Hidden Figures

There were two computing pools when Dorothy began working at Langley: The East Area pool employed white women, and the West Area pool employed Black women. The campus, like the rest of the state, was strictly segregated by race. Two white women led the West Area’s Black employees. With the war effort in full swing, Shetterly writes, “the West Computers added much-needed minds to the agency’s escalating research effort” (41).

The segregation extended to the cafeteria on the grounds, where a table in the back was designated by a cardboard sign reading “Colored Computers” (43). (At that time, “computer” referred to a person who performed computation; see Index of Terms.) One of the women, Miriam Mann, finally tired of the insult it presented and took to folding up the sign and putting it in her purse. Each time it would be replaced after a day or two. Later it took a little longer for the sign to be replaced, until one day Miriam removed it and it never reappeared. The rules remained the same, but the humiliation of being marked by the words every day disappeared. 

This chapter focuses on the training and education Dorothy received at Langley as her work progressed. Twice a week, she and the other computers took a class there after their regular work to learn the physics of flying, with an emphasis on aerodynamics. In addition, they spent two hours each week with hands-on training in the wind tunnels that were vital for testing. The wind tunnels at Langley were the most advanced in the world, but they didn’t exactly mirror real-world conditions. As a result, Dorothy first learned something called the “Reynold’s number,” which measured this discrepancy.

She also learned that an airplane “was a terrifically complex bundle of physics that could be tweaked to serve the needs of different situations” (57). Research was required to suit these various needs, so the work was voluminous. As Shetterly notes:

Regardless of whether the engineers conducted a test in a wind tunnel or in free flight, the output was the same: torrents, scads, bundles, reams, masses, mounds, jumbles, piles, and goo-gobs of numbers […] If something needed to be measured and the instrument didn’t exist, the engineers invented it, ran the test, and sent the numbers to the computers, along with instructions for what equations to use to process the data (58).

Taken as a whole, Dorothy felt that she was contributing to the war effort. 

Dorothy settled in coastal Virginia the next year, when she signed a lease on an apartment of her own in July 1944. Her four children joined her that fall to begin school in Newport News. They lived in Newsome Park, a segregated housing development for African Americans. It was well appointed with community spaces for residents, services, and businesses that offered everything from groceries to haircuts. Yet, like so much during the war years, it was intended from the start to be temporary. Despite this, Dorothy took the time to become active in the community. Uncertainty followed the next year when the war ended. The war effort was curtailed and the economy was to undergo a “reconversion,” which Shetterly notes “implied the possibility of returning to an earlier time, of a reversal even, in the changes large and small that had transformed American life” (65).