Dorothy Vaughan had always loved to travel, and in retirement she indulged herself, traveling for pleasure across the United States and to Europe. In her eighties she took a trip to Amsterdam with her family. At home, she remained as frugal as she had been during the Depression and the war, never spending when she could save, never discarding what she could salvage.
At some point, some years into her retirement, a woman came to the house, trying to enlist her in a class-action lawsuit over pay discrimination against the women who had worked at Langley. Dorothy sat on her couch and gave the woman a polite hearing, and then said: “They paid me what they said they were going to pay me,” and that was the end of that. She never had been one to dwell on the past. After her retirement party, Dorothy Vaughan never went back to Langley. The photo album, the service awards, and the retirement gifts—all of them she tucked away in the keepsakes box in the back of the closet. The greatest part of her legacy—Christine Darden and the generation of younger women who were standing on the shoulders of the West Computers—was still in the office.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The title of this book is something of a misnomer. The history that has come together in these pages wasn’t so much hidden as unseen—fragments patiently biding their time in footnotes and family anecdotes and musty folders before returning to view. My first thanks are to the historians and archivists who helped me reconstruct this story through its documents: to Colin Fries at the NASA History Office in Washington, DC, Patrick Connelly at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Philadelphia, Meg Hacker at NARA Fort Worth, Kimberly Gentile at the National Personnel Records Center, and Tab Lewis at NARA College Park. Thanks also to Donzella Maupin and Andreese Scott at the Hampton University Archives, and Ellen Hassig Ressmeyer and Janice Young at West Virginia State University’s Drain-Jordan Library.
I’ve been buoyed by the enthusiasm of David Bearinger and Jeanne Siler at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities since the day I walked into their office unannounced, in the middle of an early spring blizzard in 2014. Because of their support, the Human Computer Project, which sprang out of my research for the book, will be able to pick up the baton from Hidden Figures by creating a comprehensive database of all the female mathematicians who worked at the NACA and NASA during the agency’s golden age. Thanks to Doron Weber at the Sloan Foundation, who was willing to take a flyer on a first-time author; Sloan’s support made it possible for me to make recovering this important history a full-time job.
I couldn’t have had a better team to work with at William Morrow. Trish Daly, even though you are off to new ventures, I’ll always be grateful for the dogged way you worked to put Hidden Figures at the top of your list. Rachael Kahan, thank you for your calm guidance in helping me bring this book home. To have a book published is exciting enough; to have it made into a film at the same time is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thanks to my film agent, Jason Richman, at the United Talent Agency, my lawyer, Kirk Schroeder, and especially to Donna Gigliotti, Hidden Figures’ producer, who was able to see a movie in a fifty-five-page book proposal. She’s one of the most gifted professionals I’ve ever met, in any industry.
Nowhere has Hidden Figures received a warmer reception than in my hometown, Hampton, Virginia. My deepest gratitude to Audrey Williams, president of the Hampton Roads Chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), which served as sponsor for the seed stage of the Human Computer Project. Thank you to Mike Cobb and Luci Coltrane of the Hampton History Museum for inviting me to be part of the museum’s speaker series, and to Wythe Holt and Chauncey Brown for their vivid recollections of the early days of life in Hampton, which added wonderful detail and texture to the book’s narrative.
Current and former employees of the Langley Research Center, people too numerous to mention in such a limited space, have supported this project in many ways over the last few years, including Gail Langevin, NASA Langley’s History Liaison. Andrea Bynum invited me to present my research in progress at Langley’s Women’s History Month celebration in March 2014 and has been a tireless supporter of the book ever since. Mary Gainer Hurst, Langley’s recently retired Historic Preservation Officer, is a heroic public historian; thanks to her, thousands of interviews, wind tunnel test logs, photos, personnel documents, org charts, articles, and other primary materials that bear witness to Langley’s extraordinary history are available to the public via the NASA Langley Cultural Resources website and related YouTube channel. So much of the connective tissue of this story came from the untold hours I spent consulting the information she so expertly recovered and curated.
Belinda Adams, Jane Hess, Janet Mackenzie, Sharon Stack, and Donna Speller Turner all shared recollections both of the technical work they were involved in and of the changing opportunities for women at Langley over the years. Harold Beck and Jerry Woodfill entertained my technical questions regarding the months leading up to John Glenn’s orbital flight and the crisis of Apollo 13, respectively. My interview with engineer Thomas Byrdsong, who reminisced about being one of Langley’s first black male engineers, is a bittersweet memory because it occurred less than a month before he passed away.
This book would not have been possible without the cooperation and support of the women who lived the history, and their friends, families, and colleagues. Bonnie Kathaleen Land, my former Sunday School teacher, has the distinction of being the very first person I interviewed for this book, in 2010; she passed away in 2012 at ninety-six years old. Thanks to Ellen Strother, Wanda Jackson, and Janice “Jay” Johnson for the marvelous tales of Mary Jackson’s rich and active life outside the office.
Though Gloria Rhodes Champine’s story appears only in the epilogue, there are many chapters in the book that bear her fingerprints. Her understanding of Langley’s airplanes, its culture, and its people have been indispensable to helping me tell this story. Christine Darden is at once enormously talented and disarmingly modest, and it’s a great source of pride that I’ve learned enough about aerodynamics over the course of this research to appreciate the scale of her achievements. Thanks to both of them for the wisdom and encouragement they have given me since Hidden Figures’ beginning.
Ann Vaughan Hammond, Leonard Vaughan, and Kenneth Vaughan were instrumental in helping me reconstruct the details of their mother, Dorothy Vaughan’s, early life and the trajectory that brought her to Langley. I thank them for allowing me to get to know her through their eyes.
Jim Johnson and his stories of serving in the Korean War were firsthand evidence of the enduring power of the Double V. Joylette Goble Hylick and Katherine Goble Moore have my utmost admiration for all they have done to preserve the legacy of their mother and the other women whose talents formed the basis for the most rewarding work I’ve ever done.