Hidden Figures: Chapters 11–15

The press had more than the usual fun with such an esoteric engineering concept, calling the new planes “wasp-waisted” and “Coke-bottle shaped” and talking about the “Marilyn Monroe effect.”

Butler, perhaps trying to circumvent complaints that might short-circuit his offer, did not disclose ahead of time to Langley’s engineering staff that the newest recruit was black.

Langley liked to think of itself as a place that eschewed bureaucracy, where an idea from a cafeteria worker could get a fair hearing if it were compelling enough.

Her showdown with John Becker was the kind of gambit that the laboratory expected, encouraged, and valued in its promising male engineers.

A former teacher in Newport News’s public schools, he had taken the Newsome Park job after being fired for joining what was one of the most bitter and contentious of all of Virginia’s teacher-pay-equalization lawsuits.

Against ignorance, she and others like her mounted a day-in, day-out charm offensive: impeccably dressed, well-spoken, patriotic, and upright, they were racial synecdoches, keenly aware that the interactions that individual blacks had with whites could have implications for the entire black community.

Fortunately, Katherine Goble’s confidence in her own mathematical abilities, and her innate curiosity, pushed her to pepper the engineers with questions, just as she had as a child with her parents and teachers.

For any number of reasons, concrete and ineffable, there was something about Katherine Goble that made her as comfortable in the office in 1244 as she was in the choir loft at Carver Presbyterian.

She seemed to absorb the short-term oscillations of life without being dislodged by them, as though she were actually standing back observing that both travail and elation were merely part of a much larger, much smoother curve.

Virginia’s resistance to the ruling would, over time, be more intransigent and longer lasting than that of any other state.

Virtually every review of the situation questioned how much desperately needed brainpower was being squandered by the intentional neglect of America’s Negro schools.

In the mid-1950s, a woman named Helen Willey led a successful charge to have every female computer with a math degree upgraded to mathematician, a title that automatically applied to men with the same credential.

The crisis unfolded over days, each morning a new installment, and always accompanied by photos that were as difficult to look at as they were to look away from: images of black students Christine's age, their arms heavy with books, struggling to maintain composure as a phalanx of military men protected them from the screaming, spitting, bottle-throwing white crowd that surrounded them.

Photos of the black students being threatened with violence for the pursuit of education, along with the details of lynchings, subjugations, and other injustices issuing forth from the South, undermined the United States’ standing in the postwar competition for allies.

Christine also took umbrage at the Soviets’ excursion into the heavens.