Yet when the Head Computer Margery Hannah gets promoted and Margarery’s second, Blanche, unexpectedly falls ill and dies, Dorothy is asked to fill the role. Even so, she finds it hard to move up the ranks: there are few opportunities available to women, and even fewer for black women. ![]() The black computers, much to their consternation, are also made to sit together in the cafeteria at a table marked with a sign that reads “Colored Computers.” Nonetheless, the black computers play an important role in helping the engineers at Langley improve American fighter planes and develop ever more powerful bomb payloads.Īfter the war, Dorothy fears she will be let go by the NACA, but instead she is made a permanent employee in 1946. ![]() White computers, run by white Head Computers Margerey Hannah and Blanche Shopsin, work out of a different office on the East Side of Langley’s campus, called East Area. As a black computer, she must work in the segregated West Area Computing room. Meanwhile, Dorothy Vaughan begins work at the NACA. She completes the summer session of the master’s program, but then drops out of the program to start a family. She is such an excellent mathematician that she is invited to integrate a nearby university, where she has been accepted into a master’s program in mathematics. She accepts the job, even though it requires her to move quite a distance and be away from her family.Īt around the same time, Katherine Coleman is a math major at West Virginia. She applies, and is hired as a mathematician. One day she sees an advertisement for jobs at the NACA. Married with children, Dorothy comes from a middle class black family, well-respected and well-known by other black families in town. In the summer of 1942, Dorothy Vaughan, a math teacher, is also working in a miltary laundry room in order to earn extra money and to support the American war effort. Langley hires some black female computers, but places them in a segregated office called West Area. Further, Jim Crow laws are still in place in the South, which means that Hampton is a segregated place. At the time, mathematicians, who are commonly called “computers,” are almost all women. In 1943, in the midst of World War II, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, VA seeks to hire hundreds of junior physicists and mathematicians to help in the war effort by supporting engineers in performing aeronautical research as part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the NACA).
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