Despite its unyielding advocacy of Negro economic empowerment, Hampton Institute’s stance on integration had always been of the go-slow variety, wartime president Malcolm MacLean being a notable exception. Now, with a black president at the helm for the first time, even Hampton succumbed to the zeitgeist of the era. Dorothy Vaughan’s eldest daughter, Ann, who had left Hampton Institute in 1957, returned in the fall of 1959 to finish her degree. The campus she came back to was alive, breathless even, with the possibility of significant and permanent social change. One rumor that spread like wildfire through the network of energized students—a rumor that seemed wholly improbable, but which took root until it was accepted as fact—was that the astronauts were contributing to the students’ organizing activities. The astronauts represented everything that mainstream America held dear—and they’re with us, the students marveled. The very idea, that those buzz-cut middle-American boys were standing, however surreptitiously, with the Negro student activists! The fact that the rumor couldn’t be confirmed did nothing to dampen its power. At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible.
If anyone could bear witness to the long-term impact of persistent action, and also to the strength of the forces opposing change, it was Dorothy Vaughan. Virginia’s governor, Lindsay Almond, capitulated, reopening Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Front Royal schools in 1959 and inching toward integration: eighty-six black students in those districts now attended school with whites. In Prince Edward County, however, segregationists would not be moved: they defunded the entire county school system, including R. R. Moton in Farmville, rather than integrate. No municipality in all of America had ever taken such draconian action. As white parents herded their students into the new segregation academies, the most resourceful black families scrambled to salvage their children’s educations by sending them to live with relatives around the state, some as far afield as North Carolina. Prince Edward’s schools would remain closed from 1959 through 1964, five long and bitter years. Many of the affected children, known as the “Lost Generation,” never made up the missing grades of education. Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth. Dorothy’s friends and former Moton colleagues watched helplessly as their children’s futures were sacrificed in the battle over the future of Virginia’s public schools. Commenting on the situation in 1963, United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy said, “The only places on earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras—and Prince Edward County, Virginia.”
Meanwhile, Langley moved in the opposite direction. When Dorothy Vaughan turned off the lights in the West Area Computing office for the last time, she and the remaining women in the segregated pool were dispatched to the four corners of the laboratory, finally catching up to colleagues who had already found permanent positions in an engineering group. Marjorie Peddrew and Isabelle Mann went to Gas Dynamics, Lorraine Satchell and Arminta Cooke joined Mary Jackson in the Supersonic Tunnels Branch, Hester Lovely and Daisy Alston left for the Twenty-inch Hypersonic Jets Branch, Eunice Smith went to Ground Loads, and Pearl Bassette was assigned to the Eleven-inch Hypersonic Tunnel.
As for the West Computers’ erstwhile leader, Dorothy Vaughan found herself in a new seat in another brand-new building. In 1960, Langley had only just completed Building 1268, a West Side facility housing one of the most advanced computer complexes on the East Coast. Electronic computing had moved from the wings of aeronautical research to the main stage. Accordingly, Langley centralized its computing operations into a group named the Analysis and Computation Division, created to service all the center’s research operations, as well as to provide computing to outside contractors. The ACD organization chart was a snapshot of two decades of change at Langley. Dorothy was reunited with many of her West Computers, but they now worked side by side with East Computing alumni like Sara Bullock and Barbara Weigel.
Perhaps more striking than the racial integration of the female mathematicians, which had been spreading organically throughout Langley for years, was the fact that a group focused on computing now employed increasing numbers of men. The function of computing had been promoted from an all-female service organization with minimal hardware requirements to a top-level division with an eight-figure operating budget; it was starting to look a lot more like a launchpad and a career path to ambitious young men. The room-sized machines were remaking the old models of aeronautical research; their ascendance marked the beginning of an era that promised to be even more momentous than the one ushered in by the flying machine. For better or worse, it also signaled the beginning of the end of computing as women’s work.
Some of the older women at the center, the ones who still relied upon the mechanical calculators, were starting to look as if they were stranded on an island, separated from the mainland by a gulf that grew wider each year. The early 1960s were an inflection point in the history of computing, a dividing line between the time when computers were human and when they were inanimate, when a computing job was handed off to a room full of women sitting at desks topped with $500 mechanical calculating machines and when a computing job was processed by a room-sized computer that cost in excess of $1 million.
Dorothy Vaughan was keenly aware of that undulating invisible line that separated the past from the future. At fifty years old and many years into her second career, she reinvented herself as a computer programmer. Engineers still made the pilgrimage to her desk, asking for her help with their computing. Now, instead of assigning the task to one of her girls, Dorothy made a date with the IBM 704 computer that occupied the better part of an entire room in the basement of Building 1268, the room cooled to polar temperatures to keep the machine’s vacuum tubes from overheating.
In the past, Dorothy would have set up the equations in a data sheet and walked one of her girls through the process of filling it out. At ACD, it was her job to convert the engineers’ equations into the computer’s formula translation language—FORTRAN—by using a special machine to punch holes in 7?"×3?" cards printed with an array of eighty columns, each column displaying the numbers 0 through 9, each space assigned a number, letter, or character. Once punched, each cream-colored card represented one set of FORTRAN instructions.
The longer or more complex the program, the more cards the programmer fed the computer. The machines tapped out at two thousand cards—two thousand lines of instructions. Even modest programs could require a tray of hundreds of the cards, which needed to be fed into the computer in the correct order. Woe to the klutz who dropped a box of cards on the floor. Some programmers tried to forestall disaster by taking a Magic Marker and painting a big diagonal swath on the top surface of a vertical stack of cards, a continuous line from the front corner on the first card to the opposite back corner of the final card, hoping that the tiny dot of color on each would provide the key to reassembling the fumbled cards into the correct order.
As powerful as ACD’s computer was, however, the maestros of Project Mercury would require even more electronic horsepower for what was to come next. At the end of 1960, NASA purchased two IBM 7090s and installed them in a state-of-the-art facility in downtown Washington, DC, managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, a Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA field center opened in 1959 to focus exclusively on space science. The agency set up a third computer, a slightly smaller IBM 709, in a data center in Bermuda. Together the three computers would monitor and analyze all aspects of the spaceflights, from launch to splashdown.