Hidden Figures:
The Black Women Who Put America in Space

In 1943, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA — the predecessor to NASA) was desperate for mathematicians. World War II had pulled most male mathematicians into military service. NACA began hiring women — including Black women — as "computers": human beings who performed complex mathematical calculations by hand. Black women were assigned to a separate section called the West Area Computing Pool, which operated under Jim Crow rules.

The West Computers worked in a separate building, ate in a separate cafeteria, used separate bathrooms labeled "Colored." They were hired under lower pay grades than white computers doing equivalent work. They were, systematically and deliberately, made invisible — their contributions attributed to the engineering divisions they served, their names absent from official reports and public presentations.

NACA was a federal agency. Jim Crow operated inside it without disruption until President Truman's executive order desegregating the federal workforce in 1948 — and even then, enforcement was slow and uneven. Black women mathematicians were working at the cutting edge of aeronautical science while being told, daily, by the physical architecture of the building, that they did not fully belong there.

Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in 1918. She graduated from college at 18 and began teaching school because there was nowhere else for a Black woman mathematician to go. In 1953, she was hired at Langley as a computer. Within two years, she had been permanently assigned to the Flight Research Division — the first Black woman to work there.

Her specialty was orbital mechanics — the mathematics of how objects move through space. When NASA was preparing to launch John Glenn into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, the agency used an early IBM electronic computer to calculate his re-entry trajectory. Glenn refused to fly unless Katherine Johnson personally verified the computer's numbers by hand. His exact reported instruction to ground control: "Get the girl to check the numbers. If she says the numbers are good, I'm ready to go."

Johnson also co-authored the equations that defined the launch window and trajectory for Apollo 11 — the mission that landed the first humans on the moon. Her calculations for the trajectory of the lunar lander and the return flight were foundational to the mission's success. She worked at NASA until her retirement in 1986. Her name did not appear in the agency's public history for decades.

Dorothy Vaughan became the supervisor of the West Area Computing Pool in 1949 — the first Black supervisor at NACA. When she applied for a promotion to a formal supervisory position, she was repeatedly denied despite performing the role. NACA eventually gave her the title, making her the first Black person to hold a supervisory position in the agency's history. She managed a team of women whose work directly supported the aeronautical research that made American aviation — and eventually spaceflight — possible.

When IBM computers arrived at Langley in the late 1950s, Vaughan saw the writing on the wall: human computers would be replaced. Rather than wait to be made obsolete, she taught herself FORTRAN from a library book — one of the early programming languages used to operate IBM mainframes. She then taught it to every woman in her section. When the computing pool was formally disbanded and integrated into other departments, Vaughan's team had the technical skills to transition seamlessly.

Vaughan's foresight in learning and teaching programming meant that Black women mathematicians were not simply displaced when the electronic computers arrived — they became the people who operated them. She had turned a moment that could have eliminated her team's role into a demonstration of exactly the adaptability and intelligence the agency could not afford to lose.

Mary Jackson was hired at Langley in 1951. In 1958, an engineer named Kazimierz Czarnecki recognized her mathematical ability and recommended her for an engineering training program — which would qualify her for a promotion to aerospace engineer. The program was held at a segregated school. Jackson petitioned the city of Hampton, Virginia for permission to attend classes with white students. The city granted the exception.

She completed the program and became NASA's first Black female aerospace engineer in 1958. Her work focused on the behavior of air currents in wind tunnel experiments, contributing to the aerodynamic research that underpinned American aircraft and spacecraft design. She later moved into a management role focused specifically on promoting the hiring and advancement of women and minorities at NASA — because she had seen firsthand how the institutional barriers worked.

Jackson eventually hit a ceiling in her engineering career — NASA's promotion system favored the aeronautical engineers over mathematicians and experimentalists. She voluntarily took a demotion to become an Equal Opportunity Specialist, sacrificing her own career advancement to spend her remaining years at NASA trying to open the doors for others. She gave up seniority to do the work of making the institution less hostile.

The story of the West Computers was not secret — it was simply unpublicized. It lived in internal NASA documents, in the memories of the women themselves, and in the Black community in Hampton Roads, Virginia, where Langley was located. For decades it received no national attention.

In 2016, journalist and author Margot Lee Shetterly published Hidden Figures, drawing on oral histories, NASA archives, and decades of research. The book became a bestseller. The film adaptation, released the same year, grossed $236 million worldwide. Katherine Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. In 2019, Congress awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to Johnson, Vaughan, Jackson, and the entire West Area Computing group. A NASA computing facility was renamed the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility in 2017.

Katherine Johnson died in February 2020 at the age of 101. Dorothy Vaughan died in 2008. Mary Jackson died in 2005. None of them lived to see their stories become standard curriculum. The recognition came — but it came late, it came because a Black woman journalist went and found the story herself, and it came to women who had spent their careers working inside an institution that used their labor while erasing their names. The pattern is not unique to NASA. It is the pattern.