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

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СКАЧАТЬ and ambitious, Claytor waited in vain to be recruited to join the country’s top math departments, but West Virginia State College was his only offer. “If young colored men receive scientific training, almost their only opening lies in the Negro university of the South,” commented W. E. B. Du Bois in 1939. “The [white] libraries, museums, laboratories and scientific collections in the South are either completely closed to Negro investigators or are only partially opened and on humiliating terms.” But as was the unfortunate case in many Negro colleges, the position at the college came with a “very heavy teaching load, scientific isolation, no scientific library, and no opportunity to go to scientific meetings.”

      As if trying to redeem his own professional disappointment through the achievements of one of the few students whose ability matched his impossibly high standards, Claytor maintained an unshakable belief that Katherine could meet with a successful future in mathematical research, all odds to the contrary. The prospects for a Negro woman in the field could be viewed only as dismal. If Dorothy Vaughan had been able to accept Howard University’s offer of graduate admission, she likely would have been Claytor’s only female classmate, with virtually no postgraduate career options outside of teaching, even with a master’s degree in hand. In the 1930s, just over a hundred women in the United States worked as professional mathematicians. Employers openly discriminated against Irish and Jewish women with math degrees; the odds of a black woman encountering work in the field hovered near zero.

      “But where will I find a job?” Katherine asked.

      “That will be your problem,” said her mentor.

      Katherine and Jimmy Goble met while she was teaching at Marion. Jimmy was a Marion native, home on college break. They fell in love, and before she headed off to West Virginia, they got married, telling no one. West Virginia might have come to equalization, but it still held the line on barring married women from the classroom.

      In the spring of 1940, at the end of a busy school day, Katherine was surprised to find Dr. Davis, the president of her alma mater, waiting outside her classroom. After exchanging pleasantries with his former student, Davis revealed the motive for his visit. As a board member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Davis worked closely with Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall in the slow, often dispiriting, and sometimes dangerous prosecution of legal cases on behalf of black plaintiffs in the South. The Norfolk teachers’ case was just one of many in their master plan to dismantle the system of apartheid that existed in American schools and workplaces.

      In anticipation of the day that had now come, Davis, as shrewd a political operative as he was an educator, had walked away from an offer of $4 million from the West Virginia legislature to fund a graduate studies program at West Virginia State College. Davis’s gamble was that if there was no graduate program at the Negro college, all-white West Virginia University would be compelled to admit blacks to its programs under the Supreme Court’s 1938 Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada decision. West Virginia’s Governor Homer Holt saw the writing on the wall: the choice was to integrate or, like its neighbor to the east, dig in and contest the ruling. Rather than fight, Holt moved to integrate the state’s public graduate schools, asking his friend Davis in a clandestine meeting to handpick three West Virginia State College graduates to desegregate the state university, starting in the summer of 1940.

      “So I picked you,” Davis said to Katherine that day outside her classroom; two men, then working as principals in other parts of West Virginia, would join her. Smart, charismatic, hardworking, and unflappable, Katherine was the perfect choice. As Katherine walked out of the door on her last day at the Morgantown high school, her principal, who was also an adjunct professor in West Virginia State’s math department, presented her with a full set of math reference books to use at the university, a hedge against any “inconveniences” that might arise from her need to use the white school’s library.

      She enrolled in West Virginia University’s 1940 summer session. Katherine’s mother moved to Morgantown to room with her daughter, bolstering her strength and confidence during her first days at the white school. Katherine and the two other Negro students, both men entering the law school, chatted during registration on the first day. She never saw them again on campus and sailed off alone to the math department. Most of the white students gave Katherine a cordial welcome; some went out of their way to be friendly. The one classmate who protested her presence employed silence rather than epithet as a weapon. Most importantly, the professors treated her fairly, and she more than met the academic standard. The greatest challenge she faced was finding a course that didn’t duplicate Dr. Claytor’s meticulous tutelage.

      At the end of the summer session, however, Katherine and Jimmy discovered that they were expecting their first child. Being quietly married was one thing; being married and a mother was quite another. The couple knew they had to tell Joshua and Joylette about their marriage and impending parenthood. Joshua had always expected that Katherine would earn a graduate degree, but the circumstances made finishing the program impossible. Katherine’s love for Jimmy and her confidence in the new path her life had taken softened her father’s hard line on graduate school, and he certainly couldn’t resist the thrill of the family’s first grandchild. Though disappointed, neither he nor the other influential men in her life—Dr. Claytor and Dr. Davis—would ever have asked her to deny love or sacrifice a family for the promise of a career.

      In the four years since leaving graduate school, Katherine had not once regretted her decision to exchange the high-profile academic opportunity for domestic life. Most days she felt like the luckiest person in the world, in love with her husband and blessed with three daughters she adored. In idle moments her thoughts turned to Dr. Claytor and the phantom career he had assiduously prepared her for. In truth, the idea of becoming a research mathematician had always been an abstraction, and with the passage of time, it was easy to believe that the job was something that existed only in the mind of her eccentric professor. But in Hampton, Virginia, Dorothy Vaughan and scores of other former schoolteachers were proving that female research mathematicians weren’t just a wartime measure but a powerful force that was about to help propel American aeronautics beyond its previous limits.

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