The Greatest
Science
Science
Books of 2016
12.HIDDEN FIGURES
“No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But
a woman! What more can you ask to be?” astronomer
Maria Mitchell, who paved the way
for women in American science,
admonished the first class of female astronomers at Vassar in 1876. By the
middle of the next century, a team of unheralded women scientists and engineers
were powering space
exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Meanwhile, across the continent and in what was
practically another country, a parallel but very different revolution was
taking place: In the segregated South, a growing number of black female
mathematicians, scientists, and engineers were steering early space exploration
and helping American win the Cold War at NASA’s Langley Research Center in
Hampton, Virginia.
Long before the term “computer” came to
signify the machine that dictates our lives, these remarkable women were
working as human “computers” — highly skilled professional reckoners, who thought
mathematically and computationally for their living and for their country. When
Neil Armstrong set his foot on the moon, his “giant leap for mankind” had been
powered by womankind, particularly by Katherine Johnson — the “computer” who
calculated Apollo 11’s launch windows and who was awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom by President Obama at age 97 in 2015, three years after the
accolade was conferred upon John Glenn, the astronaut whose flight trajectory
Johnson had made possible.
Katherine
Johnson at her Langley desk with a globe, or “Celestial Training Device,” 1960
(Photographs: NASA)
In Hidden
Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (public
library), Margot Lee Shetterly tells
the untold story of these brilliant women, once on the frontlines of our
cultural leaps and since sidelined by the selective collective memory we call
history.
She writes:
Just as islands — isolated places with
unique, rich biodiversity — have relevance for the ecosystems everywhere, so
does studying seemingly isolated or overlooked people and events from the past
turn up unexpected connections and insights to modern life.
Against a sobering cultural backdrop,
Shetterly captures the enormous cognitive dissonance the very notion of these
black female mathematicians evokes:
Before a computer became an inanimate object,
and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course
of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court
case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that
separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King
Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial,
Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space
research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female
mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female.
Shetterly herself grew up in Hampton, which
dubbed itself “Spacetown USA,” amid this archipelago of women who were her
neighbors and teachers. Her father, who had built his first rocket in his early
teens after seeing the Sputnik launch, was one of Langley’s African American
scientists in an era when words we now shudder to hear were used instead of
“African American.” Like him, the first five black women who joined Langley’s
research staff in 1943 entered a segregated NASA — even though, as Shetterly
points out, the space agency was among the most inclusive workplaces in the
country, with more than fourfold the percentage of black scientists and
engineers than the national average.
Over the next forty years, the number of
these trailblazing black women mushroomed to more than fifty, revealing the
mycelia of a significant groundswell. Shetterly’s favorite Sunday school
teacher had been one of the early computers — a retired NASA mathematician
named Kathleen Land. And so Shetterly, who considers herself “as much a product
of NASA as the Moon landing,” grew up believing that black women simply
belonged in science and space exploration as a matter of course — after all,
they populated her father’s workplace and her town, a town whose church
“abounded with mathematicians.”
Embodying
astronomer Vera Rubin’s wisdom on how modeling
expands children’s scope of possibility,
Shetterly reflects on this normalizing and rousing power of example:
Building 1236, my father’s daily destination,
contained a byzantine complex of government-gray cubicles, perfumed with the
grown-up smells of coffee and stale cigarette smoke. His engineering colleagues
with their rumpled style and distracted manner seemed like exotic birds in a
sanctuary. They gave us kids stacks of discarded 11×14 continuous-form computer
paper, printed on one side with cryptic arrays of numbers, the blank side a
canvas for crayon masterpieces. Women occupied many of the cubicles; they
answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but they also made
hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and conferred with my father and other
men in the office on the stacks of documents that littered their desks. That so
many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother’s age, struck
me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the
face of science was brown like mine.
[…]
The community certainly included black
English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists,
black mechanics, janitors, and contractors, black cobblers, wedding planners,
real estate agents, and undertakers, several black lawyers, and a handful of
black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so many African
Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that’s just
what black folks did.
Katherine
Johnson, age 98 (Photograph: Annie Leibovitz for Vanity
Fair)
But despite the opportunities at NASA, almost
countercultural in their contrast to the norms of the time, life for these
courageous and brilliant women was no idyll — persons and polities are
invariably products of their time and place. Shetterly captures the sundering
paradoxes of the early computers’ experience:
I interviewed Mrs. Land about the early days
of Langley’s computing pool, when part of her job responsibility was knowing
which bathroom was marked for “colored” employees. And less than a week later I
was sitting on the couch in Katherine Johnson’s living room, under a framed
American flag that had been to the Moon, listening to a ninety-three-year-old
with a memory sharper than mine recall segregated buses, years of teaching and
raising a family, and working out the trajectory for John Glenn’s spaceflight.
I listened to Christine Darden’s stories of long years spent as a data analyst,
waiting for the chance to prove herself as an engineer. Even as a professional
in an integrated world, I had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms
and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took for an African
American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was
sure her calculations would put a man on the Moon.
[…]
And while the black women are the most hidden
of the mathematicians who worked at the NACA, the National Advisory Committee
for Aeronautics, and later at NASA, they were not sitting alone in the shadows:
the white women who made up the majority of Langley’s computing workforce over
the years have hardly been recognized for their contributions to the agency’s
long-term success. Virginia Biggins worked the Langley beat for the Daily
Press newspaper, covering the space program starting in 1958.
“Everyone said, ‘This is a scientist, this is an engineer,’ and it was always a
man,” she said in a 1990 panel on Langley’s human computers. She never got to
meet any of the women. “I just assumed they were all secretaries,” she said.
These women’s often impossible dual task of
preserving their own sanity and dignity while pushing culture forward is
perhaps best captured in the words of African American NASA mathematician
Dorothy Vaughan:
What I changed, I could; what I couldn’t, I
endured.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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