Nearly two years after Randolph’s 1941 showdown, as the laboratory’s personnel requests reached the civil service, applications of qualified Negro female candidates began filtering in to the Langley Service Building, presenting themselves for consideration by the laboratory’s personnel staff. No photo advised as to the applicant’s color—that requirement, instituted under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, was struck down as the Roosevelt administration tried to dismantle discrimination in hiring practices. But the applicants’ alma maters tipped their hand: West Virginia State University, Howard, Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal, Hampton Institute just across town—all Negro schools. Nothing in the applications indicated anything less than fitness for the job. If anything, they came with more experience than the white women applicants, with many years of teaching experience on top of math or science degrees.
They would need a separate space, Melvin Butler knew. Then they would have to appoint someone to head the new group, an experienced girl—white, obviously—someone whose disposition suited the sensitivity of the assignment. The Warehouse Building, a brand-new space on the west side of the laboratory, a part of the campus that was still more wilderness than anything resembling a workplace, could be just the thing. His brother Sherwood’s group had already moved there, as had some of the employees in the personnel department. With round-the-clock pressure to test the airplanes queued up in the hangar, engineers would welcome the additional hands. So many of the engineers were Northerners, relatively agnostic on the racial issue but devout when it came to mathematical talent.
Melvin Butler himself hailed from Portsmouth, just across the bay from Hampton. It required no imagination on his part to guess what some of his fellow Virginians might think of the idea of integrating Negro women into Langley’s offices, the “come-heres” (as the Virginians called the newcomers to the state) and their strange ways be damned. There had always been Negro employees in the lab—janitors, cafeteria workers, mechanic’s assistants, groundskeepers. But opening the door to Negroes who would be professional peers, that was something new.
Butler proceeded with discretion: no big announcement in the Daily Press, no fanfare in Air Scoop. But he also proceeded with direction: nothing to herald the arrival of the Negro women to the laboratory, but nothing to derail their arrival either. Maybe Melvin Butler was progressive for his time and place, or maybe he was just a functionary carrying out his duty. Maybe he was both. State law—and Virginia custom—kept him from truly progressive action, but perhaps the promise of a segregated office was just the cover he needed to get the black women in the door, a Trojan horse of segregation opening the door to integration. Whatever his personal feelings on race, one thing was clear: Butler was a Langley man through and through, loyal to the laboratory, to its mission, to its worldview, and to its charge during the war. By nature—and by mandate—he and the rest of the NACA were all about practical solutions.
So, too, was A. Philip Randolph. The leader’s indefatigable activism, unrelenting pressure, and superior organizing skills laid the foundation for what, in the 1960s, would come to be known as the civil rights movement. But there was no way that Randolph, or the men at the laboratory, or anyone else could have predicted that the hiring of a group of black female mathematicians at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory would end at the Moon.
Still shrouded from view were the great aeronautical advances that would crush the notion that faster-than-sound flight was a physical impossibility, the electronic calculating devices that would amplify the power of science and technology to unthinkable dimensions. No one anticipated that millions of wartime women would refuse to leave the American workplace and forever change the meaning of women’s work, or that American Negroes would persist in their demands for full access to the founding ideals of their country and not be moved. The black female mathematicians who walked into Langley in 1943 would find themselves at the intersection of these great transformations, their sharp minds and ambitions contributing to what the United States would consider one of its greatest victories.
But in 1943, America existed in the urgent present. Responding to the needs of the here and now, Butler took the next step, making a note to add another item to Sherwood’s seemingly endless requisition list: a metal bathroom sign bearing the words COLORED GIRLS.
CHAPTER TWO
Mobilization
There was no escaping the heat in the summer of 1943, not in the roiling seas of the South Pacific, not in the burning skies over Hamburg and Sicily, and not for the group of Negro women working in Camp Pickett’s laundry boiler plant. The temperature and humidity inside the army facility were so intense that slipping outdoors into the 100-plus degrees of the central Virginia June summer invited relief.
The laundry room was both one of the war’s obscure crannies and a microcosm of the war itself, a sophisticated, efficient machine capable of processing eighteen thousand bundles of laundry each week. One group of women loaded soiled laundry into the enormous boilers. Others heaved the sopping clothes into the dryers. Another team worked the pressing machines like cooks at a giant griddle. Thirty-two-year-old Dorothy Vaughan stood at the sorting station, reuniting wayward socks and trousers with the laundry bags of the black and white soldiers who came to Camp Pickett by the trainload for four weeks of basic training before heading on to the Port of Embarkation in Newport News. Small talk of husbands, children, lives back home, or the ever-present war rose above the thunder and hum of the giant laundry boilers and dryers. We gave him a real nice send-off, whole neighborhood turned out. Just as well you can’t get stockings nowhere, hot as it is. That Mr. Randolph sure is something, and friends with Mrs. Roosevelt too! They brooded over the husbands and brothers and fathers heading into the conflict that was so far away from the daily urgencies of their lives in Virginia, yet so close to their prayers and their dreams.
The majority of the women who found their way to the military laundry room had left behind jobs as domestic servants or as stemmers in the tobacco factories. The laundry was a humid inferno, the work as monotonous as it was uncomfortable. Laundry workers existed at the bottom of the war’s great pyramid, invisible and invaluable at the same time. One aircraft industry executive estimated that each laundry worker supported three workers at his plants; with someone else to tend to their dirty clothing, men and women on the production lines had lower rates of absenteeism. The laundry workers earned 40 cents an hour, ranking them among the lowest paid of all war workers, but with few job options available to them, it felt like a windfall.
Only a week had elapsed between the end of the school year at Robert Russa Moton, the Negro high school in Farmville, Virginia, where Dorothy worked as a math teacher, and her first day of work at Camp Pickett. As a college graduate and a teacher, she stood near the top of what most Negro women could hope to achieve. Teachers were considered the “upper level of training and intelligence in the race,” a ground force of educators who would not just impart book learning but live in the Negro community and “direct its thoughts and head its social movements.” Her in-laws were mainstays of the town’s Negro elite. They owned a barbershop, a pool hall, and a service station. The family’s activities were regular fodder for the social column in the Farmville section of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the leading Negro newspaper in the southeastern United States. Dorothy, her husband, Howard, and their four young children lived in a large, rambling Victorian house on South Main Street with Howard’s parents and grandparents.