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The Human Computers
When the managers couldn’t satisfy the demand with only white employees, the
government decided to hire African Americans. A civil rights leader named A.
Philip Randolph encouraged President Roosevelt to sign an executive order—a
law that ordered the desegregation of the federal government and defense
industry and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee. This executive
order opened up new and exciting opportunities for African Americans, allowing
them to work side by side with white people during the war.
The federal government also helped create special training classes at black
colleges, where people could learn the skills they would need to be successful in
the war jobs. Black newspapers like the Norfolk Journal and Guide published
articles telling their readers to apply for these new job openings. And there were
many applicants! The applications were not supposed to consider race—a recent
law had done away with the requirement that the application must include a
photo—but it wasn’t hard for employers to figure out which job candidates were
black. African Americans did not have access to white colleges and universities,
so black applicants came from black colleges, such as West Virginia State
University, Howard University, Hampton Institute, and Arkansas Agricultural,
Mechanical & Normal College. Many of the African-American candidates had
years of teaching experience as well as math and science degrees.
Once hired, the black mathematicians were assigned to a separate work space
in the Warehouse Building on the west side of the Langley campus. The East
Area Computers were all white; the West Area Computers were all black, except
for the supervisor and her assistant, who were white women.
There had always been African-American employees at Langley, but they had
worked as janitors, cafeteria workers, mechanic’s assistants, and
groundskeepers. Hiring black mathematicians—that was something new. For the
most part, the engineers welcomed extra hands, even if those hands were black.
The Langley Laboratory was operating around the clock to test airplanes to be
flown by American soldiers in the war: everyone had a job to do.
Hampton, Virginia, where the Langley campus was located, was very much a
southern town. State law and Virginia custom meant that African Americans did
not ride the same buses or eat in the same cafeterias or use the same bathrooms
as whites. The Langley staff had to prepare for the arrival of the African-
American mathematicians. One of the tasks: creating metal bathroom signs that
For the black women, the experience of working at a laboratory offered the
chance to do interesting work that would help support the war effort. Walking
into an unfamiliar environment wasn’t easy for the women of the new West Area
Computing Office, but each of them was eager for the opportunity to help their
country and prove that they, too, could be excellent mathematicians.
