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

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СКАЧАТЬ “It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that employment in the shipyards and governmental establishments in the Hampton Roads area will be drastically curtailed,” commented the Washington Post. Returning servicemen were expected to have first claim on what jobs remained in the peacetime economy. Just as “victory” had been the watchword for the past four years, now “reconversion” came to the fore, with the United States trying to adjust its psyche and its economy to the peace. The war had been a freight train, traveling headlong at top speed. What now of the passengers inside, still moving forward with tremendous inertia? The word “reconversion” itself implied the possibility of returning to an earlier time, of a reversal even, in the changes large and small that had transformed American life.

      With the war emergency fading into the past and without war production pressures, there would be no hire-at-all-costs demand for women. Two million American women of all colors received pink slips even before the final curtain fell in August. Many anticipated a happy return to domestic life. Others, fulfilled by their work, resisted the expectation that they should be reconverted back to the kitchen and the nursery. With work had come economic security, and a greater say in household affairs, which put some women on collision courses with their husbands. “Many husbands will return home to find that the helpless little wives they left behind have become grown, independent women,” wrote columnist Evelyn Mansfield Swann in the Norfolk Journal and Guide.

      With victory over the enemies from without assured, Negroes took stock of their own battlefield. Almost immediately after V-J Day, some employers returned to their white, Gentile-only employment policies. The FEPC, however feeble it might have been in reality during the war, had nonetheless become a powerful symbol of employment progress for Negroes and other ethnic minorities. With labor markets loosening, the dream that many black leaders had of establishing a permanent FEPC slipped away with the war emergency, in spite of President Truman’s support.

      No one was more opposed to the FEPC than Virginia’s Democratic senator, Harry Byrd, who called it “the most dangerous idea ever seriously considered” and likened it to “following the Communists’ lead,” an explosive epithet as the United States began to view its wartime ally Russia as the new threat. Byrd, a former governor, descended from a “First Family of Virginia,” one of the state’s multigenerational ruling elite. Heir to a newspaper and apple-growing fortune, Byrd treated segregation as a religion and ran a powerful political machine that kept the poor of all races divided against each other and at the bottom of the economic pyramid. “The Byrd Machine is the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America,” wrote journalist John Gunther in his 1947 bestselling book Inside USA. Byrd’s father, who had also been a powerful state politician, had helped fellow Virginian Woodrow Wilson win the White House in 1912. It seemed too early to say if the activism and the economic gains made during the war years would carry forward into the future or give way in the face of subversion by politicians like Byrd, as they had after World War I. The generals of the Negroes’ war, however—leaders such as Randolph, Houston, and Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as an advisor to President Roosevelt—did not let their guard down one bit, preparing to rouse the troops for the next offensive. But Dorothy and the others who had built new lives during the war weren’t waiting for leaders or politicians to take the lead. They voted with their feet, betting their new lives that the social and economic changes brought about by the four-year conflict would last.

      It wasn’t a risk-free wager. Dorothy committed to the lease on the apartment in Newsome Park even though Langley had not converted her wartime employee status to permanent. The future of the neighborhood itself was also uncertain. Neighbors in nearby Hilton Village, a World War I–era housing project for white, middle-class shipyard managers, were attempting to dismantle Newsome and Copeland Parks under slum clearance laws. Federal authorities planned to pry the houses off their bases and send the units to “war-devastated populations in Europe.” While the government and neighbors went back and forth over Newsome Park’s status—it was declared to be “not temporary in character,” yet “not permanent in its current location”—the residents brimmed with postwar idealism, calling upon each other to create a “model community, not just for Newport News, but for the entire United States.” And why would Newsome Park disappear? The great groaning defense machine and all the nooks and communities it had built in the last four years weren’t about to disappear. Gone were the small-town rhythms and the day of the waterman, replaced by connections to the larger world and the vitality of middle-class dreams. The jobs, the housing, the relationships, the routines—so many aspects of life that had been cut out of the whole cloth of the war emergency were now so intrinsic that it was easy to believe things had always been this way. Despite the best intentions of returning to their former lives, the come-heres tarried, realizing in small sips of awareness over the course of the war years—or with great gulping realizations at the war’s abrupt end—that they would not, or could not, go home again.

      Dorothy’s older children had mourned the loss of their small-town freedom and the space that had come with the big house in Farmville. As talented as Dorothy was as a mathematician, she might have missed her calling in the military: she ran the Newport News household with the authority of a general and the economy of a quartermaster, eventually sending the babysitter back to Farmville and offering room and board to a returning military man and his wife in exchange for keeping the children during the day.

      While her children went to school, managing the transition from being well-known faces in a small town to faces in a large crowd, Dorothy began to knit together the pieces of life she had been working on since her arrival, hosting a party for nearly twenty people in the little home on Forty-Eighth Street. Some she had met at work; others came from the neighborhood or St. Paul’s AME Church. She grew closer to Miriam Mann and her family, the two women and their children becoming like one large extended family, often taking advantage of the many activities available on the Hampton Institute campus. From the moment the acclaimed contralto Marian Anderson announced a performance at the college’s Ogden Hall, the two women knew they would go together. Anderson had taken the stage there many times since her earliest professional performances as a teenager. She had gone on to sing on four continents, but there was perhaps no place she was as warmly and enthusiastically welcomed as the Hampton Institute theater; many patrons there had come out for every recital. Dorothy and Miriam Mann bought tickets in advance to secure their seats. On the evening of the concert, the Vaughans dressed up and met the Manns at the theater, arriving early so that their large group could all sit together.

      It was an exceptional performance. Dorothy looked over at her children, still so young but entranced by the contralto voice that seemed to each person in the audience to be singing to them, only to them. It was, she knew right then, a moment they would never forget.

       CHAPTER EIGHT

       Those Who Move Forward

      Katherine Goble would have eventually found her way back to the classroom, but a fever hastened the process: in 1944, her husband, Jimmy, the chemistry teacher at the Negro high school in Marion, Virginia, had fallen ill with undulant fever. The illness, which came from drinking unpasteurized milk, had sickened at least eight people in Smyth County that summer. Weeks, sometimes months, of sweats, fatigue, poor appetite, and pain lay in store for the unfortunate victims. There was no way Jimmy would be able to start the school year that fall, so the principal offered Jimmy’s yearlong contract to Katherine instead. Despite being a full-time wife and mother for the last four years, Katherine had been careful to keep her teaching certificate current.

      It would be her second time around as a teacher at the school. In 1937, newly graduated from West Virginia State Institute, eighteen-year-old Katherine applied for a position at the Marion school, which was just on the Virginia side of the border. “If you can play the piano, the job is yours,” the telegram read. She bade farewell to her home state and boarded a bus in Charleston, the state capital, СКАЧАТЬ