On his first day, Williams had had to convince the guards at the Langley security gate that he wasn’t a groundskeeper or cafeteria worker so that he could get passed along for processing as an engineer. Several white supervisors refused him a place in their groups, but an influential branch chief in the Stability Research Division named John D. Bird—“Jaybird”—raised his hand right away to offer the young man a position. “Jaybird was as fair as it got,” Williams’s wife, Julia, remembered years later.
Not everyone in the group was as enthusiastic as Bird. “So how long do you think you’re going to be able to hang on?” one new office mate teased, referring to the black engineers who had washed out. “Longer than you!” Williams retorted. Whereas the black women enjoyed the support that came from being part of a group, starting in a pool was not an option for a male engineer. Williams and the other black men who were soon to follow in his footsteps had a more solitary work life and faced aggressions that the women did not. But even though it was the black women who broke Langley’s color barrier, paving the way for the black men now being hired, the women would still have to fight for something that the black men could take for granted: the title of engineer.
Soon after moving to the four-by-four-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, Mary Jackson was given an assignment by John Becker, the chief of the Compressibility Division (compressibility referred to the compression of air molecules characteristic of faster-than-sound flight), Kazimierz Czarnecki’s boss’s boss’s boss. Langley liked to think of itself as a place that eschewed bureaucracy, where an idea from a cafeteria worker could get a fair hearing if it were compelling enough. Division chiefs, just two rungs down from the top post in the laboratory, however, were Very Important People. John Becker, heir to John Stack and Eastman Jacobs and other NACA legends, ruled an empire composed of the Four-foot SPT and all the other tunnels devoted to supersonic and hypersonic research. Becker was the kind of guy the eager front-row boys from the top engineering programs would do anything to impress.
John Becker gave Mary Jackson the instructions for working through the calculations. She delivered the finished assignment to him just as she completed her work for Dorothy Vaughan, double-checking all numbers, confident that they were correct. Becker reviewed the output, but something about the numbers didn’t seem right to him. So he challenged Mary’s numbers, insisting that her calculations were wrong. Mary Jackson stood by her numbers. She and her division chief went back and forth over the data, trying to isolate the discrepancy. Finally, it became clear: the problem wasn’t with her output but with his input. Her calculations were correct, based on the wrong numbers Becker had given her.
John Becker apologized to Mary Jackson. The episode earned Mary a reputation as a smart mathematician who might be able to contribute more than just calculations to her new group. Her showdown with John Becker was the kind of gambit that the laboratory expected, encouraged, and valued in its promising male engineers. Mary Jackson—a former West Computer!—had faced down the brilliant John Becker and won. It was a cause for quiet celebration and behind-the-scenes thumbs-up among all the female computers.
Most engineers were also good mathematicians. But it was the women who massaged the numbers, swam in the numbers, scrutinized the numbers until their eyes blurred, from the time they set their purses down on the desks in the morning until the time they put on their coats to leave at the end of the day. They checked each other’s work and put red dots on the data sheets when they found errors—and there were very, very few red dots. Some of the women were capable of lightning-fast mental math, rivaling their mechanical calculating machines for speed and accuracy. Others, like Dorothy Hoover and Doris Cohen, had highly refined understandings of theoretical math, differentiating their way through nested equations ten pages deep with nary an error in sign. The best of the women made names for themselves for accuracy, speed, and insight. But having the independence of mind and the strength of personality to defend your work in front of the most incisive aeronautical minds in the world—that’s what got you noticed. Being willing to stand up to the pressure of an opinionated, impatient engineer who put his feet up on the desk and waited while you did the work, who wanted his numbers done right and done yesterday, to spot the bug in his logic and tell him in no uncertain terms that he was the one who was wrong—that was a rarer quality. That’s what marked you as someone who should move ahead.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Serendipity
It had always been Katherine Goble’s great talent to be in the right place at the right time. In August 1952, twelve years after leaving graduate school, that right place was back in Marion, the site of her first teaching job, at the wedding of her husband, Jimmy Goble’s, little sister Patricia. Pat, a vivacious college beauty queen just two months graduated from Virginia State College, was marrying her college sweetheart, a young army corporal named Walter Kane.
Katherine and Jimmy packed the girls into the car and drove the sixty miles from Bluefield to Jimmy’s parents’ house, which quivered with excitement for Pat’s big day. Hotels in the South denied service to black patrons; blacks of all social strata knew to make arrangements with friends and family, or even strangers known for opening their homes to guests, rather than risk embarrassment or possibly danger while traveling. Five of Jimmy’s eleven siblings still lived in Marion, and their houses swelled to maximum capacity accommodating the out-of-town visitors, including the groom’s family, in from nearby Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and friends and extended family from all over Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina.
The simple but elegant wedding took place at the home of Jimmy’s eldest sister, Helen. Pat, radiant in a ballerina-length accordion-pleated gown, stood before the makeshift altar adorned with evergreens and gladioli and said “I do” to Walter, dashing in a white dinner jacket. The jubilant crowd toasted the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Kane. Katherine and Jimmy danced and ate wedding cake. Their three girls—Joylette, age eleven; Connie, ten; and Kathy, nine—squealed with delight as they played hide-and-seek and hopscotch and danced with their cousins. The celebration continued late into the cool August night and trickled into the following day, as the Goble and Kane clans tarried to savor their last moments together before heading back to their workaday lives.
Jimmy’s sister and brother-in-law, Margaret and Eric Epps, had journeyed from Newport News, and the newlyweds planned to accompany the Eppses back to the coast, hitching a ride to their honeymoon at Hampton’s segregated Bay Shore Beach resort. “Why don’t y’all come home with us too?” Eric asked Katherine. “I can get Snook a job at the shipyard,” he said, using Jimmy’s family nickname. “In fact, I can get both of you jobs.” There’s a government facility in Hampton that’s hiring black women, Eric told Katherine, and they’re looking for mathematicians. It’s a civilian job, he told her, but attached to Langley Field, in Hampton.