Langley, full of talented people with varied interests, was a bonanza of recruits for her many volunteer activities. Coworkers got used to finding Mary standing quietly at their desks, enlisting them in her latest attempt to apply the engineer’s values of discipline, order, and progress to the social sphere. Girls, she believed, needed particular attention; it wasn’t lost on her that the derby, while open to black boys, would have rejected her daughter’s application because of her gender. Mary’s promotion to engineer gave her an unusual vantage point. Despite the relatively large group of women now working at the center, most female technical professionals, black and white—even someone as gifted as Katherine Johnson—were classified as mathematicians or computers, ranked below engineers and paid less, even if they were doing the same work.
Mary made common cause with the black employees working at Langley and at other places in the industry. She and Katherine Johnson and many others were core members of the National Technical Association, the professional organization for black engineers and scientists. Mary made every effort to bring students from Hampton’s public schools and from Hampton Institute into the Langley facilities for tours, to get an up-close and personal look at engineers at work. She organized an on-site seminar for career counselors at Hampton Institute so that they might better steer their students into job opportunities at Langley. If she got word that Langley was hiring a new black employee, she went out of her way to make phone calls to find him or her a place to live, just as she had done when she was secretary of the King Street USO.
But Mary also cultivated allies among the white women she worked with. Emma Jean Landrum, another member of Langley’s tiny engineering sisterhood, sat a couple of desks away from Mary in the Four-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel office. Emma Jean was valedictorian of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s class of 1946, working her way through school serving meals in the dining hall and grading papers for professors. Like so many of the women at Langley, Emma Jean had been recruited by Virginia Tucker. In the years since, Emma Jean had produced several research reports as a part of the Unitary Plan Tunnel team; she then transferred to the Four-foot SPT office, where she became another of Kaz Czarnecki’s frequent collaborators. She, like Mary Jackson, had become an engineer in 1958.
When Mary asked Emma Jean to participate in a career panel in 1962, organized by the local chapter of the National Council of Negro Women, she readily agreed. An all-black group of junior high school girls paid close attention to Mary and Emma Jean’s joint lecture, entitled “The Aspects of Engineering for Women.” Afterward, Emma Jean entertained the girls with a slideshow from a trip she had recently taken to Paris and London. Their appearance together in front of the group—Mary, petite and black, and Emma, white and nearly a foot taller—made as powerful a statement on the possibilities of the engineering field as their actual presentation. Not only did the girls receive firsthand evidence that women could succeed in a traditionally male field; in Mary and Emma’s collaboration, they saw that it was possible for a white workplace to embrace a woman who looked like them.
Serving as the leader of Girl Scout Troop No. 60, now one of the largest minority troops on the peninsula, was always at the top of Mary’s list of volunteer activities. However, she was becoming impatient with the segregation that mandated a separate council for black scouts, and she began campaigning for one organization overseeing all the scouts. When nominations circulated to fill Virginia’s two slots for the Girl Scouts’ national conclave in Cody, Wyoming, Mary lobbied to send her young assistant troop leader Janice Johnson, who had developed into a capable right hand and a leader in her own right. This would be Janice’s first time in an integrated setting—her first time away from her hometown, in fact—but Mary believed she would be up for the challenge and find it an invaluable experience.
Mary also knew that a native of a place so flat it was practically underwater would need a leg up before hiking for days in the rarefied altitude of the Wyoming mountains. So Mary enlisted the help of Helen Mulcahy, a former East Computer who had transferred to Langley’s technical editing department. Mary asked Helen, an aficionado of the outdoors, to take Janice trekking with a full backpack, first on Buckroe Beach, then up into Virginia’s Shenandoah mountains. It wasn’t exactly the most rigorous training for an excursion at five thousand feet, and Janice didn’t earn any badges for her hiking, but she held her own in the camp and returned with tales for her young charges and a head full of dreams of a life beyond her Tidewater home.
With each passing year, it seemed that the work Mary loved and the community service that gave her life meaning were becoming one and the same. She earned her engineering title through hard work, talent, and drive, but the opportunity to fight for it was made possible by the work of the people who had come before her. Dorothy Vaughan had had a positive impact on her career and on the phenomenon-in-waiting that was Katherine Johnson. Dorothy Hoover had shown that a black woman was capable of the highest level of theoretical aeronautical research. Pearl Young, Virginia Tucker, Kitty Joyner—Mary stood on those white women’s shoulders too. Each one had cracked the hole in the wall a little wider, allowing the next talent to come through. And now that Mary had walked through, she was going to open the wall as wide as possible for the people coming behind her.
On Saturday morning, July 3, an enthusiastic crowd of four thousand people crowded along both sides of Twenty-Fifth Street in Newport News, kicking off their Fourth of July holiday weekend. The weather was Virginia summer at its best: clear, warm, just enough of a breeze to keep the crowd from overheating, not too breezy to interfere with the outcome of the peninsula’s tenth annual soap box derby. Contestants for the first heat of the day wheeled their vehicles to the starting line at the summit of the Twenty-Fifth Street Bridge. Everything receded into the distance as the pilots settled into their cars—the view of the C&O piers and the shipyard below, the sound of the energetic crowd, the faces of family and friends who had come to cheer them on—everything except the feel of the vehicle confining their gangly limbs and the desire to be the first car to cross the finish line. Officials weighed and inspected each car and then held a lottery to determine the positions in the first heat. At the crack of the starter’s pistol, the pint-sized pilots released their brakes, hunched down into their homemade roadsters, and willed their cars down the hill. The race was an all-day affair, heat upon heat of anxious and eager adolescent boys soldiering on through wobbly wheels, broken axles, driver error, parental disappointment, and photo finishes.