The progress that the black women had made in the last fourteen years was unmistakable. Demand for their mathematical abilities had opened Langley’s front door to them, and the quality of their work had kept them at their desks. Through the familiarity that came with regular contact, they had been able to establish themselves not as “the colored girls” but simply “the girls,” the ones engineers relied upon to swiftly and accurately translate the raw babble of the laboratory’s fierce machines into a language that could be analyzed and turned into a vehicle that cut through the sky with grace and power.
True social contact across the races was well nigh impossible, yet within the confines of their offices, relationships cultivated over intense days and long years blossomed into respect, fondness, and even friendship. The colleagues exchanged Christmas cards with one another, asked after spouses and children. An engineer’s wife gave Miriam Mann’s daughter a shiny new penny to put in her shoe on her wedding day. The employees came together for extracurricular activities based at the laboratory: in 1954, Henry Reid appointed Chubby Peddrew to serve as one of the directors of Langley’s inaugural United Fund Drive. The Activities Building was the site of club meetings and branch get-togethers, an end run around the embarrassment and difficulty of finding a venue in the town that would accommodate a racially mixed group. The Negro employees began attending centerwide events such as the annual Christmas party; one season, Eunice Smith volunteered as a Santa’s helper. Every year, Dorothy Vaughan’s children counted the days until the laboratory’s giant picnic, where they could romp and play with the other kids and eat their fill of grilled hot dogs and hamburgers.
The social and organizational changes occurring at Langley were buoyed by the civil rights forces gathering momentum in the country. A. Philip Randolph, implacable in his advocacy of voting rights and economic equality, was actively working with younger organizers, principally the minister of a Montgomery, Alabama, church named Martin Luther King Jr. King and a fellow pastor named Ralph Abernathy had helped organize a boycott of the city buses after a fifteen-year-old student named Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old seamstress, were both hauled off to jail for refusing to yield their seats in the “white” section of the bus. As with the legal case of Irene Morgan, the woman arrested in Virginia’s Gloucester County in 1946 for the same infraction, the battle over integration on Montgomery buses eventually won a hearing in front of the Supreme Court. Once again America’s highest court ruled segregation illegal. The controversy over the bus boycott vaulted the young Dr. King into the national headlines as the leader of the civil rights movement.
Langley Air Force Base and Fort Monroe moved forward to integrate the housing and the schools on their bases; as federal outposts, they were bound to comply with federal law. The state of Virginia, on the other hand, hoisted the Jim Crow flag even higher. In the years following the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Senator Harry Byrd’s antipathy toward the law had swelled into a countering movement—Massive Resistance—and he marshaled every resource at his political organization’s disposal to build a firebreak against integration. Byrd Machine politician J. Lindsay Almond assumed the governorship and the party line in January 1958. “Integration anywhere means destruction everywhere,” Almond inveighed in his inaugural address, his words a dark mirror of Lyndon Johnson’s anxious commentary on Sputnik. Claiming to be the front line of defense for the entire South and its “way of life,” the southern Democrats who ruled the state passed a package of laws that gave the legislature the right to close any public school that tried to integrate. “How can Senator Byrd and [Virginia] Congressman Hardy be so distressed one minute about our lagging behind the Russians in our missile program and the next minute advocate closing the schools in Virginia?” demanded one Norfolk Journal and Guide columnist.
Supporters of integration and segregation faced off with growing intensity: in 1956, the NAACP filed lawsuits in Newport News, Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Arlington, with the aim of forcing each of those Virginia school districts to integrate. The Byrd cronies retaliated by diverting taxpayer money to fund whites-only “segregation academies,” private schools founded to circumvent integrated public schools. The no-go situation in the Virginia schools was evidence of just how difficult it was going to be to pull out the roots of the caste system that had defined and circumscribed virtually every interaction between whites and those considered nonwhite since the English first set foot on the Virginia coast. “While integration waits to be born, the ‘separate but equal’ education of the Negroes marks time,” wrote journalist James Rorty in Commentary Magazine.
That so many West Computers managed to find opportunity as they rotated into new positions at the lab certainly relieved some of the pressure for Langley management to take a more active hand in the matter of integration. Langley might easily have continued its organic approach to desegregation, ending West Area Computing only after the last of the women had found a new home with an engineering section, like grade school kids waiting to be picked for a kickball team. Driven by the pragmatic sensibility of the engineers, management had naturally tacked toward a policy of benign neglect with respect to the bathroom signs and lunchrooms, neither enforcing compliance with the rules nor eliminating them altogether. It might have taken years longer before the unseen hand that had been vanquished by Miriam Mann in the lunchroom in the early 1940s would take the next step and pry the riveted aluminum COLORED GIRLS signs off Langley’s bathroom doors. But by leapfrogging the United States into space, the Russians had turned even local racial policy into fodder for the international conflict. In forcing the United States to compete for the allegiance of yellow and brown and black countries throwing off the shackles of colonialism, the Soviets influenced something much closer to Earth, and ultimately more difficult than putting a satellite, or even a human, into space: weakening Jim Crow’s grip on America.
“Eighty percent of the world’s population is colored,” the NACA’s chief legal counsel Paul Dembling had written in a 1956 file memo. “In trying to provide leadership in world events, it is necessary for this country to indicate to the world that we practice equality for all within this country. Those countries where colored persons constitute a majority should not be able to point to a double standard existing within the United States.” It would take a lot more than a shiny Soviet ball and the threat of international disdain to completely break the Byrd organization’s commitment to racial segregation. As far as the segregationists were concerned, racial integration and Communism were one and the same and posed the same kind of threat to traditional American values. Yet those charged with mounting the American offense in space saw strength in countering the Russian value of secrecy with its opposites—transparency, democracy, equality—and not a simulacrum.