Dr.

Sarah McLennan
semcle@email.wm.edu
Visiting Assistant Professor, Virginia State University
Conference paper for SHOT 2015 (unpublished)

Computing and the Color Line:

Race, Gender, and Opportunity in Early Computing at NASA
In 1951, Mary Winston Jackson heard that Langley Memorial Laboratory was hiring
women with degrees in the sciences. A former teacher who majored in math and physics,
Jackson had the education and experience to qualify for a position in the emerging field of
aeronautical computing at Langley, one of the primary research centers for the National
Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the precursor to NASA). From the mid-1930s into
the 1970s, hundreds of human computers like Jackson played an integral role in research at
Langley. Driven by the labor demands of World War II and the space race, the lab hired women
exclusively for this job. Recruiters targeted white and African American college graduates,
emphasizing the value of their education and the service they could provide to their country.
However, gender and race also defined the status of computing labor at Langley. As an African
American woman, Jackson began work with a sub-professional job classification in the civil
service, and a posting in the segregated West Area Computer Pool.1
Jacksons thirty-five year career at Langley spanned major developments in computing
technology, aeronautics, and the employment opportunities for both women and African

Information on Jackson is drawn from interviews she did with Beverly Golemba and accounts given by
her coworker, Gloria Champine. See Beverly E. Golemba Human Computers: The Women in
Aeronautical Research, unpublished manuscript 1994, NASA Langley Archives, Hampton, VA,
especially 5-6, 40-43, and 117-119. A copy of the manuscript is available at
http://gisx.ndc.nasa.gov/historic/Human_Computers; Gloria Champine, interview by Sandra Johnson for
the NACA Oral History Project, May 1, 2008, transcript available in the NASA CRGIS database,
http://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/crgis/images/e/e9/ChampineGR_2008.pdf. All female computers received the
sub-professional job classification, regardless of race.

McLennan

Americans in these fields. Transferred to one of the first integrated computer sections in the mid1950s (at the 4x4 Supersonic Pressure Tunnel), she collected data during wind tunnel tests and
developed equations used to measure airflow and reduce drag in the design of supersonic
aircraft. When her section began adopting electronic computers, Jackson learned to program and
operate them, and helped write training manuals on how to apply this new technology in
supersonic research.2 She took engineering courses offered to Langley employees, and with the
support of her supervisor Kasimir Carnecki, contributed to research reports. In 1958 this work
earned her a promotion to electronics engineer, and she became one of the first women to hold
that rank. Towards the end of her career Jackson took an administrative position as an Equal
Opportunity Specialist, advising other women and minorities on advancing at the lab.3
Mary Jackson had an exceptional career, but her experience is also representative of the
opportunities and challenges a position in computing offered. At Langley, female computers
participated in cutting-edge projects from supersonic aircraft to space flight. Helping devise
methods and techniques specific to the field of aeronautical and aerospace research, they defined
a central role for themselves in computing technology as it developed from calculating with slide
rules to programming and operating Langleys first electronic computers. Working as a computer
provided an entre into the field of aeronautical research at a time when women, particularly
African American women, were rarely hired as engineers or other positions, and offered another
career option besides teaching for those with degrees in the sciences.
Even so, female computers remained outliers in the male-dominated field of engineering,
and African Americans faced racial boundaries, from segregated workspaces to sub-professional
job classifications, as well. As they pursued careers at Langley, these women worked to
2
3

Golemba, 117.
Gloria Champine interview, 13.

McLennan

challenge and change discriminatory policies, and reshape the culture of the lab. African
American computers found they had to prove that women could successfully do engineering
work, and seek out their own opportunities for advancement in a system that structurally was not
geared towards recognizing their achievements.
Langley organized its first computing section in 1935.4 Comprised of five women
working from a central office in the Administration Building, this computer pool took on
calculating work that had originally been done by the engineers themselves. While the initial
computer pool at Langley proved a success, what really drove the expansion of computing (and
the expansion of Langley, overall) was the United States involvement in World War II.
Between 1941 and 1945, employee numbers at LMAL climbed dramatically from 940 to 3220,
and the lab itself doubled in size.5 In addition to the central pool, computing sections were
established in the main wind tunnels and research divisions. Advertisements for computing jobs
appeared in trade journals, newspapers, and pamphlets sent to colleges and universities. The
labor demands of World War II, coupled with wartime legislation that banned racial
discrimination in hiring for federal jobs and defense industries, also opened more positions for
African Americans at the lab.6 The earliest references to black women being hired as computers
Ive found so far date to 1943. They worked in a segregated computing section known as the
4

For more on Langleys early computers, see Sarah McLennan, When the Computer Wore a Skirt:
Langleys Human Computers 1935-1970, 2011, compiled for the Langley CRGIS database,
http://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/historic/Human_Computers.
5
James Schultz, Winds of Change: Expanding the Frontiers of Flight- Langley Research Center's 75
years of accomplishment 1917-1992, Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
1992, 47. LMAL Personnel Total Exceeds 2000 LMAL Bulletin June 16, 1943.
6
Key legislation, much of it in response to political pressure from civil rights leaders, included the
Ramspeck Act of 1940 that made racial discrimination illegal in both employment and promotion policies
in the federal service, and Roosevelts executive order 8587 (Nov. 7, 1940) got rid of the photo
requirement for civil service applications. On June 25, 1941 Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802,
establishing a Committee on Fair Employment Practice for defense industries. See Desmond King,
Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007).

McLennan

West Area Computer Pool. A notice in the December social column of the Norfolk Journal
and Guide, a local black newspaper, announced Mrs. D.J. Vaughn, instructor in mathematics at
the high school for several years, has accepted a position at Langley.7 Miriam Daniel Mann and
Dorothy Hoover also left teaching for computing jobs that year, while others like Eunice Gray
Smith, joined straight out of college.8
Smith graduated from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), a historically black
college located near Langley that became one of the main sources for Langley computers.9 In
addition to degree programs, Hampton offered courses for the federal governments Engineering,
Science, and Management War Training program (ESMWT). Hampton had the largest
enrollment of any black college in the ESMWT program during 1942-1943, the first year it was
offered. 953 people, 349 of them women, took the free ten-to-twelve week courses, with nineteen
of the women completing a course in engineering fundamentals designed to qualify them for
government jobs as junior engineers.10 Articles in the Journal & Guide, like this one titled
Deadline Near for Women to Enter Engineering Courses, encouraged black women with high
school or college degrees to take advantage of engineering mathematics and other courses that
provided skills for jobs, like those in computing at Langley, with a high demand for workers.11

Elois Barker, Farmville, VA Norfolk Journal and Guide, December 11, 1943, 16.
Peninsula Spotlight Norfolk Journal and Guide, February 5, 1949, D5.
9
Margot Lee Shetterlys research indicates the only other school to rival Hamptons numbers at Langley
was the Womens College at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. See Shetterly Research Blog,
July 9, 2015, http://margotleeshetterly.com/blog.
10
All information and statistics from Hampton Tops Colleges in ESMWT Work Norfolk Journal and
Guide, October 20, 1943, 20.
11
Deadline Near for Women to Enter Engineering Courses Norfolk Journal and Guide, January 30,
1943, 11, and ESMWT Class Opens at Hampton Norfolk Journal and Guide, October 17, 1942, 6.
8

McLennan

Defining Computing Labor at Langley

Computing, as a profession, dated back to the late-nineteenth century, and typically both
men and women were employed as human computers in astronomy, the social sciences,
statistical research and ballistics testing.12 Female computers at Langley occupied a position that
fell somewhere in between clerical and scientific work. Their job, and the presence of an allfemale workforce in research fields viewed as masculine domains had no precedent at the lab.
From the 1940s to the 1960s, computers were classed as subprofessionals, SP-3 (Junior
Computer, starting at $1440/year) through SP-8 (Chief Computer, starting at $3200/year).13 Most
hired at Langley had at least a bachelors degree, and many former computers noted in
interviews that men with similar qualifications were typically hired as Junior Engineers, a
professional classification with a higher salary and more opportunity for research and
promotion.14 Computers labor and skills were needed, but their subprofessional classification
limited their access to engineering jobs and research at the lab, containing and defining their
expertise as separate from, and secondary to that of male engineers.
Jennifer Light has written about the way [patterns in] the sexual division of labor prior to
World War II influenced the job assignments and perception of female programmers of ENIAC,
minimizing the complexities of their actual work.15 A 1942 report on Langleys computing
program revealed that similar gendered assumptions shaped its representation. It was produced
12

For more information on this history, see David Alan Grier, When Computers were Human, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
13
These salary figures are from 1940, and would have changed over the years, though the classification
range stayed the same until the system was redone in the 1960s. United States War Department, Office of
the Chief of Engineers, Work of the Engineer Department August 1, 1940, 3.
14
War Department, Work of the Engineer, 2. For more accounts of hiring practices see Golemba, 4278, and Panel Discussion with Women Computers NASA Langley videotape, December 13, 1990.
Computers official job titles changed to mathematician or later, data analyst but they were still
referred to as computers among Langley employees.
15
Jennifer Light, When Computers were Women Technology and Culture Vol. 40 No. 3 (July 1999):
456.

McLennan

by a representative from Curtiss Aircraft, who was interested in replicating the program in the
aircraft industry. Describing Langleys computing pool as conducted "much as a typing pool, it
noted that women generally have a higher clerical aptitude rating than men, which made them
particularly suited to computing work. The engineers admit themselves, the report declared,
that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they woulddue in large
measure to the feeling among the engineers that their college and industrial experience is being
wasted and thwarted by mere repetitive calculations. The majority of computers, however, were
also college grads with interests in math or science (preferably physics), and specially
trained at Langley to handle simple calculations as well as complicated formulas which
necessitate a knowledge of trigonometry and sometimescalculus. 16
The reports description simultaneously noted the skill and expertise of female
computers, and devalued the work they did. Calculations dismissed as a waste of mens
expertise by the engineers became ideal work for women, many of whom had the same
educational background and qualifications as male junior engineers. The use of terms like girl
computer and comparisons to a typing pool further removed computing from its original context
as a part an engineers job, containing it in the realm of feminized clerical work.
While the specific tasks a computer did varied according to need and her department, the
majority of computing work involved three components: reading film, running calculations, and
plotting data. During wind tunnel tests, manometer boards measured pressure changes using
liquid-filled tubes. Computers read photographic films of the manometer readings, and
recorded the data on worksheets. Working one on one for an engineer, or collectively in a
computing section, computers then ran different types of calculations to analyze the data, and
16

The report was produced by a representative from Curtiss Aircraft interested in replicating the program
at that business, in consultation with Langley staff including Head of Computing Virginia Tucker. R.H.
Cramer to R.A. Darby, Computing Groups Organization and Practice at NACA April 27, 1942.

McLennan

plotted the results on graph paper. Initially, this was done by hand, using slide rules, curves, and
basic calculating machines, like the Marchant or the more popular Friden.17
All computers at Langley did the same work, but the first African American computers
were grouped in a segregated section. The West Area Computers processed data sent to the
pool and also joined other sections on a temporary basis when additional help was needed. And,
in a period when segregation was policy across the South, they also encountered segregated
bathrooms and dining facilities, along with barriers to professional advancement.18 Kathryn
Peddrew, for example, had a degree in chemistry and recounted being hired in 1943 to work in
that division at NACA, until the agency discovered that she was black. She ended up reassigned
to the West Computers, because African Americans were not employed for her original
position.19 Dorothy Vaughan, hired as a West Computer in 1943, describing not being promoted
to a computer supervisor until 1958, noting I changed what I could and what I couldnt I
endured.20 Miriam Daniel Manns daughter recalled her mothers story about taking down a
colored sign on one of the cafeteria tables in the 1940s, only to find it replaced the next day.21

17

For more specific information on computing techniques and work, see Sheryll Goecke Powers, Women
in Flight Research at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center from 1946-1995. Monographs in Aerospace
History No. 6, NASA History Office, 1997, and Golemba, Human Computers.
18
Under Woodrow Wilson s administration, federal government institutions and facilities were resegregated, reversing the policy of integrated civil service that had existed since Reconstruction. On
July 26, 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the armed forces.
Beginning in 1953, President Eisenhower moved to desegregate federal institutions and facilities,
beginning with those in Washington DC. This may have influenced the desegregation of computing units
at Langley. Key legislation includes the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and a 1973 requirement that the
government implement affirmative action programs. See United States National Park Service Civil
Rights in America Theme Study: Racial Desegregation of Public Accommodations, February 17, 2004.
On legislation and its impact on NASA see Sylvia Fries The History of Women in NASA, Report
presented for Womens Equality Day, Marshall Space Flight Center, August 23, 1991.
19
Golemba, 18.
20
Vaughan quoted in Golemba, 43.
21
Miriam Mann Harris account of her mother, Miriam D. Manns time at Langley. Emailed to author
September 12, 2011.

McLennan

These accounts reflect the complexities of race relations in the segregated workplace.
According to Beverly Golembas study of early computers at Langley, many white computers
were not aware of the West Computers, although both the black and white women she
interviewed reported that when computers did do a project with each other everyone worked
well together. African American interviewees expressed frustration at the institutional racism
and segregation at Langley, while noting that on an interpersonal level, productive work (and
sometimes social) relationships formed across the color line. They recalled a feeling of
camaraderie among section employees, as engineers, model builders and computers worked
together as a team. Yet, even when computing sections began being integrated during the mid1950s, Mary Jackson found that one still needed to know which restrooms were for which
race.22
Negotiating both gender and racial boundaries, African American computers worked to
challenge and change discriminatory policies as they pursued careers at Langley. Mann retired in
1966, Vaughn in 1971, and Peddrew in 1986. Katherine Johnson, who joined the West
Computers in 1953, only spent a few weeks there and told an interviewer she didnt have time
for inequality. Assigned to work with Henry Pearson in the Flight Research Division, Johnson
went on to join the Space Task Force in 1958 where she calculated trajectories for Alan
Shepherd and John Glenns space flights.23 Everything was so new, Johnson recalled, we
were defining the field as we went along. There were no textbooks, so we had to write them. We
wrote the first textbook by hand, starting from scratchWe created the equations needed to
track a vehicle in space. I was lucky I was working with the division that worked out all the
22

Quoted in Golemba, 42-44. Along with Golembas manuscript, Panel Discussion with Women
Computers NASA Langley videotape, December 13, 1990 contains interviews with some of the first
African American computers.
23
Hodges She Was a Computer When Computers Wore Skirts Langley Researcher News, August 8,
2008.

McLennan
original trajectoriesWe needed to be assertive as women in those daysassertive and
aggressiveand the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were.24
Along with changing laws, actions taken by Langley employees played a key role in the
changing the culture of the lab.
With the introduction of the first electronic computers, rather than being dissolved,
computing sections gradually shifted to operating and programming work. The Bell Electronic
Computer, a huge machine acquired by NACA in 1947, had its own computing group headed
by Sara Bullock.25 Kathryn Peddrew both punched cards for early computers, and operated the
machines themselves. She noted that this type of work still required specialized knowledge;
computers had to know the kind of results the engineers were looking for in order to put
together the right type of program. Dorothy Vaughn took courses offered at Langley or nearby
colleges to keep up with the rapid development of electronic computers and learned
FORTRAN.26 The human computers often wrote the programming for electronic computers
because programs geared to aeronautical problems did not exist. Based on information from the
oral histories and Langleys newsletter, computing sections continued to do a mix of calculating
by hand as well as work with electronic computers into the 1970s. Katherine Johnson famously
recounted how John Glenn requested that she double-check the computer calculations for the
1962 Friendship 7 mission. It took her a day and a half to run the calculations by hand, but she
ultimately came up with the same numbers the computer had produced.27 The sections
themselves trained new employees on how to program, operate, and punch cards for the
24

Wini Warren, Black Women Scientists in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1999),143. Quotes are from Warrens oral history interview with Johnson in 1996.
25
Derrick Henry, Sara Bullock, early NASA mathematician The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
December 25, 2003, D7 and Announce New Research Device, Air Scoop March 28, 1947.
26
Peddrew and Vaughan quoted in Golemba, 116-119.
27
A video interview of Johnson telling this story, for Makers.com, is available at
http://www.makers.com/katherine-g-johnson.

McLennan 10
electronic computers, and all of these tasks seem to have been done interchangeably within a
section, depending on need.
By 1967, when Christine Darden was hired, her work consisted of writing programs for
electronic computers. When I came here, they still called the group the computers, and I told
one of my bosses one time, I was not a computer, that was a machineI was a person and I
really didnt like being called a computer. Darden, who had a masters degree and a
background in BASIC and FORTRAN, was still funneled into a lower-grade computing section,
and found the position very much a dead end job. She spent five years writing programs for
which she gained no recognition or promotion, and finally went to her section head, asking why
is it that men who have come here with the same degree were immediately assigned to sections
to work on own projects and write papers and move ahead, while I havent had a promotion the
entire time Ive been here? He replied that no one had really complained to him about that
before. 28
In her study of race and U.S. engineering programs, Amy Slaton emphasized the
durability of patterns of racial, ethnic, and gender representation in STEM fields, arguing that
the lack of attention paid to the historical role of identity in scientific and technical practice
helped perpetuate exclusionary and inequitable employment and enrollment patterns regardless
of intentionality.29 In oral history accounts, former computers chronicled similar challenges they
faceddifficulty of promotion, lack of recognition of their workdue in large part to a
classification system that did not accurately represent what their work involved. Darden
eventually got a transfer to sonic boom research, and went on to earn a PhD and become an

28

All quotes from author and Antony Clemons interview with Dr. Christine Darden, April 1, 2011.
Available at https://youtu.be/z_QiI_HESWY.
29
Amy Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color
Line, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 207-208.

McLennan 11
engineer that developed codes in supersonic aerodynamics that are still used today.30 Her
experience reflects how durable the definitions originally mapped out for African American and
female computers, based on gender and racial conventions from the 1940s could be, even after
three decades of work. But her insistence at pushing beyond those boundaries was also a legacy
of their engagement with technology throughout the era of early development in computing.
Recovering the presence and key role African American women played in the
development of computing at Langley can shift the historical understandings and perceptions of
the field in the present. Their work was publicized and well known within their community at the
time. Black newspapers like the Baltimore Afro-American and the Norfolk Journal and Guide
frequently carried profiles of computers, and stories about mathematicians like Melba Roy and
Dorothy Hoover, involved in computing for NASAs space program, who both had masters
degrees in science, and were married with children.31 A 1958 newspaper article by the Labor
Departments Womens Bureau encouraged girls keenly interested in the subject in high
school to pursue higher education and careers in scientific fields. If machines and puzzles
appeal you might hitch your math talents to a big new computer or electronic brainwork[ing]
as a coder or programmer, the article related, for the brains are real dunces without human
beings to guide them.32 John Morton, an African American computer scientist working at
NASAs Goddard center, advised black students to consider careers in computer science and the
space program, telling them opportunities are unlimited, because this field is so new.33 In
1958, at the same time the Virginia governor was shutting down public schools to halt
30

Dardens codes included SEEB (developed 1983) as well as AERO2S, a subsonic analysis code, and
WINGDES, a subsonic/supersonic design code, both developed with Harry W. Carlson. For further
information see Warren, Black Women Scientists, 78.
31
Two Women Help Chart Way for the Astronauts Norfolk Journal and Guide, July 6, 1963, 5.
32
Math in Stars for Girls Interested in the Subject Norfolk Journal and Guide, November 1, 1958, 6.
33
Morton quoted in Goddard Scientist has Key Apollo Role Baltimore Afro American, September 23,
1967, 36.

McLennan 12
desegregation, a school group from Huntington High School, Norfolks African American high
school, visited Langley for a workshop on careers at the lab. All of this helped create a context
where, Margot Lee Shetterly, a journalist and daughter of a Langley engineer currently
completing a book project about Langleys African American computers, wrote, I knew so
many African Americans working in science, math and engineering that I thought thats just
what black folks didFor me, growing up in Hampton, Virginia, the face of science was brown
like mine. 34

34

Margot Lee Shetterly, webpage for her forthcoming book Hidden Figures: The African American
Women Mathematicians Who Helped NASA and the United States Win the Space Race: An Untold Story.
http://margotleeshetterly.com/hidden-figures-nasas-african-american-computers.