Among the black women watching the television, far from Mission Control, tucked away at a resort in the Poconos, Katherine Johnson divided her attention between the weekend leadership conference being held by her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and the fortunes of the Apollo 11 astronauts on their way to becoming the three most solitary beings in the history of humanity. As she watched the delicate dance of physics that propelled the Apollo capsule forward toward the Moon, her mind’s eye superimposed equations and numbers upon each stage of the craft’s journey, from launch to Earth orbit, from translunar injection to lunar orbit.
The intensity of the last few days at Langley had been matched only by the extreme heat that had enveloped the peninsula. It was nearly 96 degrees in Hampton that Saturday morning in July 1969 when Katherine and a car full of sorority members hit the road for the Poconos. It had been too hot to think, too hot to sleep, too hot to do anything except seek refuge anywhere you could find it, until the temperature ticked back down from intolerable to just bearable. The weekend escape had offered a break from both office and climate, each mile north taking her farther away from the steam heat that had held the area hostage for the last few days. Passing Washington, DC, she could breathe a little easier; by the time they crossed from Maryland into the foothills of Pennsylvania, the fever had broken, the air outside was crisper, the sky bluer and higher, the milder climate a reminder of her native West Virginia.
The Hillside Inn, perched on a grassy rise like an oversized farmhouse, was the perfect setting for the flock of pink-and-green-clad women who had convened for a weekend of planning and friendship. The sorority had tapped the most promising young women from collegiate chapters around the country so that they might learn from seasoned members like Katherine how best to organize the service projects that were at the core of their mission and activity. They talked about fundraisers for scholarships to black colleges, literacy campaigns, and voter registration drives. The kind of projects undertaken by the chapters around the country ranged from modest and one-off to sophisticated operations: one AKA chapter in Ohio ran a full-time job training center in one of the city’s black communities.
The women doubled and tripled up in Hillside’s thirty-three rooms, taking in the expanse of green and mountain views that were part of the region’s iconic appeal. The inn’s rustic luxury fulfilled the sorority’s need for a quiet, reflective setting for their meeting. But it also boosted their racial pride: the Hillside Inn was the only resort in the Poconos with black owners. Albert Murray, a successful New York lawyer, had bought the land with his Jewish business partner in 1954. A year later the partner died, and Murray and his wife, Odetta, decided to use the property for a hotel. At the time, most resorts in the Poconos barred Negroes and even Jews, maintaining policies every bit as inflexible as the legal segregation of the South. The Hillside welcomed all guests, and most particularly wanted to provide upwardly mobile blacks with the same kind of vacation experience their white counterparts enjoyed.
The Hillside advertised in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Pittsburgh Courier, and Ebony; with its swimming pool and expansive 109-acre estate, it delivered on its promise of understated luxury. And of course, it distinguished itself with the things that the black sororities and social clubs and family reunions making the pilgrimages up Route 609 never would have found at the other retreats, even if they’d managed to get past the bellman—delights like the hearty southern-style home cooking. Three times a day, Katherine and her sorors sat next to each other family style in the inn’s dining room, laughing and talking and debating over grits for breakfast, ribs and golden-fried chicken for lunch and dinner, and sweet potato pie and peach cobbler for dessert. The youngsters who staffed the dining room—all of them students at black colleges in the South, a conscious choice on the part of the Murrays—were constantly exposed to Hillside’s professional class of patrons, examples in the flesh of what they might aspire to in their own lives.
Katherine loved the exacting standards of the women in the sorority; their shared desire to do things of value for other people, their fierce commitment to cultivate and display the best of the black community, served to deepen their personal bonds. They’d had to learn to work together to accomplish their goals, something that had served Katherine and the rest of the women well in their careers. The sorority had been a constant in her life since her days as a fifteen-year-old freshman at West Virginia State; she had spent more weekends than she could remember attending sorority activities or meetings.
Katherine and the other women relaxed in each other’s company in the intimate setting, enjoying it even more for the many years that the experience had been denied them. It was not yet so long ago since Katherine’s father, Joshua, and Dorothy Vaughan’s husband, Howard, had worked together, attending to the needs of the jet set at the Greenbrier, not so many summers past since Katherine herself had staffed the grand hotel’s antiques store and served as a private maid to wealthy guests. It was just yesterday, it seemed, that she was the precocious adolescent learning to hold her own with the kitchen’s French chef and making conversation with the president’s brother and the other lofty guests who dropped in on the resort as part of their nomadic social circuit.
Those well-heeled people had all responded to something in the young bespectacled woman, something that gave them the feeling that she had a great future. Who among them would have ever imagined, however, that Katherine’s future, and their country’s future, and the future, as imagined by the likes of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, would converge to be one and the same? Yet four days earlier, on July 16, 1969, fifty-year-old Katherine Johnson had been part of that group of insiders when the three-hundred-foot Saturn V rocket boosted the Apollo 11 craft and its three human occupants down the road to history.
Mission Control set the candle on fire at 9:37 a.m., early enough for the East Coast brain busters to take in the big event and get to work, then spend the rest of the day getting the color commentary. If the space shots hadn’t exactly become commonplace since Alan Shepard’s first foray, they happened often enough for talking heads like CBS’s Walter Cronkite to wield the jargon of max Q and apogee and trans-Earth injection with the same nonchalance as the flight operations crew in the trenches of Mission Control. Still, the broadcasters knew—everyone in the audience knew—that even with twenty-six manned flights under NASA’s belt, this was different, and they struggled to come up with superlatives to capture the moment. Cronkite gushed unabashedly, putting the magnitude into the context of the great machines of war and transportation that had transformed the American century: the mighty Saturn V rocket consumed the equivalent of ninety-eight railroad cars’ worth of fuel; it propelled a craft that weighed as much as a nuclear submarine with the equivalent thrust of 543 fighter jets. The United States would spend $24 billion on Apollo, in order to plunge the sword into the heart of the Soviet Union’s ambitions in space.