Hidden Figures

In 1944, Katherine’s husband, a teacher, falls ill with fever. Because he can’t work, his school principal offers his yearlong teaching contact to Katherine instead. Katherine had graduated from West Virginia State Institute in 1937 and then had taken a teaching job at the Marion school in Virginia. A year after she left, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit against the state of Virginia for equal teacher pay. Alston v. Norfolk went to the US Supreme Court, which ordered Virginia to bring black teachers’ salaries up to the white teachers’ level. The decision passed too late for Katherine, however, who had to leave Virginia and go to Morgantown, West Virginia to make more money.

Katherine loves West Virginia and she always makes sure that people know that she is from there, rather than Virginia. West Virginia seceded from Virginia during the Civil War to join the Union. Though it was not a bastion of equality (West Virginia was still segregated), West Virginia offered its black citizens slightly more space and dignity than Virginia did. Katherine’s father, Joshua, was a math whiz who helped engineer Katherine’s academic success, even though he only made it to the sixth grade.

During the Depression, income from Katherine’s family’s farm fell. Joshua moved the family into town and took a job as a bellman at the Greenbrier, the country’s most exclusive resort. (It was here that Dorothy Vaughan’s husband, Howard, and Joshua would later become friends.) Katherine also worked in the hotel as a personal maid to wealthy guests, cleaning, washing, ironing, and setting out clothes. At one point, a French countess Katherine was serving discovered that Katherine understood French and told the administration; after that, Katherine worked in the kitchen with the resort’s Parisian chef. The next summer, she was put to work in the hotel’s antique store, rather than as a maid. There she met the brother of President William Howard Taft and taught him his Roman numerals.

In 1933, Katherine entered West Virginia State College as a fifteen-year-old freshman with a full academic scholarship. She worked under math professor William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor. Claytor created advanced math classes just for her and he encouraged her to become a research mathematician. Claytor himself wanted to join the country’s top math departments, but found his options limited to a job at West Virginia State College because he was black. He tried to push Katherine forward so she could take advantage of opportunities he hadn’t been offered.

Katherine meets her husband Jimmy while she is teaching. In the spring of 1940, she is invited to be one of the first students to integrate the all-white West Virginia University by joining the math department. She enrolls in the 1940 summer session and is accepted by the white student body, but she drops out at the end of the summer session after she discovers she is pregnant.

Katherine leaves graduate school to raise her child with Jimmy. She wonders sometimes what would have happened if she’d continued to pursue a career as a research mathematician, but she is happy to work as a schoolteacher. Meanwhile, in Hampton Virginia, Dorothy Vaughan is paving the way for women like Katherine to help propel aeronautics research into the future.