Reaching for the Moon: Chapter 5

But now that we lived in a city for the first time, we exercised an abundance of caution.

Many a Colored man had been lynched over the allegations that he’d looked a White man in the eye or looked at him in an “uppity” way—or, worse, looked that way at a White woman.

Indeed, all of us knew that the rules of segregation were arbitrary and the price for violating them could be vicious.

“During the Civil War they fled the brutality of slavery in search of the promise of safety offered by the Union General Benjamin F. Butler. He had made it known that he would consider people who had escaped to be ‘contraband of war’ and would protect them from slave patrollers and bounty hunters and would not return them to slavery.”

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing, as the two nations competed in the battle between Communism and democracy.

The mood had gotten worse in 1949, when the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb.

Later I would learn that the White women who worked at NACA were often the wives of the engineers and got in through nepotism.

“Our quota for Colored mathematicians has already been filled this year.”

“Well, ma’am, I’d like to fill out an application,” I said, tightrope-walking between being determined and perhaps seeming impudent.

The invisible social line—which, if crossed, might make her think I was sassy—was narrow and was applied arbitrarily.

“You studied at West Virginia University?” she asked incredulously.

Board of Education of Topeka by ruling that “in the field of education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”

In that proceeding, it had ruled that racially segregated facilities were constitutional as long as they were equal.

In that proceeding, it had ruled that racially segregated facilities were constitutional as long as they were equal.

During the next several years, one of Virginia’s US senators, Harry Byrd, would promote a strategy called the Southern Manifesto, which opposed integrated public schools as a violation of states’ rights.

And she moved with an authority that I had rarely seen in other Colored women, who were usually required to fill subservient roles.

During that era our nation was focused on the goal of supersonic flight, which means that the speed of the airplane is faster than the speed of sound.

We did a good job, worked a full day, and fulfilled our responsibilities; that was our mantra.

At NACA, I didn’t feel segregation in quite the same oppressive way that I did out in the world.

I was to look through his long calculation sheets and compute an answer for him.

When I finished that project, I expected to be sent back to West Computing so that Mrs. Vaughn could assign me to the next project, as was the normal protocol.

Back then men—especially those in prestigious careers—expected that women would not question them.

I also would persist even if I thought I was being ignored.

The newspaper, a book, the waiting room pamphlet about the power of prayer.

Jimmie looked so small and vulnerable as he lay there alone, big bandages on his head.