Hidden Figures

In the summer of 1943, 32-year-old Dorothy Vaughn works in the sorting station of a massive laundry room at Camp Pickett in central Virginia. The women who work there fold socks and trousers for the black and white solders who come to Camp Pickett for basic training. They worry over their loved ones who are headed off from Virginia to fight in World War II. Most of the women have left behind jobs working as domestic servants or laborers to work in the laundry. They earn 40 cents an hour, which means that they are paid the least of all those who work in the service of the war. Nonetheless, it feels like a lot to them.

Dorothy, a recent college graduate, also works a job in Farmville, Virginia as a teacher. Teachers are considered very accomplished in the black community because they are thought of as the leaders of social movements. Vaughn’s husband’s parents are business owners and members of the black elite, and her family’s name regularly appears in the social columns in the newspaper. She lives in a large Victorian house with her in-laws and their parents.

Dorothy eagerly accepts the work at Camp Pickett, even though another woman in her position and of her status might have looked down on it. The laundry is 40 miles away from her home, which means she has to live in worker housing during the week. But the 40 cents an hour is more than what she earns as a math teacher, and she has four children who can use the extra money. She wants to use it to send them to college. Even the most successful black people know that discrimination can, at any moment, destroy everything they have built, and a good education will offer her children a better chance at a good life.

Dorothy knows the money she is making at the laundry will buy school clothes and help her send her children to school. They inform every move she makes, though she often has to choose between spending time with them and working to make sure they have what they need.

Dorothy was born in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri. Her mother died when she was two, and her father, a waiter, married Susie Johnson, a housekeeper. Susie taught Dorothy to read before she started school, which allowed her to skip two grades. She also enrolled Dorothy in piano lessons. Dorothy graduated early from high school as valedictorian, then won a full-tuition scholarship to Wilberforce University, the country’s oldest private black college. The African Methodist Episcopal Sunday School Convention of West Virginia underwrote her scholarship.

At Wilberforce,  Dorothy’s  professors recommended her for a master’s degree in mathematics at Howard University, which was the best black university in the country. The first two black men in the country to earn PhDs in mathematics ran the department. Dorothy decided not to go to graduate school, however. The Great Depression had just begun and Dorothy’s  parents could not find work. She stayed home to help out and to ensure that her sister could also go to college. Dorothy was only 19 but she felt a great responsibility towards her family, so she chose to pursue a degree in education and become a teacher, which was the most stable career she would be able to find. At the time, black colleges got calls from schools nationwide requesting teachers and Dorothy, through her alma mater, landed a job at a school in rural Illinois.

Dorothy lost her job, however, when the Depression led the school to close after her first year. After losing a second teaching job, she took a job as a waitress until 1941, when she took a teaching job in Farmville. There, she met Howard Vaughan, a bellman for various hotels in the region. The two married. While he traveled for work, she attended Beulah AME Church, becoming the church’s pianist.

In 1943, Dorothy goes to the post office and sees Melvin Butler’s bulletin advertising jobs at the NACA. She also sees an article about the job in the Norfolk Journal and Guide. The article is called “Paving the Way for Women Engineers” and under the headline, Dorothy spots a picture of eleven “well-dressed Negro women,” all graduates of Hampton’s engineering school. This opportunity represents something Dorothy has never imagined for herself before. That spring, she fills out the application.