Hidden figure

Chapter 1: A Door Opens

By May 1943 the United States is embroiled in World War II. Demand for personnel to handle work at
the lab has tripled. The operation at Langley now runs three shifts a day, six days a week. Three years
earlier, in a move to strengthen national defense, President Roosevelt called for increased production of
airplanes to 50,000 a year. By 1943 America's aircraft industry is surpassing the president's mark.

Airplanes during World War II are used for transportation of troops and supplies, for aerial pursuit of the
enemy, and for launching ship-sinking bombs. The speed and safety of the machines are in the hands of
Langley's engineers, who tirelessly test and refine the design and structure of planes. Wind-tunnel tests
and test flights conducted at the agency reveal flaws. Test results are captured in numbers that are then
analyzed. Improvements are recommended. Accurate processing of the numbers is critical to this
process and requires mathematicians who can interpret the flow of numerical data coming from wind-
tunnel tests and other research.

Since 1935 mathematicians at Langley have been mostly women. Known as "computers," they have
proven better than engineers at computing. To keep pace with Langley's growing involvement in national
defense, more mathematicians are needed in the computer pool. With America's involvement in World
War II, men are fighting, and women have stepped in to take their places. As a result, by 1943 the labor
market is stretched thin.

Two years earlier an activist named Asa Philip Randolph created a path for labor that could address the
shortage of workers. Randolph headed the largest black labor union in America. He used his influence to
persuade Roosevelt to issue Executive Orders 8802 and 9346. The first ordered the desegregation of the
defense industry; the second created the Fair Employment Practices Committee.

Consequently, in 1943 applications of qualified black female candidates begin to reach Langley's
personnel staff. The applicants are qualified, experienced, and hired. Yet, the head of personnel, Melvin
Butler, knows the women will need a segregated space to work.
Chapter 2: Mobilization
Dorothy Vaughan is among the Negro women who work in Camp Pickett's laundry boiler plant during the
summer of 1943. Camp Pickett, Virginia, is the basic training camp for soldiers. The women process
18,000 bundles of laundry each week. Invisible yet invaluable, the women earn $0.40 per hour—less
than all other war workers.

That summer Vaughan is 32 years old, intelligent and well educated, a math teacher, and a wife with four
children. Her home is in Farmville, Virginia, where she teaches at Robert Russa Moton, the Negro high
school. Howard, her husband, is an itinerant bellman at luxury hotels. While the school is closed for the
summer, Vaughan willingly works the summer job at Camp Pickett to earn extra money for her children's
future education, which she knows they will need as a bulwark against a world that will require more of
them and attempt to give them less in return because they are black.

When Vaughan had applied for this summer job in the spring, she also had applied for a war job at
Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Black newspapers had been encouraging readers to submit
their applications for such jobs, touting President Roosevelt's executive orders desegregating the defense
industry and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Vaughan recognizes that a job in the
aeronautical laboratory means stepping out of the sphere of work typically open to blacks and into a
whole new world of opportunity.
Analysis
In Chapter 1 after explaining the genesis and purpose of NACA Langley Memorial Aeronautical
Laboratory, author Margot Lee Shetterly explains why black laborers, in particular women, were added
to the defense industry workforce in the 1940s. President Roosevelt's call for increased airplane
production, America's involvement in World War II, the shortage of men to fill jobs, the thinning ranks of
white women workers, and Asa Philip Randolph's influence in Washington, D.C., all converge in 1943.
The political, social, and practical needs of a nation at war open the doors of the defense industry to
anyone who can do the job. This is a crack in the wall of racial discrimination and Jim Crow laws that
have gripped the South since the 1870s and robbed the country of a rich human resource: black
Americans, who are waiting to fully participate in American democracy. Within the wartime government
and defense industry, segregation, with its deep roots in the past, now must take a back seat to the
urgent needs of the present.

At Langley employing Negroes presents some logistical problems for Melvin Butler. Despite federal
desegregation laws, Jim Crow laws still dictate the social separation of blacks and whites in the
workplace. Butler will need to establish separate workspaces for the new black employees. Fortunately
for Butler, segregation will prove less important than the needs of the laboratory for most of its
employees, black and white. And neither he nor the black female mathematicians he hires have an
inkling that this move will end at the Moon. No one predicts the technological, social, and cultural
transformations that the next few decades will bring.

Chapter 2 introduces Dorothy Vaughan and how she is drawn into the work at Langley. Intelligent, highly
educated, a teacher, and concerned for her children, Vaughan is also ambitious and ready for a
challenge. Recognizing that the "Negro's ladder to the American dream" is missing rungs, she values
education above all else as a bulwark against economic uncertainty. She is not too proud to work hard at
a menial job if it means the future will be securer.
Chapter 3: Past Is Prologue
The 1943 school year begins at Farmville's Robert Russa Moton High School. Dorothy Vaughan and her
12 fellow teachers welcome 301 students to the overcrowded facility. Vaughan will be teaching
arithmetic and algebra in the auditorium alongside two other classes. In addition to teaching, she will
tutor struggling students after school, work with the school choir, and participate in community support
for the war effort.

Her life abruptly changes with an acceptance letter from Langley, where she has been appointed
mathematician, Grade P-1, at pay more than twice her current salary. While this is what she hoped for,
the civil-service appointment means relocating to Newport News, Virginia, and leaving behind her home,
her job, her extended family, and her children. She takes comfort in the knowledge that her children will
be surrounded by caring family and neighbors.

Dorothy's husband, Howard, travels a great deal in his career as an itinerant bellman. She is unsure what
affect her new job will have on the marriage. She has supported his unusual career, even accompanying
him in 1942 to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he worked at the Greenbrier. An enormous,
white-columned resort in peacetime, Greenbrier functioned as a prisoner-of-war camp for German and
Japanese detainees.

During this time Vaughan and the children befriended Joshua and Joylette Coleman, residents of White
Sulphur Springs. Among their four children was a grown daughter named Katherine (Katherine Johnson).
In 1940 Johnson's superior intelligence and gift for mathematics had earned her admission to a
university to pursue a graduate degree. In summer 1940 she had entered the newly integrated West
Virginia University. However, she chose not to complete the graduate program, choosing instead "a life
as a full-time wife and mother."

Fifteen years earlier Vaughan had similarly set aside her own ambitions. Now, a second chance is
opening up for her—a chance "to unleash her professional potential." Eventually, Johnson will follow the
same path "down the road to Newport News" to meet her destiny at Langley.
Chapter 4: The Double V
Newport News is a city near the Hampton Roads harbor. Located near Hampton, Virginia, home of
Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, the city is where Dorothy Vaughan and thousands of other
war workers will be housed. It is a wartime boomtown; "a powerful military capital," in which the war
operates around the clock. To address the housing shortage caused by the explosion in civilian
population, the city features "the world's largest defense housing project," located in the East End of
Newport News. The housing is segregated; Newsome Park houses 1,200 blacks, and Copeland Park
houses 4,000 whites. Vaughan rents a room in a home on the periphery of Newsome Park.

In Newport News, as in all other Southern cities, the lines of segregation separating whites from blacks
are everywhere. Problems arise most frequently on buses and trolleys, now overcrowded with
employees coming and going to their war jobs, 24 hours a day; 6 days a week. Necessity often requires
breaking rules that were designed to keep the races separate. This and the general pressure of daily life
in Newport News and other boomtowns across the country steadily push racial tensions toward a
breaking point.

In January 1941 President Roosevelt told the American people in his State of the Union address, "Men of
every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world" are entitled to freedom of speech and
worship and freedom from want and fear. The president then committed the United States to defeating
the dictators who would rob people of these freedoms. While blacks agree with these sentiments and
are horrified by the brutal treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany, they cannot help comparing it to their
own decades-long battle against institutionalized discrimination. The contradiction between the
American ideals driving the war effort and the ongoing injustice of segregation in America cannot be
ignored. Some blacks wonder if they should fight for their country and, if so, what they will be fighting
for.

Even so, the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was a rallying cry. Across the nation blacks "geared
up to fight, for their country's future and for their own." With optimism they looked for a double victory:
over America's enemies from without and over the enemies within: those "who perpetrate these ugly
prejudices" that will "destroy our democratic form of government."
Analysis
As the title "Past Is Prologue" suggests, the past was preparation for the opportunity that will unleash
Dorothy Vaughan's potential. She had assumed the die of her life had been cast when she gave up a
scholarship to study math at Howard University. Now, all that is about to change. Also in keeping with
the title, the chapter introduces Katherine Johnson, whose participation in aeronautical research at
Langley will not begin for many years. The pattern of her life mirrors Vaughan's. She is gifted with
numbers, achieves scholastic recognition, and sets aside her ambitions to be a wife and raise children.
The lives of the two women intersect briefly in 1942 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. This is
prologue for the time when Vaughan will welcome Johnson to West Area Computing and, for a brief
period, be her supervisor.

Chapter 3 also describes the substandard conditions of Farmville's Russa Moton High School, where
Vaughan works. As the school year begins, 301 students crowd into a school designed for 180 students.
There are only eight classrooms and no cafeteria, gymnasium, or student lockers. The students and their
parents are hungry for the education that can provide some measure of security in the segregated
South. Overcrowded, underfunded, segregated schools like Russa Moton are emblematic of the
inefficient system created by Jim Crow laws and the "separate but equal" doctrine behind them. Often
the result was inadequate funding for all schools in a region.

Jim Crow laws and segregation are on full display in the Chapter 4 description of Newport News and
Hampton, Virginia, especially in transportation and housing. The segregated conditions illustrate the
dilemma facing black Americans: at a time when their country needs them and calls upon their
patriotism, it still insists on a dividing line that violates their basic rights to freedom and equality—the
ideals driving America's participation in World War II. Their answer to the question "What are we fighting
for?" is to turn their country's need into an opportunity to wage war and win on two fronts: for their
country and for their race.
Chapter 5: Manifest Destiny
On Dorothy Vaughan's first day at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, she boards the Langley
shuttle bus for the laboratory's West Area. The West Area occupies the grounds of several old
plantations now owned by the federal government. A forested back road connects the area with the rest
of Langley's campus. In addition to a collection of two-story brick buildings, there is a 16-foot-high speed
tunnel for research tests. Vaughan is assigned to the Warehouse Building, where she will be "engaged in
aeronautical research at its most granular level," helping to answer the question, "What makes things
fly?" All the human computers in the Warehouse Building office where she works are female, and they
are black. The white female computers are assigned to the East Area.

Many of the women with whom Vaughan will work are graduates of Hampton Institute's Engineering for
Women training classes. Others come from farther afield, and like Vaughan, many bring years of teaching
to the job. The head of her section is Margery Hannah, formerly an East Aria computer. Hannah reports
to Virginia Tucker, the head computer in charge of Langley's entire computer operation.

Langley is the NACA's flagship laboratory. Two additional research laboratories have been established at
Moffett Field, California, (1939) and Cleveland, Ohio (1940). Working together, they scramble to keep up
with America's rapidly expanding aircraft industry, which by 1943 is at the top of the industry. The course
of events has made it clear that the war is "being fought in the laboratories as well as on the
battlefields." Through research, military aircraft are becoming "as powerful, safe, and efficient as
possible." Good minds and highly specialized skills have made this possible.

Langley employees are "a mélange of black and white, male and female, blue-collar and white-collar
workers." Yet racial divisions are clearly marked by the separated working spaces, the "Colored girls"
bathrooms, and signs in the cafeteria designating where "Colored Computers" may sit. In an act of
defiance Miriam Mann, a black computer, launches a private war with the unseen hands that placed the
sign on that table. She hides the first sign and thereafter hides its replacements every time they appear.

There are whites among Langley's executives and employees—especially the engineers from northern
and western states—who defy Southern conventions and stand up to prejudice. Their main concern is
whether a person can do the job and do it well. The West computers understand that these "were the
ones who had the power to break down the barriers that existed at Langley."