Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. Margot Shetterly Lee

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      Dorothy Vaughan arrived in Newport News on a Thursday and started work at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory the following Monday. The personnel department maintained a file of available housing for new employees, carefully segmented by race to “establish congenial connections” and “avoid embarrassment.” Five dollars a week got Dorothy a place to lay her head, two meals a day, and the kind attentions of Frederick and Annie Lucy, a black couple in their sixties. The Lucys owned a grocery store and opened their spacious home, which was located on the periphery of the Newsome Park development, to boarders. A larger version of what Dorothy had left behind, the East End was populated by stable Negro families in well-maintained homes, thriving local businesses, and a growing middle class, many of them shipyard workers whose tenure predated the boom. On the corner of the Lucys’ block, a pharmacist had purchased a lot with plans to open the city’s first Negro pharmacy. There was even a brand-new hospital nearby: Whittaker Memorial opened earlier in 1943, organized by black doctors and constructed by black architects.

      With husband and children now far away, her living space shrunk from a spacious house to a single room, her suitcase now her closet, Dorothy’s daily existence was reduced to its simplest elements. The few days of lead time were just enough to scope out the bare essentials of her new life: the location of the nearest AME church, mealtimes at the Lucy home, and transportation to work.

      City buses and trolleys circulated from morning till night, swelling with riders before the orange and pink of dawn, as employees punching out from the graveyard shift met early birds just starting their day. Nowhere was the war strain more evident than in the intimate crowds of strangers who pushed up against one another in the vehicles making their rounds. Managing the multitudes in such a limited space would have been difficult under the best of circumstances, but the convoluted Jim Crow transportation laws turned the commute into a gauntlet for all riders. Whites entered and exited from the front of the bus and sat in the white section in the front. Blacks were supposed to enter and exit from a rear door and find space in back, behind the Colored line; they were also supposed to yield seats to white patrons if the white section was full. A shortage of conductors at the rear door meant that most of the time, blacks actually entered through the front door and had to push through a line of white patrons in order to get to the black section. They then jostled back through to the aisle to the front to leave the bus. And if white passengers on one of the few two-man buses found themselves at the back of the bus, they too had to push through to the front, as the law prohibited whites from using the back door. If the segregation laws were designed to reduce friction by keeping the races apart, in practice they had the opposite effect.

      Overcrowded buses; a six-day workweek; constant noise and construction; shortages of sugar, coffee, butter, and meat; long lines for everything from the lunch counter to the gas station … the pressures of daily life in the boomtowns across the country pushed already touchy racial relations to the breaking point. So far, Hampton Roads had avoided the strife that had befallen Detroit, Mobile, and Los Angeles, where tensions between whites and blacks (and in Los Angeles, between Mexican, Negro, and Filipino zoot-suited youths and the white servicemen who attacked them) boiled over into violent confrontations.

      Whereas white residents of the boomtowns might have seen these conflicts as caused by the war, Negroes, long conditioned to racial enmity in close quarters, were weary of the same old battles. Blacks caught sitting in white sections of buses or trolleys, no matter how crowded, were subject to fines. More than a few violators were dragged off city buses, some beaten by police. Members of a ladies’ club called Les Femmes wrote a letter to the bus company complaining of the derogatory treatment their drivers routinely directed at Negro women. A bus driver on a route between Newport News and Hampton denied entry to Negro men in military uniform. Across the country, some equated the uniformed black soldiers with people who had stepped beyond their place, provoking slights and even violence against them.

      Negro resistance to this injustice had been a constant ever since the first ship carried enslaved Africans to Old Point Comfort on Hampton’s shores in 1609. The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. “Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world” were entitled to “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address. He committed the United States to vanquishing the dictators who would deprive others of their freedom. Negroes joined their countrymen in recoiling at the horrors Germany visited upon its Jewish citizens by restricting the type of jobs they were allowed to hold and the businesses they could start, imprisoning them wantonly and depriving them of due process and all citizenship rights, subjecting them to state-sanctioned humiliation and violence, segregating them into ghettos, and ultimately working them to death in slave camps and marking them for extermination. How could an American Negro observe the annihilation happening in Europe without identifying it with their own four-century struggle against deprivation, disenfranchisement, slavery, and violence?

      Executive Order 8802 and the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee brought about an upswell of optimism, with many in the black community hopeful that the gates of opportunity, finally opening, would never close again. But nearly three decades earlier, World War I had also been heralded as the event that would break the back of race prejudice. “With thousands of your sons in the camps and in France, out of this conflict you must expect nothing less than the enjoyment of full citizenship rights—the same as are enjoyed by every other citizen,” President Woodrow Wilson, a native Virginian, vowed to American blacks during the previous conflict. Even then, Negroes were ready to redeem their lives for their long overdue inheritance. But the military forbade them from serving with whites, deeming them mentally deficient for the rigors of combat. Most were attached to labor battalions, as cooks and stevedores, laborers and gravediggers. The few who clawed their way into the ranks of officers still encountered filthy toilets, secondhand uniforms, segregated showers, and disrespect from white soldiers. And a man who survived the dangers of the battlefield courted danger by walking the streets of his hometown in uniform.

      Charles Hamilton Houston’s unyielding opposition to America’s institutionalized discrimination came in part from his experiences as a young soldier in France during World War I. The man who would become the NAACP’s top lawyer and the other colored soldiers in his regiment suffered endless abuse at the hands of white officers. Finally back in the United States, Houston and a friend, still in uniform, were returning home on a train when a white man refused to sit next to them in the dining car. “I felt damned glad I had not lost my life fighting for my country,” he remembered in a 1942 column published in the Pittsburgh Courier.

      After the Civil War and during the Reconstruction era, the federal government had opened jobs to blacks, providing social mobility particularly for those from educated backgrounds. Civil service reform in the late nineteenth century reduced patronage and corruption and introduced a merit system that allowed blacks to get a foot in the door. During Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, however, the iron curtain of segregation fell on federal employment. A 1915 rule requiring a photo with every application made race a silent consideration for the final decision. From agencies as diverse as the Bureau of Engraving, the US Post Office, and the Department of the Navy, Wilson officials conducted a rout, purging the rolls of high-ranking black officials. Those who remained were banished to segregated areas or hidden behind curtains so that white civil servants and visitors to the offices wouldn’t have to see them.

      The intransigence of the forces opposed to the Negro’s drive for equality was made almost unbearably plain in a 1943 comment by Mark Etheridge, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, who had served as the first head of Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee. “There is no power in the world—not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis—which would now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation,” said Etheridge, a white liberal often vilified for his support of Negro advancement. The system that kept the black race at the СКАЧАТЬ