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

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СКАЧАТЬ school year, the school ran out of money and simply stopped paying her. Dorothy supported herself and contributed to the family by working as a waitress at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia, until 1931, when she got word of a job at the school in Farmville.

      It was no surprise that the newcomer with the beautiful eyes caught the attention of one of Farmville’s most eligible bachelors. Tall, charismatic, and quick with a smile, Howard Vaughan worked as an itinerant bellman at luxury hotels, going south to Florida in the winter and north to upstate New York and Vermont in the summer. Some years he found work closer to home at the Greenbrier, the luxury resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which was a destination for wealthy and fabulous people from around the world.

      Though her husband’s work kept him on the road, Dorothy exchanged her traveling shoes for Farmville life and the routines of family, the stability of regular work, and community. Still, coming of age and entering the workforce in the depths of the Depression permanently affected Dorothy’s worldview. She dressed plainly and modestly, spurned every extravagance, and never turned down the chance to put money in the bank. Though she was a member of Farmville’s Beulah AME Church, it was the First Baptist Church that enjoyed her esteemed piano playing come Sunday morning, because they had hired her as their pianist.

      As the war intensified, the town post office was awash in civil service job bulletins, competing for the eyes of locals and college students alike. It was on a trip to the post office during the spring of 1943 that Dorothy spied the notice for the laundry job at Camp Pickett. But the word on another bulletin also caught her eye: mathematics. A federal agency in Hampton sought women to fill a number of mathematical jobs having to do with airplanes. The bulletin, the handiwork of Melvin Butler and the NACA personnel department, was most certainly meant for the eyes of the white, well-to-do students at the all-female State Teachers College there in Farmville. The laboratory had sent application forms, civil service examination notices, and booklets describing the NACA’s work to the school’s job placement offices, asking faculty and staff to spread the word about the open positions among potential candidates. “This organization is considering a plan to visit certain women’s colleges in this area and interview senior students majoring in mathematics,” the laboratory wrote. “It is expected that outstanding students will be offered positions in this laboratory.” Interviews that year yielded four new Farmville girls for the laboratory’s computing sections.

      Dorothy’s house on South Main sat down the street from the college campus. Every morning as she walked the two blocks to her job at Moton High School, a U-shaped building perched on a triangular block at the south end of town, she saw the State Teachers College coeds with their books, disappearing into classrooms in their leafy sanctuary of a campus. Dorothy walked to school on the other side of the street, toeing the invisible line that separated them.

      It would no sooner have occurred to her that a place with so baroque a name as the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory would solicit an application from Negro women than that the white women at the college across the street would beckon her through the front doors of their manicured enclave. Black newspapers, however, worked relentlessly to spread the word far and wide about available war jobs and exhorted their readers to apply. Some were dubbing Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employment Practices Committee “the most significant move on the part of the Government since the Emancipation Proclamation.” Dorothy’s own sister-in-law had moved to Washington to take a job in the War Department.

      In the first week of May 1943, the Norfolk Journal and Guide published an article that would call to Dorothy like a signpost for the road not taken. “Paving the Way for Women Engineers,” read the headline. The accompanying photo showed eleven well-dressed Negro women in front of Hampton Institute’s Bemis Laboratory, graduates of Engineering for Women, a war training class. Founded in 1868, Hampton Institute had grown out of the classes held by the free Negro teacher Mary Peake, in the shade of a majestic tree known as the Emancipation Oak. On the eve of World War II, Hampton was one of the leading Negro colleges in the country and the focal point of the black community’s participation in the conflict.

      The women had come from points up and down the East Coast, and from right there in town. Pearl Bassette, one of several Hampton natives, was the daughter of a well-known black lawyer, her family tracing its roots back to the early days of the city. Ophelia Taylor, originally from Georgia, graduated from Hampton Institute, and prior to starting the class was running a nursery school. Mary Cherry came from North Carolina, Minnie McGraw from South Carolina, Madelon Glenn from faraway Connecticut. Miriam Mann, a tiny firebrand who had taught school in Georgia, had come to the city with her family when her husband, William, accepted a position as an instructor teaching machine shop at the US Naval Training School at Hampton Institute.

      There were black jobs, and there were good black jobs. Sorting in the laundry, making beds in white folks’ houses, stemming in the tobacco plant—those were black jobs. Owning a barbershop or a funeral home, working in the post office, or riding the rails as a Pullman porter— those were good black jobs. Teacher, preacher, doctor, lawyer—now those were very good black jobs, bringing stability and the esteem that accompanied formal training.

      But the job at the aeronautical laboratory was something new, something so unusual it hadn’t yet entered the collective dreams. Not even the long-stalled plan to equalize Negro teachers’ salaries with those of their white counterparts could beat this opportunity. Even if the war ended in six months or a year, a much higher salary even for that brief time would bring Dorothy that much closer to assuring her children’s future.

      So that spring, Dorothy Vaughan carefully filled out and mailed two job applications: one to work at Camp Pickett, where the need for labor was so great, so undifferentiated, that there was virtually no possibility that they would not hire her. The other, much longer application reviewed her qualifications in detail. Work history. Personal references. Schools attended: high school and college. Courses taken, grades received. Languages spoken (French, which she had studied at Wilberforce). Foreign travels (None). Would you be willing to accept a position abroad? (No). Would you be willing to accept a position in Washington, DC? (Yes). How soon could you be ready to start work? She knew the answer before her fingers carved it into the blank: 48 hours, she wrote. I can be ready to go within forty-eight hours.

       CHAPTER THREE

       Past Is Prologue

      The 1943 school year at Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton High School started the same way other years always had: same space, more students. The “new” high school, built in 1939 to accommodate 180 students, had been obsolete almost from its beginning. In the school’s first year of operation, 167 students arrived for classes. Four years later, Dorothy Vaughan and her twelve fellow teachers were welcoming 301 education-hungry youngsters, urged along by parents who wanted more for their children than a life of work in the tobacco factories. The students walked for miles to get to the school or took their chances each morning in barely roadworthy buses that made the rounds in the outer reaches of Prince Edward County.

      As a member of Moton’s parent-teacher association and a founding board member of the Farmville chapter of the NAACP, Dorothy worked hard to improve the long-term educational prospects of the young people of Farmville. As a teacher, her ambitions were more immediate: with only eight classrooms; no gymnasium, lockers, or cafeteria; and an auditorium outfitted with folding chairs, it took all her leadership and creativity to maintain an orderly learning environment. Somehow, she managed to impart the finer points of arithmetic and algebra in the auditorium, with two other classes taking place simultaneously. The school building might have been modest, but Dorothy’s standards were not. She once discovered an error in one of the math textbooks she used in her classroom and dashed off a letter to the publisher informing them of their mistake (they fixed it, and sent her a thank-you СКАЧАТЬ