulated at Fort Monroe was an army plan to be executed in the case of an atomic attack.
The rivalry between the onetime allies exploded into open war-by-proxy along the border between North and South Korea in 1950, making the stakes of the new conflict concrete for most Americans, and for the NACA. Over Korean skies, Russian fighter planes “too fast to be identified”—the near supersonic MIG-15—attacked American B-29 Superfortress planes. “Russia Said to Have Fastest Fighter Plane,” ran the headline of a 1950 Norfolk Journal and Guide article. The Americans had led the way through the sound barrier with Chuck Yeager at the helm of the X-1, but by 1950, the NACA reckoned that “the Russians expended at least three times the man power in their research establishments” than what the United States budgeted. Again the NACA angled to benefit from increased international tension, handing Congress a proposal to double its agency-wide employment level from seven thousand in 1951 to fourteen thousand in 1953.
The long list of job vacancies published in the Air Scoop was reminiscent of the boom times of the last war and buttressed America’s vow that it would not back down before any rival in the heavens. With its many new facilities coming into operation, the laboratory again cast its net for the female alchemists who could turn the numbers from testing into aeronautical gold. With Mary’s abilities, it was no surprise that Uncle Sam decided she would be of better use as an NACA computer than as a military secretary. After three months at Fort Monroe, she accepted an offer to work for Dorothy Vaughan.
In the eight years that had elapsed since Dorothy Vaughan had taken the same trip on her first day of work, the fields and remaining forest of Langley’s West Side had filled in with roads, sidewalks, and the laboratory’s characteristic low redbrick buildings, an aeronautical village brimming with inhabitants. A gigantic 295-by-300-foot hangar, also known as Building 1244, the largest structure of its kind in the world, sheltered the laboratory’s fleet of research aircraft, including the X plane series, the offspring of Chuck Yeager’s sound-barrier-breaking X-1. The feat of smashing through the sound barrier scored a Collier Trophy, the aeronautics industry’s most prestigious award, for Yeager, Lawrence Bell—whose company, Bell Aircraft, produced the X-1—and John Stack, Langley’s assistant director, who had championed the plane’s development as a research tool. More importantly, breaching that physical barrier opened researchers’ minds to the wider spectrum of powered flight’s possibilities, and its challenges. As a plane accelerated from high subsonic speeds to low supersonic speeds, passing through the unsteady “transonic” region between Mach .8 and Mach 1.2, the simultaneous presence of subsonic and supersonic flows caused buffeting and instability. Aerodynamicists sharpened their pencils to understand the sudden changes in lift and drag on a plane flying at transonic speeds, because the transonic regime served as the waiting room for any vehicle seeking to supersede the speed of sound. The telltale sonic boom indicated that the plane had pushed through the volatile transonic region into the state of smoother, all-supersonic flows.
With Mach 1 achieved, engineering imaginations broke free of all previous speed limits. While maintaining its efforts to wring out improvements in subsonic flight and address the complexities of transonic flight, the NACA mounted a concerted effort to take what it had learned from the experimental planes and use it to design military production aircraft capable of supersonic flight. “For America to continue its present challenged supremacy in the air will require that it develop tactical military aircraft that will fly faster than sound before any other nation does so,” John Victory, the NACA’s long-serving executive secretary, said in the Journal and Guide article. The most visionary of the brain busters pined for the day when a pilot could take one of their creations for a hypersonic joy ride: Mach 5 or faster. The details of something mysteriously known only as Project 506 was revealed in 1950 to be a hypersonic wind tunnel, with a test section of just eleven inches, but capable of subjecting models to wind speeds close to Mach 7. That test facility, and a large complex under construction called the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, which would be capable of wind tunnel tests up to Mach 18, tipped the agency’s interest in flight so fast that it could occur only at the limits of Earth’s atmosphere. The vacuum spheres being built to power the tests in the Gas Dynamics Laboratory—three smooth-metal sixty-foot-diameter globes and a one-hundred-foot corrugated sphere towering over its siblings—would become one of the most recognizable landmarks on the Virginia Peninsula.