Hidden Figures

Mary Jackson helps her son, Levi, build a car to race in the 1960 soap box derby. She works closely with her son, the way she worked with Kazimierz Czarnecki. They follow the official rules and buy all the equipment. The race sets off from the Twenty-Fifth Street Bridge in Newport News.

Levi is one of fifty thousand boys to compete in races around the country. Mary is one of the few women who helped build her son’s car. Mary, like other engineers, hopes her children will follow her into her profession. She pushes Levi to take the most challenging math and science classes and helps him with his work. He wins prizes in his school science fair.

Most black families don’t participate in the soap box derby because advertisements for it appear primarily in white publications. Segregation also makes it difficult for black parents to believe they might win. It takes a lot for a black child to believe he can. Mary is also aware that her daughter would have been rejected from the race outright because of her gender. Frustrated, she does what she can at work and at home to fight against racial and gender inequality.

Mary works with the National Technical Association, the professional organization for black engineers and scientists. She brings students from public schools in Hampton to the Langley facility to see the scientists at work and invites career counselors from nearby colleges so they can steer their students towards job opportunities at Langley. She also goes out of her way to help new black employees and find them places to live.

Mary also cultivates friendships with the white women she works with. She collaborates with Emma Jean Landrum, who is also an engineer, and they invite girls from nearby schools to visit Langley and show them how women can work together, and how black women have been embraced, to an extent, at Langley.

Mary serves as the leader of one of the largest girl scout troops in the area. Frustrated by the segregated troop system, she campaigns for integration. She nominates her assistant troop leader to visit the Girl Scouts’ national conclave in Cody, Wyoming and she even trains the woman in hiking before she leaves, returning afterwards with a view of what life looks like far away from home.

Mary gives everything she has outside of work to community service. She is able to do her job because of women like Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Hoover, who demonstrated that black women are capable of the highest level of theoretical aeronautical research. It is important for Mary to give back as much as she’s been given.

Mary and her son win the soapbox derby race. Levi tells the Norfolk Journal and Guide that he wants to be an engineer like his mother. He wins a trophy and a spot at the national race in Ohio. He is the first black person to win the derby. Mary knows it is an important symbol for the rest of the black community, and she is grateful that there will never again have to be another “first” black winner of the soapbox derby.