The same day that Mary Jackson started her job at Langley—April 5, 1951—a New York federal court handed down a death sentence against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a New York couple accused of spying for the Russians. The Cold War wasn’t happening just in the skies above Korea or in a Europe that was being divided into a Soviet-allied East and a US-friendly West. The Rosenberg trial sparked fears inside the United States that living throughout the country were communist sympathizers plotting to overthrow the government. Official propaganda films like He May Be a Communist warned Americans that their neighbors might have thrown in their lot with the Reds. Even friends and family could be secret Communists, alerted the film, the kind “who don’t show their real faces.” The Rosenberg trial was all the evidence many citizens needed that their country had been infiltrated by radicalized agents of the Soviet Union.
At Langley, the Rosenberg trial and its repercussions hit a little too close to home. An engineer named William Perl, who had worked at Langley until he transferred to the NACA laboratory in Cleveland in 1943, was accused of stealing classified NACA documents and funneling them to the Soviet Union via the Rosenbergs. Among the secrets allegedly leaked by Perl were plans for a nuclear-powered airplane and the specs for a high-speed NACA airfoil. Some even believed that the high T-shaped tails on the MIGs that were shooting down American pilots over Korea were based on NACA designs. Perl was eventually tried and cleared of the espionage charges, but he was convicted of perjury for lying about his association with the Rosenbergs.
The FBI had begun laying the groundwork for the case in the late 1940s, interrogating Langley employees about their knowledge of Perl and his possible conspirators. Federal agents terrified staffers by showing up unannounced at their homes in Hampton and Newport News, ringing the doorbell in the evenings to ask questions. The FBI tracked down former Langley engineer Eastman Jacobs, known for his left-leaning sympathies, and interrogated him at his new home in California. They spent hours questioning Pearl Young, who had left the agency in the late 1940s for a job teaching physics at Penn State. The Stability Research Division, where Dorothy Hoover worked, was a particular target, as Perl had been a member of the group before leaving for Cleveland.
The investigation tapped into veins of anti-Semitism that flowed just under the racial prejudice at the laboratory and in the community. Quietly, some laboratory employees complained about the “New York communist people” and the “practically impossible New York Jews” recruited to work at Langley. A Jewish computer who had invited her Negro college roommate down to Virginia for a weekend visit caused a scandal. The progressives of the Stability Research group, regardless of their actual political practices, were certainly open to accusations of subversion for their embrace of “dangerous” ideas like racial integration, civil rights, and equality for women.
Investigators looked into rumors that engineers in Stability Research and a “black computer” with whom they were friendly had been caught burning the loyalty forms President Truman had required all civil servants to sign after 1947. In 1951, Air Scoop published a long list of organizations that the government had labeled totalitarian, Communist, or subversive, the clear message that affiliation with any of them might jeopardize one’s job. Around the same time, Dorothy Vaughan’s relative, Matilda West, possibly the black computer accused of disloyalty, was fired from her job at the laboratory. West was an outspoken advocate for black empowerment and one of the leaders of the local NAACP. The NAACP wasn’t included on the government list, but it had long been a target of the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy. With the Rosenberg trial casting a shadow on the NACA and its security practices, and with the agency’s growing budget requests under the microscope in Congress, the lab’s administrators may have decided that having a “radical” black computer on staff was a headache they just didn’t need.
It was a dismissal that would shake West Computing to its core, with possibly career-damaging implications for Dorothy Vaughan as well. The Red scares and Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s destroyed reputations, lives, and livelihoods, as Matilda West’s situation proved. The fear of Communism was a bonanza for segregationists like Virginia senator Harry Byrd. Byrd painted the epithet “Communist” on everyone and everything that threatened to upend his view of “traditional” American customs and values, which included white supremacy. (One sequence in the film He May Be a Communist not so subtly showed a dramatized protest march in which participants held signs reading END KKK TERROR and NO WAR BASES IN AFRICA.)
Having the courage to criticize the government carried serious risks, and once again, the champions of Negro advancement had to engage in the delicate two-step of denouncing America’s foreign enemies while doing battle with their adversaries at home. Even A. Philip Randolph, an avowed socialist who preached a fiery sermon in favor of fair employment and civil rights legislation in front of a packed audience in Norfolk in 1950, was careful in his speeches to denounce Communism as antithetical to the interests of the Negro people.
Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, and W. E. B. Du Bois were among the black leaders to draw a connection between America’s treatment of its Negro citizens and European colonialism. They traveled abroad and made speeches declaring their solidarity with the peoples of India, Ghana, and other countries that were in the early days of new regimes as independent nations or pushing with all their might to get there by agitating against their colonial rulers. The US government went so far as to restrict or revoke these firebrands’ passports, hoping to blunt the impact of their criticism of American domestic policy in the newly independent countries that the United States was eager to persuade to join its side in the Cold War.
Foreigners who traveled to the United States often experienced the caste system firsthand. In 1947, a Mississippi hotel denied service to the Haitian secretary of agriculture, who had come to the state to attend an international conference. The same year, a restaurant in the South banned Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi’s personal doctor from its premises because of his dark skin. Diplomats traveling from New York to Washington along Route 40 were often rejected if they stopped for a meal at restaurants in Maryland. The humiliations, so commonplace in the United States that they barely raised eyebrows, much less the interest of the press, were the talk of the town in the envoys’ home countries. Headlines like “Untouchability Banished in India: Worshipped in America,” which appeared in a Bombay newspaper in 1951, mortified the US diplomatic corps. Through its inability to solve its racial problems, the United States handed the Soviet Union one of the most effective propaganda weapons in their arsenal.
Newly independent countries around the world, eager for alliances that would support their emerging identities and set them on the path to long-term prosperity, were confronted with a version of the same question black Americans had asked during World War II. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America’s model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them?
The international audience, and their opinion of US racial problems, were beginning to matter—a lot—to American leaders, and concern for their opinion influenced Truman’s 1947 decision to desegregate the military through Executive Order 9981. At the start of the Korean War, the Tan Yanks remaining in active service in the US Air Force were called up to serve as a part of an integrated squadron.