Hidden Figures: Chapters 6–10

Managers upbraided a group of messenger boys overheard dishing office dirt at a local diner, and engineers caught having a loud, detailed work conversation at the Industrial USO were called on the carpet.

She had come full circle and then some, as she tried to attune her ear to the argot that flew back and forth between the inhabitants of the laboratory, all seeking to answer the fundamental question “What makes things fly?”

Engineers blasted air over planes, sometimes full-sized vehicles or fractional-scale models, even disembodied wings or fuselages, closely observing how the air flowed around the object in order to extrapolate how the object would fly through the air.

After several rounds of refinement in the Langley wind tunnels, the Mustang achieved its apotheosis with the P-51D.

There simply wasn’t enough supply to meet the demands of a growing black population, most of whom considered a comfortable and safe place to live at the top of the list of the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt elucidated during the war.

The sylvan fields, forests, and shores had been mowed down, paved over, and built up with roads, bridges, hospitals, boatyards, jails, and military bases, cities in and of themselves.

Rather than fight, Holt moved to integrate the state’s public graduate schools, asking his friend Davis in a clandestine meeting to handpick three West Virginia State College graduates to desegregate the state university, starting in the summer of 1940.

Smart, charismatic, hardworking, and unflappable, Katherine was the perfect choice.

In idle moments her thoughts turned to Dr. Claytor and the phantom career he had assiduously prepared her for.

There was never a question that Dorothy would return to work as soon as possible after the births of her last two children, as soon as they were old enough to thrive in the nexus of siblings and babysitters and boarders that provided their daily lives with care and structure.

It felt fresh and new, that kind of free-form entertainment, away from the traditional, structured socializing that occurred for most blacks at home or in church, or in the nest of interconnected social and civil organizations that absorbed the precious free time of the incipient black middle class.

So his managers conspired to skip him ahead to a P-2, which, by the arcane rules of bureaucracy, didn’t have the same requirement.

But on October 14, 1947, pilot Chuck Yeager, flying over the Mojave Desert in an NACA-developed experimental research plane called the Bell X-l, pierced the sound barrier for the first time in history, a fact that was corroborated by the female computers on the ground who analyzed the data that came from the instruments on Yeager’s plane.

In 1951, Air Scoop published a long list of organizations that the government had labeled totalitarian, Communist, or subversive, the clear message that affiliation with any of them might jeopardize one’s job.

Even A. Philip Randolph, an avowed socialist who preached a fiery sermon in favor of fair employment and civil rights legislation in front of a packed audience in Norfolk in 1950, was careful in his speeches to denounce Communism as antithetical to the interests of the Negro people.