It was Miriam Mann who finally decided it was too much to take. “There’s my sign for today,” she would say upon entering the cafeteria, spying the placard designating their table in the back of the room. Not even five feet tall, her feet just grazing the floor when she sat down, Miriam Mann had a personality as outsized as she was tiny.
The West Computers watched their colleague remove the sign and banish it to the recesses of her purse, her small act of defiance inspiring both anxiety and a sense of empowerment. The ritual played itself out with absurd regularity. The sign, placed by an unseen hand, made the unspoken rules of the cafeteria explicit. When Miriam snatched the sign, it took its leave for a few days, perhaps a week, maybe longer, before it was replaced with an identical twin, the letters of the new sign just as blankly menacing as its predecessor’s.
The signs and their removal were a regular topic of conversation among the women of West Computing, who debated the prudence of the action. As the sign drama played itself out in the Langley cafeteria, an incident that would have national repercussions took place in Gloucester County, just twenty miles away. Irene Morgan worked at the Baltimore-based aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin Company, assigned to the production line of the B-26 Marauder. In the summer of 1944 she came home to Virginia on the Greyhound bus to visit her mother, but was arrested on the return trip to Baltimore for refusing to move to the Colored section. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund took the case and planned to use it to challenge segregation rules on interstate transportation. In 1946, the Supreme Court, in Morgan v. Virginia, held that segregation on interstate buses was illegal. But what hope had the West Computers of making a federal case out of something so banal as a cafeteria sign? More likely, whoever kept the table stocked with signs would just decide that it was time to get rid of the troublemakers. “They are going to fire you over that sign, Miriam,” her husband, William, told her at night over dinner. Negro life in America was a never-ending series of negotiations: when to fight and when to concede. This, Miriam had decided, was one to fight. “Then they’re just going to have to do it,” she would retort.
The Manns lived on Hampton Institute’s campus. Though the student body was predominantly black, the school’s president and much of the faculty were white. Malcolm MacLean, a former administrator from the University of Minnesota, had taken the helm of the school in 1940, and was determined that the school’s fully committed participation in the war effort would be his legacy. As the aeronautical laboratory expanded west to meet the demands of the war, its twin, Langley Field, sought to grow in order to accommodate the Army Air Corps’ booming operation. A Boston philanthropist had deeded to Hampton Institute a former plantation named Shellbanks Farm, which served as an agricultural laboratory for Negro and Indian students at the school. In 1941, MacLean oversaw the sale of the 770-acre property to the federal government for use by Langley Field, making it one of the largest air bases in the world.
Under MacLean’s direction, the college also established a US naval training school, effectively turning the campus into an active military base. Military police manned all campus entrances, patrolling the comings and goings of everyone on the grounds. From around the country, more than a thousand black naval recruits were sent to the school to receive instruction in the repair of airplane and boat engines. The graduates then headed off to stateside service at bases like Maryland’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River, ground zero for the navy’s flight test activity. And Hampton was determined to be the leader of all black colleges in providing the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training (ESMWT) programs that had graduated West Computing’s first members. Men and women crowded into Hampton Institute classrooms offering instruction in everything from radio science to chemistry. At a war labor conference that Hampton Institute hosted in 1942, MacLean told attendees that the war could be “the greatest break in history for minority groups.”
Many local whites considered MacLean distastefully progressive, dangerous even, with his strident calls to boost Negro participation in the war. But it was his comfort with racial mixing in social situations that really fanned the flames. In speeches, he urged white colleges to employ Negro professors. He entertained both white and black guests at the president’s residence (called the Mansion House), even allowing them to smoke. He went so far as to dance with a Hampton coed at a campus mixer, scandalizing the local gentry (and scoring points with the Hampton students). He seemed to be a true believer in the need for the Negro to advance in American society, a true champion of the tenets of the Double V.
Henry Reid, the engineer in charge of the Langley laboratory, was anything but a firebrand. An understated electrical engineering graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, Reid served as an able ambassador for the Yankee-heavy laboratory, replying to invitations to attend local bridge openings with the same care and promptness he used in corresponding with Orville Wright. He embraced the Hampton and Newport News Kiwanis Club set that MacLean spurned. And yet, in some ways the two men were cut from the same cloth: passionate about their particular fields, pragmatic by nature, come-heres with interests and responsibilities that extended beyond the southern sensibilities and social obligations of the town in which they worked. Almost certainly at some point they found themselves in the same place at the same time, in their hurried efforts to push their respective institutions to keep up with the rhythm of the war. Neither left fingerprints on Langley’s decision to hire black women mathematicians. Keeping a public distance from the matter might have been a strategic decision on the part of both men: if the approval process took place quietly, through the “color-blind” bureaucratic gears of the US Civil Service Commission, there was less chance of derailing an advance that served both their missions. The word about the Colored Computers made the round in the community, naturally, and there were those who saw in their employment evidence that the world was coming to an end. Even among the local gentry who attended concerts and theater at Hampton Institute’s grand concert auditorium, Ogden Hall, there were those who expected to be seated at the front of the hall, apart even from the school’s black faculty and administrators.
Some of Langley’s white employees openly defied southern conventions. Head computer Margery Hannah went out of her way to treat the West Area women as equals, and had even invited some of them to work-related social affairs at her apartment. This was nearly unheard of, and made Marge a pariah as far as some white colleagues were concerned.
One of the most brilliant engineers on the laboratory’s staff took an active interest in standing up to the prejudice he saw around town. Robert “R. T.” Jones, whose theory on triangular delta-shaped airplane wings would revolutionize the discipline, was walking through the streets of Hampton one evening when he came upon a group of Hampton police officers harassing a black man. The cops were on the verge of beating the man up when Jones shouted at them to stop. They left the man alone and allowed him to leave, deciding instead to take Jones into custody. He spent the night in the city hoosegow for his trouble. Another engineer, Arthur Kantrowitz, bailed Jones out the next morning.
Engineers from the northern and western states were probably of mixed minds on the issue of race mixing. While it may have been unthinkable for most to extend their social circles to include black colleagues, within the circumscribed atmosphere of the office, they were cordial, even friendly. They got to know the women by their work, requesting their favorites for projects, open to giving a smart person—black or white, male or female—the chance to work hard and get the numbers right. That pragmatic majority, the West Computers knew, were the ones who had the power to break down the barriers that existed at Langley.
Their facilities might be separate, but as far as the West Computers were concerned, they would prove themselves equal or better, having internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far. They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons, warding off the presumption of inferiority because they were Negro or female. They corrected each other’s work and policed their ranks like soldiers against tardiness, sloppy appearance, and the perception of loose morals. They warded off the negative stereotypes that haunted Negroes like shadows, using tough love to protect both the errant individual and the group from her failings. And each time the laboratory passed the collection plate for Uncle Sam, the West Computers reached into their purses as they had when they were teachers, so that West Computing could claim 100 percent participation in the purchase