Mary Jackson could see the air moving around the racer just as clearly as if she were looking at a Schlieren photograph taken in a wind tunnel. Levi’s car was well made; the only adjustment it required between heats was “a drop of oil on each wheel bearing.” Mary and Levi Sr. and four-year-old Carolyn held their breath as Levi Jr. got into position for the final heat. It seemed like an eternity, but at the end, Mary and Levi Sr. shouted in delight: their son had finished first, saving his best time for the heat that mattered most. Wearing a black-and-white crash helmet and the official race T-shirt, Levi Jr. sailed across the line at a relatively blazing seventeen miles per hour. His family fell upon him in a crush of hugs and celebration. To the inquiring and surprised local reporters who came to hear from the winner of the Virginia Peninsula Soap Box Derby, Levi Jackson confided the secret of his victory: the slimness of his machine, which helped to lower the wind resistance. What do you want to be when you grow up? the Norfolk Journal and Guide reporter must have asked. “I want to be an engineer like my mother,” Levi said.
The spoils of the win were eye-popping: a golden trophy, a brand-new bicycle, and a spot at the national All-American Soap Box Derby in Akron, Ohio, as the official representative of the Virginia Peninsula. There Levi would face off against pilots from around the country, in front of seventy-five thousand fans, on a track where the racers could dash along at speeds exceeding thirty miles per hour. There he would be the only occupant of his aerodynamic buggy, but he’d have a community of people riding along on his shoulder. Levi Jackson was the “first colored boy in history” to win the peninsula’s soap box derby. Virtually the moment he crossed the finish line, the donations started rolling in from the Bachelor-Benedicts, the Phoebus Elks, the Beau Brummell Social Club, the Hampton Women’s Service League, half a dozen local black-owned businesses, and each of Hampton’s three largest black churches to help defray the costs of the local hero’s trip to Ohio. Another Black First for the books! If a black kid could take home the soap box derby trophy, what else might be possible?
Achievement through hard work, social progress through science, possibility through belief . . . when Levi reached out and took hold of the first-place trophy, Mary witnessed, in one proud and emotional moment, the embodiment of so much that she held dear. Of course, Mary also knew that her son was a ringer; the two of them had been building to win. Brain busters’ kids were supposed to come out on top in a race like this, even if the brain buster was a woman, or black, or both. Being part of a Black First was a powerful symbol, she knew just as well as anyone, and she embraced her son’s achievement with delight. But she also knew that the best thing about breaking a barrier was that it would never have to be broken again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Degrees of Freedom
In February 1960, as NASA pushed forward with reliability tests on the Mercury capsule, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical, a black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the segregated lunch counter in the town’s Woolworth’s and refused to move until they were served. The following day, the “Greensboro Four” had become a group of twenty activists. On the third day, sixty students converged upon the Woolworth’s, and by the fourth, three hundred had joined the demonstration. Participating were students from Bennett College, an all-black women’s college in Greensboro, as well as white students from Guilford College and the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina. Within a week, the protests, inspired by the nonviolent actions of India’s Mahatma Gandhi, spread to other cities in North Carolina, and then crossed the borders into Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. The students started calling their protests “sit-downs” or “sit-ins.” The prison sentences that often attended their activism did nothing to quell their ardor. “Dear Mom and Dad: I am writing this letter tonight from a cell in the Greensboro jail. I was arrested this afternoon when I went into a lily-white lunch room and sat down . . .” wrote a young Portsmouth woman who attended North Carolina A&T. Like a match on dry kindling, the sit-ins set aflame Negroes’ smoldering, long-deferred dream of equality with a speed and intensity that took even the black community by surprise.
Hampton Institute was the first school outside of North Carolina to organize a sit-in. On the campus, many students had come into contact with one of the early icons of a mobilization that seemed to be gaining national momentum. Five years earlier, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress and NAACP member, refused to yield her seat on a city bus to a white man, galvanizing the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy. A ferocious backlash against Parks ensued: she received death threats, and both she and her husband, Raymond, were blacklisted from employment in Montgomery. The president of Hampton Institute reached out to Parks, offering her a job as a hostess at the university’s faculty dining room, the Holly Tree Inn. Parks accepted, arriving on campus in 1957 and working at the restaurant into 1958.
When the sit-ins came to Hampton, Christine Darden was an eighteen-year-old Hampton Institute junior carrying a double course load. Her father had insisted that she earn a teaching certificate as a backup plan for her pursuit of a career in the sciences. Christine found herself captivated by the incipient activist movement, and despite carrying a full semester of courses in math and physics and extra classes in teacher education, she found time to join the protests, which eventually swelled into marches of more than seven hundred. Students walked across the Queen Street Bridge to downtown Hampton and converged on the lunch counters at Woolworth’s and Wornom’s, the local drug store. They quietly occupied the stores, some sitting at tables reading and working on homework assignments, until the owners shut down their establishments in the middle of the afternoon. The next month, five hundred students staged a peaceful protest through downtown Hampton. An outspoken group of thirteen movement leaders held a press conference with local newspapers. “We want to be treated as American citizens,” they told the reporters. “If this means integration in all areas of life, then that is what we want.”
Christine also decided to join the voter registration drives organized at Hampton, walking door-to-door in black neighborhoods along Hampton’s Shell Road and Rip Rap Road, imploring black voters to register in time to make their voices heard in the November 1960 presidential showdown between the Republican, Vice President Richard Nixon, and the Democrat, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.