At the same time, Truman issued Executive Order 9980, sharpening the teeth of the wartime mandate that had helped bring West Area Computing into existence. The new law went further than the measure brought to life by A. Philip Randolph and President Roosevelt by making the heads of each federal department “personally responsible” for maintaining a work environment free of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. The NACA appointed a fair employment officer to enforce the measure and settled into the habit of responding to a quarterly questionnaire, relating its activity with respect to its growing numbers of black professional employees.
“The laboratory has one work unit composed entirely of Negro women, the West Area Computers, which may fall into the category of a segregated work unit,” wrote Langley’s administrative officer, Kemble Johnson, in a 1951 memo. “However, a large percentage of employees are usually detailed to work in non-segregated units for periods of one week to three months. Members of this unit are frequently transferred to other research activities at Langley, where they are integrated into non-segregated units. The same promotional activities are available to the West Area Computers as to other computers at Langley.”
Supersonic aircraft and missiles were determining the course of the Cold War, but so too would “science textbooks and racial relations.” The West Area Computers were ammunition for both fronts of the conflict, yet they were one of the best-kept secrets in the federal government. Among the middle-class and black professional community of southeastern Virginia, however, word traveled like wildfire: Mrs. Vaughan’s office is hiring. Christine Richie heard about West Computing in the Huntington High School teachers’ lounge. Aurelia Boaz, a 1949 Hampton Institute graduate, got the word through the college grapevine. It seemed that every black church on the peninsula had at least one member who worked out at Langley. Applications were passed along at homecoming tailgates and choir rehearsals, at the meetings of Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha sororities and the Newsome Park PTA. Mary Jackson was connected to so many computers in so many different ways that the only surprising thing about her arrival at Langley was that it had taken so long.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Area Rule
In the early 1950s, there was rarely a slow workday for Dorothy Vaughan. With research activity concentrated on the West Side of Langley’s campus, Dorothy managed a steady stream of computing jobs, dispatching incoming assignments to the women in her office and sending her computers out to various engineering groups located in the vicinity with greater frequency. Most of the work that came into the West Area computing office originated from one of the tunnels on the West Side or from the Flight Research Division, which was located in Building 1244, the West Side’s new hangar. Though the East Side was now smaller in size and activity than Langley’s booming West Side, facilities like the Spin Tunnel (a building shaped like a squat smokestack where engineers analyzed models subjected to dangerous spins) and Tanks nos. 1 and 2 (three-thousand-foot-long channels for testing seaplanes) remained busy. The Full-Scale Tunnel, the linchpin of the lab’s World War II drag cleanup work, continued to test everything from low-speed aircraft designed with delta wings to helicopters. During intense periods, if the work exceeded the available hands, computing supervisors working in the East Area might put in a phone call to Dot Vaughan for reinforcements.
On one such occasion, two years after Mary joined West Computing, Dorothy Vaughan sent Mary to the East Side, staffing her on a project alongside several white computers. The routines of the computing work had become familiar to Mary, but the geography of the East Side was not. Her morning at the East Side job proceeded without incident—until nature called.
“Can you direct me to the bathroom?” Mary asked the white women.
They responded to Mary with giggles. How would they know where to find her bathroom? The nearest bathroom was unmarked, which meant it was available to any of the white women and off-limits to the black women. There were certainly colored bathrooms on the East Side, but with most black professionals concentrated on the West Side, and fewer new buildings on the East Side, Mary might need a map to find them. Angry and humiliated, she stormed off on her own to find her way to her restroom.
Negotiating racial boundaries was a daily fact of Negro life. Mary wasn’t naive about the segregation at Langley—it was no different than anywhere in town. Yet she couldn’t shake this particular incident. It was the proximity to professional equality that gave the slight such a surprising and enduring sting. Unlike the public schools, where minuscule budgets and ramshackle facilities exposed the sham of “separate but equal,” the Langley employee badge supposedly gave Mary access to the same workplace as her white counterparts. Compared to the white girls, she came to the lab with as much education, if not more. She dressed each day as if she were on her way to a meeting with the president. She trained the girls in her Girl Scout troop to believe that they could be anything, and she went to lengths to prevent negative stereotypes of their race from shaping their internal views of themselves and other Negroes. It was difficult enough to rise above the silent reminders of Colored signs on the bathroom doors and cafeteria tables. But to be confronted with the prejudice so blatantly, there in that temple to intellectual excellence and rational thought, by something so mundane, so ridiculous, so universal as having to go to the bathroom . . . In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn’t good enough for the white pot.
Still fuming as she walked back to West Computing later that day, Mary Jackson ran into Kazimierz Czarnecki, an assistant section head in the four-by-four-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel. A stocky fellow with a lantern jaw who played first base in the Langley softball league, Kazimierz Czarnecki—friends called him “Kaz”—was a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, who had come to the laboratory in 1939 after graduating from the University of Alabama with an aeronautical engineering degree. His good nature and prodigious research output made him a well-liked, well-respected member of the laboratory staff. Before joining the four-foot SPT, Kaz had worked as a member of the Nine-inch Supersonic Tunnel research staff, which maintained an office in the Aircraft Loads Building, where West Area Computing was housed.
Most blacks automatically put on a mask around whites, a veil that hid the “dead-weight of social degradation” that scholar W. E. B. Du Bois gave voice to so eloquently in The Souls of Black Folk. The mask offered protection against the constant reminders of being American and the American dilemma. It obscured the anger that blacks knew could have life-changing—even life-ending—consequences if displayed openly. That day, however, as Mary Jackson ran into Kazimierz Czarnecki on the west side of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, there was no turning inward, no subversion, and no dissembling. Mary Jackson let her mask slip to the ground and answered Czarnecki’s greeting with a Mach 2 blowdown of frustration and resentment, letting off steam as she ranted about the insult she had experienced on the East Side.
Mary Jackson was a soft-spoken individual, but she was also forthright and unambiguous. She chose to speak to everyone around her in the same serious and direct fashion, whether they were adolescents in her Girl Scout troop or engineers in the office. Mary was also a shrewd and intuitive judge of character, an emotionally intelligent woman who paid close attention to her surroundings and the people around her. Whether her outpouring in front of Czarnecki was the spontaneous result of having reached a breaking point or something more astute, she picked the right person to vent to. What had started as one of the worst workdays Mary Jackson had ever had would end up being the turning point of her career.
“Why don’t you come work for me?” Czarnecki asked Mary. She didn’t hesitate to accept the offer.