Hidden Figures

Dorothy Vaughn swears the US Civil Service Oath and accepts her employee badge, a blue metal circle with an image of her face on it and the winged NACA logo on either side. She takes the shuttle bus to the West Area, the office where black computers work.

The Langley Laboratory was established in 1917, starting with a single wind tunnel. The lab saved the city of Hampton from economic collapse after Prohibition, when the sale of alcohol was outlawed and the liquor industry, from which a large proportion of Hamptonites earned their income, was brought to a halt. The city’s clerk of courts sold parcels of land to the federal government to test planes and perform aeronautical research.

Construction of the West Area, where the black computers work, started in 1939. In 1942, the entire structure was painted dark green to camouflage the facility against possible attack by Axis forces. Arriving at her office, Dorothy finds herself in a futuristic arena featuring the Sixteen-Foot High-Speed Tunnel, which stretches three hundred feet wide and one hundred feet deep.

Dorothy gets dropped off at the Warehouse Building. Through one window, she has a view of the construction taking place on the Langley grounds. The room is full of black women using calculating machines to research aeronautical engineering at its most finely-detailed level. Dorothy’s work area is segregated from the East Computing Area where white female mathematicians do the exact same work. The white women in the East Area come from schools like Sweetbriar and Hollins, while the West Area computers come from black colleges like the Virginia State College for Negroes and Hampton Institute. The first five black women to work in this area were named Miriam Mann, Pearl Basette, Yvette Brown, Thelma Stiles and Minnie McGraw. The previous May, it was their photo Dorothy had seen in the newspaper.

Margerey Hannah, and her assistant Blanche Sponsler, both of whom are white, run the West Area computing office, under the supervision of Virginia Tucker, also white, who runs the entire computing division. Virginia parcels out assignments to Margerey and Blanche who then pass them down to the other computers, including the West Area Computers. The NACA plans to double the size of the West Area in the coming three years. The American aircraft industry has gone from the country’s forty-third largest industry in 1938 to the world’s number one in 1943.

The NACA employees go to hear Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox speak about the war effort. He tells them “the war is taking place in the laboratories as well as on the battlefields.” Most of the faces in the room during his speech are white, but a group of about twenty or so black male workers, as well as the faces of the black computers, stare back at him, taking in everything he says.

In the cafeteria after this speech, West Computers have to sit together at lunch. A white cardboard sign reading COLORED COMPUTERS marks their table. The black women have had to learn to accept things like this, in spite of the fact that equality in the workplace has recently been mandated by Executive Order 8802. Langley allows the women to work for white engineers, but the facility keeps them separate under Virginia’s “separate but equal” statutes.

Miriam Mann steals the COLORED COMPUTERS sign and puts it in her purse. The next day the sign is back. Mann steals it again. This small action mirrors a larger one that is playing out in Gloucester County, twenty miles away, where a woman named Irene Morgan is refusing to sit in the Colored section of a Greyhound Bus. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund is readying itself to take her case to the Supreme Court.