The revelation spurred her to action. Rather than raise the issue with her boss, Christine went directly to the division chief—her boss’s boss’s boss, none other than John Becker, Langley’s éminence grise, now on the cusp of retirement.
“Why is it that men get placed into engineering groups while women are sent to the computing pools?” Christine asked him. “Well, nobody’s ever complained,” he answered. “The women seem to be happy doing that, so that’s just what they do.” Becker was a man from another era. His wife, Rowena Becker, had been an “excellent mathematician”—the two met during the war, in the eight-foot tunnel—but after marrying she made the decision to leave Langley to become a full-time wife and mother. His frame of reference for working women and their expectations was like that of most men of his generation. But just as Becker had been willing to admit he was wrong when challenged by Mary Jackson in the 1950s, he rose to meet Christine Darden’s challenge twenty years later. Two weeks after Christine walked into John Becker’s office, she was assigned to a group working on sonic boom research.
Christine’s new boss, David Fetterman, was a self-described “wing man” who had decided to stay in aeronautics even as others were moving to space. He was happy working on his research independently and assumed that his new charge felt the same way. So he handed Christine a fly-or-fail research assignment: she was to take the industry standard algorithm used to minimize sonic boom for a given airplane configuration (developed by Cornell researchers Richard Seabass and Albert George) and write a FORTRAN program based on it. It was work at aeronautics’ leading edge, a computational fluid dynamics project that might help to mitigate the sonic boom that had made commercial supersonic flight so unpalatable.
It took three years of work, but the results were published in a 1975 paper entitled “Minimization of Sonic-Boom Parameters in Real and Isothermal Atmospheres.” Christine was the sole author. The code she wrote as an aspiring engineer is still the core of sonic boom minimization programs that aerodynamicists use today. It was an important contribution and a career-making achievement, but the road from that breakthrough moment to becoming an internationally recognized sonic boom expert with sixty technical publications and presentations under her belt and a member of NASA’s Senior Executive Service was still not direct.
In 1973, Christine took a computer programming course through Langley’s partnership with George Washington University. She had excelled at Hampton Institute, powered through her master’s degree at Virginia State, and finally landed a position with an engineering group at NASA, but the class of eight students—seven white and one black, seven men and one woman—was the first time she had been in an integrated school setting. She was intimidated at first, but high marks in the class made her decide to pursue a doctorate. Getting approval to enroll in the program took some doing. An upper-level supervisor denied her initial request. Even after she got the approval, she still was “juggling the duties of Girl Scout mom, Sunday school teacher, trips to music lessons, and homemaker,” for her two daughters in addition to her full-time work at Langley.
The doctorate in mechanical engineering took ten years. It was bestowed upon her forty years after the first West Computers walked into Langley. Christine’s success was supported by the work of the women who had come before her, her research based on the uncountable number of numbers that had passed through their hands and minds. Even with two of the finest credentials in the field to her name—a PhD and a major research contribution—it would take one more push before Langley acknowledged Christine Darden with the promotion that matched her accomplishments.
Gloria Champine admired Christine Darden’s intelligence and the dogged way she had pursued her PhD. From her perch in the equal opportunity office, she knew that women at the center—even at the top levels—were still being leapfrogged by men, and Christine was one of them. By the mid-1980s, Christine had moved up to GS-13, but even with the doctorate, she was having problems breaking into GS-14. On the other hand, a white male engineer who had started at the same time, with similar quality performance reviews, had already hit the GS-15 level. Gloria knew the Langley way: “Present your case, build it, sell it so they believe it.” She created a bar chart and showed it to the head of her directorate—a manager one level down from the top of Langley—who was shocked at the disparity. With Gloria’s efforts, the promotion came, and after it, the renown and the mobility for Christine that should come to people with such outstanding abilities. It was one of Gloria’s proudest moments. Christine had already done the work; Langley just needed someone who could help it see the hidden figures.
“What I changed, I could; what I couldn’t, I endured,” Dorothy Vaughan told historian Beverly Golemba in 1992. Dorothy retired in 1971 after twenty-eight years of service. The world had changed dramatically since the day she had taken the bus from Farmville to the war boomtown, but not quite enough to fulfill her last career ambitions. The Green Book landed on Dorothy’s desk just two days after her sixtieth birthday. Her name was in the book, but it was not where she hoped it would be.
“It involved a promotion,” Dorothy’s daughter, Ann Vaughan Hammond, told me, though to exactly what, her mother never said. Dorothy played it close to the vest, giving her family only the barest sketch of her final disappointment. In all likelihood, she had expected to serve out her last few years as a section head, regaining the title she had held from 1951 through 1958. What a triumph it would have been to return to management, but as the head of a section that employed both men and women, black and white. The section head position was given to Roger Butler, a white man, who also held the post of branch chief. Sara Bullock, the East Computer who had been put in charge of the group programming the Bell computer back in 1947, was appointed head of one of the branch’s four sections. Bullock was one of the rare female supervisors, particularly outside of administration. In 1971, there were still no female branch chiefs, no female division chiefs, no female directors at Langley.
And for the first time in almost three decades, no Dorothy Vaughan. Dorothy Vaughan’s time as a supervisor back in the 1950s was relatively brief, but during those years she had midwifed many careers. Her name never appeared on a single research report, but she had contributed, directly or indirectly, to scores of them. Only reluctantly did she agree to a retirement party; she never liked it when people made a fuss. She discouraged her family from coming and found a ride (despite all her years in automobile-dependent Virginia, she never did learn to drive). Many of her new colleagues turned out to celebrate her, including her boss, Roger Butler. Of course, many of her old colleagues came too. Once upon a time they were girls who had come to Langley expecting a six-month war job; now they were older women with decades of membership in an elite scientific club. At one point in the evening, Lessie Hunter, Willianna Smith, and other West Computers gathered around their former supervisor for a picture, which was published the next week in the Langley Researcher. It was perhaps the only photographic evidence of the story that began in May 1943 with the Band of Sisters in the Warehouse Building. Though Langley was meticulous about documenting its employees over the years, individually and in groups, I have yet to stumble upon another Langley photo of the West Computing section.