Against the odds and contrary to their expectation when they first walked through the doors at Langley, the women of West Computing had managed to turn their wartime service into lasting and meaningful careers. By the standards of their parents and grandparents, and compared to many of their contemporaries, they had reached the mountaintop. Despite their progress, however, there was still work left to do at Langley. Breaking out of the paraprofessional status of computer or math aide presented a challenge for all women, more so for the black women. Of all the black employees working in research at Langley in the early 1960s, there were still only five categorized as engineers and sixteen with the title of mathematician. In a letter to NASA administrator James Webb, Langley’s director, Floyd Thompson, lamented that “very few Negroes” were applying for open science and engineering positions at the laboratory. “There is no doubt that one of the reasons they do not apply is that they do not believe that the living conditions in the area would be favorable to them because the Langley Research Center, which is completely integrated, is situated in a community where social segregation based on color is still practiced to a certain extent.”
With an all-out need for technical expertise to feed the space program, and with continued pressure from the federal government to remove race-based barriers in its organization, Langley redoubled its recruitment efforts, casting a wider net at black colleges that had turned out generations of black math and science graduates, like Hampton Institute, Virginia State University in Petersburg and its branch campus in Norfolk, North Carolina A&T, and other schools in nearby states. Many in the generation of Negro students who came of age in a decade defined by Brown v. Board of Education and Sputnik—the ones who in the future would be known as the civil rights generation—were drawn into the engineering profession for the “economic and social mobility” that was the result of the national demand for technical skills. Most of them were southerners; for them, there was no need to adjust to living conditions that they had known all their lives. In the mid-1960s, with “dreams of working at NASA,” greater numbers of black college students found their way to Langley. Many of them were taken under the protective wing of Mary Jackson, who, like an ambassador, helped the recruits find places to live and settle into their jobs. She and Levi opened their house to them if they needed a home-cooked meal, or simply a place to go when they felt homesick. Mary and the other black employees at Langley tended the new recruits as carefully and lovingly as if they were a garden. Unlike the women who started in West Computing after years of teaching, the new generation was coming to research early in their careers—early enough that they’d have time to stretch out and see where their talent might take them.
One Sunday in 1967, after services at Carver Presbyterian Church, Katherine Johnson spied a new face in the crowd, a young woman who had come to the church with her husband and two young daughters. Always among the first to welcome new parishioners, Katherine strode forward and offered her hand in welcome. “I’m Katherine Johnson,” she said. “Yes, I know,” said Christine Darden, “you’re Joylette’s mother.” Though she hadn’t seen her for many years, Christine had met Katherine once at an AKA sorority barbecue hosted at the Johnsons’ home.
Christine hadn’t set out to find a job in aeronautical research. In the spring of 1967, as she ticked off the days to graduation from her master’s degree program at Virginia State University, she had visited the school’s placement office in order to apply for professor positions at Hampton Institute and Norfolk State. “We wish you’d been here yesterday,” said the placement officer, “because NASA was interviewing.” The woman handed Christine an application for federal employment. “Fill this out and bring it back tomorrow.”
Christine’s application was received enthusiastically; a follow-up phone call from Langley’s Personnel Department turned into a day of interviews and then a job offer as a data analyst in the Reentry Physics branch. She reported first to former East Computer Ruby Rainey, then to former West Computer Sue Wilder. Christine commuted from Portsmouth for a short time before moving her family to Hampton after Sue Wilder tipped her off to a house for rent in her neighborhood. Once on the peninsula, Christine saw Katherine Johnson and many of the other former West Computers on a regular basis. They hosted card parties and invited her along, introducing her to the black community in Hampton and Newport News. Despite spending four years at Hampton Institute, she had rarely left the campus and came to the city as a virtual stranger. The network of older women helped her settle quickly in her new town.
Katherine Johnson invited Christine to join the choir at Carver. If Katherine and Eunice Smith took time off work to sing for a funeral at the church, Christine often came along. Christine also ran into Katherine at local sorority activities. For many years, Katherine and Eunice Smith traded off serving as president and vice president of AKA’s Newport News chapter, overseeing a busy schedule of events like the organization’s annual picnic and the many scholarship fund-raisers that were a core part of the sorority’s mission. Katherine Johnson was involved in so many civic and social associations—the Peninsula League of Women, which hosted an annual debutante ball for young black women; the Altruist Club, a middle-class social organization—that folks came to expect to see her broad smile and firm handshake wherever the professional set of the black community gathered. Even the brainy fellas in the office at 1244 knew that when the CIAA tournament came to town—the premier basketball event for black colleges—Katherine’s desk would be empty, as she never missed her annual courtside date with Eunice Smith, the two rabid hoops fans having the time of their lives cheering for their favorites.
Christine Darden and Katherine Johnson got to know each other well outside the office, but they never had the chance to work together. Christine visited Katherine in her office a couple of times, but it would be years before Christine knew more about the full scope of her friend’s mother’s work. The press surrounding Katherine Johnson’s role in John Glenn’s flight had made her something of a celebrity in the local community and among the small national network of black engineers and scientists, but she remained modest about her work. “Well, I’m just doing my job,” she would say, implying and I’m assuming that you are, too.
Of course, while Katherine took the accolades in stride, she never took the work for granted. Not a morning dawned that she didn’t wake up eager to get to the office. The passion that she had for her job was a gift, one that few people ever experienced. That did make her special, she understood, and it bonded her to the engineers at work as strongly as social and charity activities bonded her to the women in her sorority. Together they shared the secret language of pericynthion altitudes and orbital planes and lunar equators. They experienced the indescribable joy of seeing their endeavors coalesce with those of the hundreds of thousands of other people now involved in the space program, the collective effort so much greater than the sum of the individual parts that it began to feel like a separate being. They also grieved together when all their best-laid plans were destroyed in the February 1967 electrical fire on board the Apollo 1 command module, which was on the launchpad in Cape Canaveral for testing. Fire flashed through the interior of the craft, and the three astronauts inside—Ed White, Roger Chaffee, and Gus Grissom of the Mercury Seven—perished instantly.