Mary Jackson scrutinized every aspect of the model—its smoothness, its symmetry and alignment, its weight distribution—her trained eye and intuition sensitive to anything that might lower its aerodynamic fitness. This had been a project of nights and weekends, but she knew this investigation would provide results much more quickly than any research currently underway in the Four-foot Supersonic Tunnel. The bar had been set the year before by an engineer in the Aerospace Mechanics Division—Katherine Johnson’s group—but Mary and her young collaborator were more than up to the challenge. She was ready to spend all the time it took to help her son, Levi, build a humdinger of a car to race in the peninsula’s 1960 soap box derby.
Since the beginning of the year, Mary had spent hours, hundreds of them, perhaps, collaborating with her thirteen-year-old son the way she worked with Kazimierz Czarnecki. She and Levi had gone to the local Chevrolet dealer to fill out the entry form and pick up a copy of the official rules, which read like a familiarization manual for an airplane. “The car and driver together must weigh less than 250 pounds. Only rubber wheels allowed. Length shall not exceed 80 inches. Road clearance must be at least three inches with the driver in the car. The total cost of the car shall not exceed $10.00, exclusive of wheels and axles.” They absorbed the restrictions and made sketches and measurements, trying out different designs until they settled on the best specification. Then they hunted for the materials that would bring their sketch to life. Buried in the clutter at the back of the garage might be a treasure in disguise: vegetable crates, plywood, orphaned wagon wheels, garden tools, old shoes, wire and twine—just about anything could prove useful to building the car, given enough creativity. Gluing, nailing, screwing, and fitting ensued as the big race, held annually over the July Fourth holiday weekend, approached. Mary helped her son refine the vehicle until they possessed something that could roll down the street with its pilot, as the racers were known, in the driver’s seat.
The final step was to smooth, sand, and polish the body of the car to within an inch of its home-built life. All the derby’s matches started at the top of a hill, with no pushing allowed. Levi and his competitors would set off from the Twenty-Fifth Street Bridge in Newport News, virtually the only thing that could pass as a hill in the flat-as-a-pancake coastal terrain. As the pilots released their brakes, they hunched themselves as far down as they could into their vehicle’s cockpit, imploring the gods of gravity to pull them as quickly as possible down the nine-hundred-foot racecourse, hoping to do righteous battle against air resistance, which was as much the foe of the pee-wee racer as it had been for Chuck Yeager. No one knew that better than Levi’s technical consultant, who managed to sneak in the occasional sponsored moment about the wonders of a career in the sciences in the midst of the building fun.
An enduring symbol of American boyhood (girls weren’t allowed to race until the early 1970s), the All-American Soap Box Derby mixed good old American whiz-bang ingenuity with family fun. The competition had started as a Depression-era distraction, a way to create something out of nothing when nothing was what most people had. Over the years, it had taken hold at the grassroots, and in 1960 Levi was one of fifty thousand boys gearing up to compete in local races around the country. Not surprisingly, the peninsula embraced the competition with zeal. Parents who spent their days designing, building, fixing, and operating machines of transportation signed their sons up and gave free rein to their own tinkering instincts. They got to spend time with their children and let the parental mask slip just a bit, giving their offspring a glimpse of the curious child they themselves had once been. Officially, the derby was the boy’s show, from building the car to crouching inside it on race day. Parents (usually fathers; Mary was one of the very rare derby moms) were supposed to stand back and offer only advice, but it was usually hard to tell who savored the engineering project more, the parent or the child.
Like craftsmen in a medieval guild, the NASA engineers hoped that one day their children would decide to take up the mantle of the profession they held so dear. Their workplace was pleasant and safe, their colleagues were smart and interesting, and over the course of the twentieth century, engineers had seen the fruits of their labor transform every aspect of modern life in ways that seemed unimaginable even as they were happening. They wouldn’t get rich, but an engineer’s salary was more than enough to crack into the ranks of the comfortable middle class. So they served as laboratory assistants for science projects and turned the kitchen table into an honors calculus class. They held their offspring captive until the last homework problem was solved correctly, adolescent insolence and tears be damned.
No NASA father had anything on Mary Jackson. Building a soap box derby car was an apprenticeship in engineering, and the earlier a kid got started, she knew, the more likely they were to fall under its spell. She pushed Levi (and his teachers) to allow him to take the most challenging math and science classes he could handle, and she coached him on his science projects. His eighth-grade project, “A Study of Air Flow in Scaled Dimensions,” scored third place in his school’s annual science fair.
“Soapbox what?” some neighbors and Bethel AME parishioners and Girl Scout troop members had asked when Mary told them about her and Levi’s mechanical exploits. The first challenge many blacks faced in participating in something like the All-American Soap Box Derby was finding out about it in the first place. Starting early in the year, Chevrolet placed advertisements in Boys’ Life magazine, the official publication of the Boy Scouts, exhorting youngsters to put in their bid for fun, fame, and adventure by getting their cars in tip-top shape before racing season rolled around in the summer. Levi, who was a member of Bethel AME’s Boy Scout troop, might have read about the derby even if it hadn’t been part of the watercooler conversation at his mother’s office, but the message had a hard time finding its way to less well-connected ears.
Harder than getting the message, perhaps, was acting on it when you got it. Entering the derby was tantamount to believing you had a shot at victory, as much (or more) for the parents as for the racer. The electrified fence of segregation and the centuries of shocks it delivered so effectively circumscribed the lives of American blacks that even after the current was turned off, the idea of climbing over the fence inspired dread. Like the editorial meetings in 1244, like so many competitive situations large and small, national and local, black people frequently disqualified themselves even without the WHITES ONLY sign in view. There was no rule keeping a Negro boy from entering the race, but it took a lot of gumption for him to believe that he might win, and even more to accept a loss as a failure that had nothing to do with his race.
Mary, however, was determined to clamber over every fence she encountered and pull everyone she knew behind her. The deep humanitarianism that was her family inheritance had taught her to see achievement as something that functioned like a bank account, something you drew on when you were in need and made deposits to when you were blessed with a surplus.