Mary Jackson was a tireless promoter of science and engineering as a meaningful and stable career choice. She made so many speeches at local schools that one might have thought she was running for office: Thorpe and Sprately Junior High Schools, Carver and Huntington High Schools, Hampton Institute, Virginia Wesleyan, a small college in Norfolk. At the King Street Community Center, where Mary had worked as the USO secretary during World War II, she started an after-school science club for junior and senior high school students. She helped the students build a smoke tunnel and conduct experiments, and taught them how to use the tool they created to observe the airflow over a variety of airfoils. “We have to do something like this to get them interested in science,” Mary commented in a 1976 article in the employee newsletter Langley Researcher, which profiled her for being honored as the center’s Volunteer of the Year. “Many times, when children enter school they shun mathematics and science during the years when they should be learning the basics.”
In 1979, Mary Jackson organized the retirement party for Kazimierz Czarnecki, who was leaving government service after forty years. Two years prior, the facility that had been the bedrock of most of their work—the four-by-four-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, the third member of Mary and Kaz’s partnership—had come to the end of its service at Langley as well. In 1977, the tunnel that had been state-of-the-art technology when it began operations in 1947 was razed to make way for the National Transonic Facility, a 1.2 Mach, $85 million tunnel that was powered by cryogenic nitrogen.
It was a moment for Mary to reflect on her career. She traveled regularly to make presentations at industry conferences, and by the end of the 1970s she had twelve authored or coauthored papers to her name. She had progressed from computer to mathematician to engineer, and in 1968 had been promoted to the level of GS-12. The budget cuts and RIFs of the 1970s made promotions harder to come by, however, and the next rung on the ladder for Mary Jackson—GS-13—was starting to look distant. GS-13 was a significant threshold, with few women in Langley at that grade in the mid-1970s. This was a contrast with Goddard, where both Dorothy Hoover and Melba Roy had hit the GS-13 mark by 1962. In 1972, NASA’s agencywide goal was “to place a woman in at least one of out of every five vacancies filled at levels GS-13 through GS-15.” The numbers of women, professional and administrative, had grown along with Langley’s general level of employment, but women were still a scarcity in high-level technical positions and in management. Even seemingly small barriers conspired to keep larger numbers of women from advancing: until 1967, the Langley Field golf course—as in other workplaces, a prime location for networking—restricted women to playing during the workday, rather than allowing them to golf alongside men after work.
In 1979, Mary Jackson was fifty-eight years old and coming to the conclusion that she had probably hit the glass ceiling. It would have been easy for her to reap the benefits of seniority, reducing her workload and taking a long coast toward retirement. Even if the next promotion eluded her, she still had the prestige of being an engineer and the satisfaction of knowing how hard she had worked to arrive at this point. But a position opened up in the Human Resources Division, and Mary’s name was floated to fill it: Federal Women’s Program Manager, charged with pushing for the advancement of all of the women at the center. To relinquish her hard-won title of engineer, at an organization that was created and run by engineers, was no easy choice.
Mary’s career frustration wasn’t unique, she knew. When she looked around, she saw many women and minorities at Langley trapped in the sticky middle grades, unable to rise to the level that their ability would otherwise merit. Did Langley really need one more GS-12 aeronautical engineer, even if the seat was occupied by a black woman? Or would the center be better served by someone who could help make way for legions of employees, at every level and from every background, liberated to give their best to their work? Mary Jackson wasn’t wired to take the easy road or be satisfied with the status quo. If the decision wasn’t simple, it was certainly clear. Stepping off the engineering track wasn’t a sacrifice if it allowed her to act on her principles. Taking a demotion from GS-12 to GS-11 in order to accept the less-prestigious position, Mary Jackson threw herself in 1979 into her new role as the center’s Federal Women’s Program Manager.
Helping girls and women advance was at the core of Mary’s humanitarian spirit; she saw the relationships between women as a natural way to bridge racial differences. She had been instrumental in bringing the separate regional white and black Girl Scout Councils together into a unified service organization for all girls in southeastern Virginia. In 1972, Mary volunteered as an equal opportunity employment counselor, and in 1973 she joined Langley’s Federal Women’s Program Advisory Committee. Both programs had been created in the 1960s to make sure that the federal government was hiring and promoting without differentiation by race, gender, or national identity. At Langley, as in other federal workplaces, the programs had a beneficial secondary effect: they gave female and minority employees a formalized way to make connections and boosted their centerwide visibility. Mary had always been a natural networker, bringing people together to help one another and to marshal their support for the many causes that were dear to her heart. She became an energetic member of a group of Langley women who were determined to push for opportunities for women of all colors at NASA, clearing the way for women to take their place as equals alongside men in science and engineering jobs, and also looking for ways to help secretaries and clerical employees to make the leap into technical jobs and program management. Accepting the position as the Federal Women’s Program Manager was a way of uniting twenty-eight years of work at Langley with a lifetime commitment to equality for all.
One of the most difficult aspects of writing a book is knowing that there’s not enough space or time to give voice to all the incredible people you meet along the way. The original draft of Hidden Figures had a final section portraying in detail how Mary Jackson and her fellow travelers went to all lengths in the 1970s and 1980s to extinguish the lingering traces of what NASA historian Sylvia Fries called the “fantasy that men were uniquely gifted to be engineers.” Like Mary, the final narrative stepped away from the daily routines of research to follow the women of Langley as they formed alliances and used all the ingenuity they brought to engineering to change the face of the center’s workforce. Making the decision to trim this section was difficult; while it allowed for the chance to spend more time with Dorothy, Mary, and Katherine in the golden age of aeronautics and space, it meant ending the book before Mary’s decision to leave engineering for Human Resources. It also meant saying good-bye to one of my favorite “characters” in this sweeping drama, who has become a treasured friend in real life: Gloria Champine. The relationship between Gloria and Mary, which grew out of Mary’s decision to sacrifice her engineering career for the future career prospects of other women, is one of the most poignant of all the stories I uncovered in the research.