With the threat of 100,000 people swarming to the Capitol, President Franklin D. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights activist, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the continued injustices of racial discrimination. Though the pressing needs of war were great, racial discrimination remained strong and few jobs existed for African-Americans, regardless of gender. The first black computers didn’t set foot at Langley until the 1940s.
NASA dissolved the remaining few human computers in the 1970s as the technological advances made their roles obsolete. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing pool for specific projects- Christine Darden worked to advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. They contributed to the ever-changing design of a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more aerodynamic. They worked through equations that described every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the greater mission of the project. The West Computers were at the heart of the center’s advancements. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as the space race gained speed. Built in 1917, this research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day into war machines. Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. “Those guys have all told their stories.” Now it’s the women’s turn. “We've had astronauts, we’ve had engineers- John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft,” she says. The book's film adaptation, starring Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women’s lives and accomplishments. “These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary,” says Margot Lee Shetterly. Called the West Computers, after the area to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and engineers of all races and genders to follow.
Many of these “computers” are finally getting their due, but conspicuously missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by courageous, African-American women. Sharp and successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed. Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. As America stood on the brink of a Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater, spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians.
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