Farmville, the town that Dorothy left behind in the 1940s, had become in the 1950s a microcosm of America’s struggle over integration in its public schools. In the thirteen years since she’d left Moton High School, the deficient building had passed from being merely overcrowded to packed beyond reasonable measure. In 1947 the state constructed tar paper shacks on the school’s lawn (the students called them “chicken coops”) in an attempt to squeeze 450 students into a school built for 180. In 1951, one of the school’s decrepit school buses crashed, killing five students. One of the victims was the best friend of Barbara Johns, the sixteen-year-old niece of Farmville native and renowned civil rights activist Vernon Johns, who, at the time of the accident, was a preacher at a church in Montgomery, Alabama.
The grief that washed over Barbara Johns gave way to anger, then took hold in her as a hunger for justice that would not be denied. In April 1951, the same month Langley promoted Dorothy Vaughan to the head of West Area Computing, Barbara Johns organized her fellow students in a walkout, imploring them to take a public stand against the abysmal conditions at the school; she stood strong, leading the charge through the opposition and fear of many parents and teachers. Dorothy’s nieces and nephews were among the strikers. At the time, none of them could have foreseen the consequences of the dominoes that the courageous teenagers set in motion in 1951: Barbara Johns’ campaign to attend a school that equaled the standards of white Farmville High attracted the attention of Virginia lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, who then joined forces with Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief counsel. Marshall consolidated the Moton students’ suit with four others around the country into the US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 decision that banned segregation in all public schools in the United States of America. Black Americans sent up a cheer of jubilation, and the ruling provided momentum and hope to grassroots civil resistance and social movements throughout the land. “Not Willing to Wait: NAACP Leaders Want Integration ‘Now!’ ” declared a Norfolk Journal and Guide headline.
Waiting, though, was exactly what Virginia’s leading politicians, starting with Senator Harry Byrd, had in mind. “If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that, in time, the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South,” Byrd said in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. Virginia’s resistance to the ruling would, over time, be more intransigent and longer lasting than that of any other state. When Dorothy and the other West Computers signed up for computation classes in the 1950s, they registered to attend at Hampton Institute. Langley offered on its premises a series of lectures on aerodynamics, open to all comers. It held one engineering course on-site, which some of the black employees attended. It had set up a classroom on the air force base, a cooperative venture with George Washington University, presumably available to all employees. Nearby College of William and Mary extended its classrooms to Langley employees. Newport News High School held night classes. Langley managed so many courses in so many places that it often seemed like a university itself.
Hampton High School was the seat of the University of Virginia’s Extension School, and the most significant of Langley’s campuses. In the evenings, the city’s only public high school taught laboratory employees everything from sewing to dynamic model design, bookkeeping to machine shop theory. It even hosted an Americanization class, helping foreign employees prepare for the citizenship test. Most of the classes covered math, science, and engineering. The lineup included courses like Differential Equations, a core part of the engineering curriculum, and higher-level math, such as Theory of Equations.
But the high school was off-limits to the city’s Negro children, who were still sent to Phenix High School, Mary Jackson’s alma mater. In 1953, a Negro lawyer named William Davis Butts had gone before the Hampton school board to decry Phenix’s “inadequate gymnasium and library” and to demand that the city “terminate the ‘undemocratic and expensive dual system.’?” The board, deferring to the state segregation law, declared his pleading moot. As Hampton’s schools remained segregated for its schoolchildren, the UVa Extension Program rebuffed Langley’s black employees. More than a decade after the first West Computers headed to Hampton Institute for wartime ESMWT classes, Langley’s black professionals still relied on the august black college for professional training and career advancement.
Across the country, the United States debated the quality of its schools, concerned with how American students matched up to the Soviets in math and the sciences. The imperative to raise the general level of technical proficiency had only grown stronger as the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union grew more inflamed. While the discussion in World War II had centered on using white women in engineering and science, the 1950s debate had expanded to a broad discussion of the participation of Negroes in the technical fields as well. Virtually every review of the situation questioned how much desperately needed brainpower was being squandered by the intentional neglect of America’s Negro schools.
Kaz Czarnecki wasn’t about to leave brainpower on the table. He only learned of Mary Jackson’s double major in math and science after he made her the offer to join the Four-foot SPT group. Even so, without having reviewed her résumé, something about her gave him the idea that she was both qualified and the right fit for the job. He was white, male, Catholic, and a Yankee. She was a black woman from the South, a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. It would have been easy for each of them to look past the other, to see the outside and assume that they could have nothing in common. But what Kaz Czarnecki intuited, and what the years would bear out, was this: Mary Jackson had the soul of an engineer.
From the beginning, Czarnecki had put Mary at the controls in the wind tunnel, showing her how to fire up the tunnel’s roaring sixty-thousand-horsepower engines (the noise from years of work in the tunnel eventually damaging Mary’s hearing). He showed her how to work with the mechanics to correctly position a model in the test section. One test required Mary to clamber onto the catwalk of the wind tunnel, measuring how rivets disrupted the airflow over a particular model. Another involved turning the tunnel’s Mach 2 winds on a series of sharp-nosed metal cones to discover the point at which the smooth air flowing over the cones became turbulent. The research had application to the design of missiles, of great interest as the United States sought to gain every possible military and technological advantage over the Soviet Union. The results of the work would come to fruition in 1958, in Mary’s first report, coauthored with Czarnecki: “Effects on Nose Angle and Mach Number on Transition on Cones at Supersonic Speeds,” published in September 1958.