With All Deliberate Speed
1958 was a year no Langley employee would ever forget. Leaving work on September 30, they said good-bye to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the esoteric operation that for forty-three years had quietly supervised and directed the airpower revolution, good-bye to the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory of yore. On the morning of October 1, the former NACAites walked into the Langley Research Center, epicenter of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a new American agency whose birth had been induced by a hurtling Soviet sphere. The buildings hadn’t changed, nor had the people, or, for many of them, the work they were charged with. But from sundown one day to sunup the next, they had gone, if only in the public imagination, from erudite and obscure to obvious and spectacular, from the crackpots of the airplane epoch of the 1940s to the guardians of the space-age 1960s.
At the end of the 1950s, when the American space program looked as uncoordinated and spindly as a foal, predicting that the United States would best the Soviets might have seemed like a fool’s bet. NASA had other plans, creating a brain trust at Mother Langley called the Space Task Group, a nimble, semi-autonomous working group that drew largely from the Flight Research Division and PARD and was led by engineer Robert Gilruth. The Space Task Group set up shop on Langley’s East Side in some of the laboratory’s oldest buildings. Those space pilgrims, an initial group of forty-five people, gave the country’s first manned space program an operating plan and a name: Project Mercury. The venture had three goals: to orbit a named spacecraft around the Earth, to investigate man’s ability to function in space, and to recover both men and spacecraft safely.
Virginians puffed out their chests with pride now that the good old brain busters were leading the charge against the Reds. An October 1959 open house at Langley held on the occasion of NASA’s first anniversary attracted twenty thousand ardent locals eager for an up-close look at the work of the unusual neighbors they had underestimated and overlooked for decades. No longer just a “a dull bunch of gray buildings with gray people who worked with slide rules and wrote long equations on blackboards,” NASA, the public now believed, was all that stood between them and a Red sky. However, Virginia’s legacy as the birthplace of humanity’s first step into the heavens would have to compete with the notoriety it was gaining as the country’s most intransigent foe of integrated schools.
“So far as the future histories of this state can be anticipated now, the year 1958 will be best known as the year Virginia closed the public schools,” lamented Lenoir Chambers, editor in chief of Virginia Beach’s Virginian-Pilot and a southern liberal in the mold of Mark Etheridge of the Louisville Post-Courier. Undeterred and unchastened by the 1957 showdown in Little Rock, the Byrd Machine’s Massive Resistance movement made good on its threat. In the fall of 1958, Virginia’s governor Lindsay Almond chained the doors of the schools in localities that attempted to comply with the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. Thirteen thousand students in the three cities that had moved forward with integration—Front Royal, Charlottesville, and Norfolk—found themselves sitting at home in the fall of 1958. “I would rather have my children live in ignorance than have them go to school with Negroes,” one white parent told a reporter. A total of ten thousand of the shut-out students lived in Norfolk: 5,500 of those from military families stationed at the naval base, white students as well as black paying the price for the state’s racial crusade.
Across the water from Norfolk, on the peninsula that Langley called home, public schools remained open but segregated. Even as the barriers in their parents’ workplace continued to erode, the children of Langley’s black employees returned to their fall routines at Carver, Huntington, and Phenix, while their white colleagues’ children went back to Newport News High and Hampton High. In their new home in Mimosa Crescent, the Goble daughters were now zoned to attend Hampton High School. The school board, however, paid “school fees” to the families as an incentive for them to keep their children in the black district, similar to the out-of-state “scholarships” the state offered to black graduate students to keep them from integrating Virginia colleges.
The forces in favor of equality redoubled their efforts, determined to surmount the resistance to integration like a jet engine propelling an airplane through drag. But, like Christine Darden and everyone else whose hopes—and fears—had escalated on the day the Brown case was decided, blacks in Virginia were acutely aware of the long lag between legal and political triumphs and social change. As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.
Rather than trying to make plans based on machinations beyond their reach, parents like Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Goble worked hard to influence what they did control: pushing their children to excel in their segregated schools and getting them into college. Katherine Goble’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Joylette, a talented violinist and a graceful beauty, graduated salutatorian of Carver High School’s class of 1958 and headed across town to attend Hampton Institute. Connie and Kathy, honor students and musicians in Carver High’s sophomore class, nipped at their elder sister’s heels. The girls and their mother made regular appearances in the social column of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the model of an upwardly mobile and professional black family.
In public, Katherine Goble was unfailingly gracious, optimistic, and unflappable, and she insisted that her girls acquit themselves in the same fashion. Her grief and loneliness, the burden of being both mother and father, she relegated to the privacy of their house on Mimosa Crescent. Jimmy Goble had been the love of Katherine’s youth, a nurturing father, and the partner she expected to grow old with. The two of them had been a compatible, attractive, and charming couple, making the rounds of the black community’s fall galas, debutante balls, picnics, and fund-raisers. As a single woman, still youthful at forty years old, she found herself drifting toward the social sidelines.