SYMHC Classics: Mary Winston Jackson

This 2019 episode covers Mary Winston Jackson, best known as the first black woman to become an engineer at NASA. But she also worked to clear the way for other underrepresented people at NASA.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We got a message from a listener recently
who was hoping for an episode on a woman aeronautical engineer.
You'll hear that email on a forthcoming episode of the
show because we recorded some stuff out of order, but
we wanted to go ahead and re release something that
was relevant to that request, which is Mary Winston Jackson,

(00:23):
first black woman to be hired as an engineer at
NASA before it was known as NASA. At the end
of the episode, we talked about the Hidden Figures Congressional
Gold Medal Act, which at that point had been introduced
in Congress but had not become law. It was signed
into law on November eighth, twenty nineteen, and the ceremony
took place in September of twenty twenty four. The ceremony

(00:46):
honored Catherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson, and doctor Christine Darden,
whose family members accepted medals on their behalf. It also
honored all the other women who served at NASA and
its precursor and ACA as computers, mathematicians, and engineers between
the nineteen thirties and the nineteen seventies. This episode originally

(01:07):
came out on February eleventh, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and

(01:28):
I'm Holly Frye. Folks who have seen the movie Hidden
Figures or read Margo Lee Shetterley's book by the same
title will probably recognize the name Mary Jackson. She was
the first black woman to become an engineer at NASA,
and she's been on my list for an episode for
a while. We have a collection about women in stem fields,
but we haven't talked specifically about a woman engineer, and

(01:52):
she really hasn't gotten as much recognition as some of
the other women who are featured in Hidden Figures, such
as Catherine Johnson, who calculated the trajectory for the United
States first human spaceflight and celebrated her one hundredth birthday
in August of twenty eighteen. But I didn't realize until
I got into this episode just how much Mary Jackson

(02:12):
also worked to clear the way for other underrepresented people
at NASA. I mean, she changed the torte the whole
direction of her career to do this, and in particular,
she did a lot to try to make more room
for black women in the ranks of NASA engineers. That
made me even more excited to talk about her today. Yeah,
she's pretty great. And Mary Jackson started working as a

(02:33):
computer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or the
NACA years before it was absorbed into NASA. So before
we get to her specifically, we have to back up
and talk a little bit about human computers. If it
sounds weird for you to say someone worked as a computer,
that is what they were called human computers, and how
Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory now known as Langley Research Center

(02:56):
came to have a segregated pool of human computers in
the nineteen forties. There were surely people doing this kind
of work in other parts of the world as well,
but our focus today is really on Europe and North America.
In English, the word computer to mean a person who
makes calculations or computation goes all the way back to
the early seventeenth century. Many of these early computers were men.

(03:21):
They were apprentices and assistants who were doing this work
as part of their education and training to become, say
an astronomer or an engineer. But women have played a
really important part too, especially the wives and sisters and
daughters of astronomers and physicists and other scientists, some of
whom were scientists in their own right. These women did

(03:43):
calculations to support the research of their male family members,
often without ever getting the credit for it. One example
is mathematician and astronomer Nicole ren Lepotte, whose husband Jean Andrei,
was France's royal clockmaker. She worked with astronomer Joseph Lalande
and mathematician Alexei Clairout to calculate the return of Halle's

(04:04):
comment in seventeen fifty eight. Laland later said, quote, for
six months, we made calculations from dawn to dusk, sometimes
even during the meals. The help given by Madame Lapote
was such that without her I would not have been
able to complete such a colossal enterprise. But when Clara
published their findings, which were far more accurate than previous

(04:25):
predictions had been, he did not acknowledge Lapote's work at all.
The Harvard College Observatory started hiring women as assistants toward
the end of the nineteenth century. They cared for glass
plates that were used to record images of the night sky,
and they analyzed and recorded the images from those plates,
classifying the stars, and compiling the data. Observatory director Edward

(04:49):
Charles Pickering, in particular, started hiring a whole group of
women computers in eighteen eighty one. They were nicknamed Pickering's Harem,
which was not a particular nice nickname, and nods to
sort of a perception that one of the reasons that
some of these departments were all women was because the
men in charge wanted to be surrounded by young women.

(05:13):
We don't talk about that as much and other reasons
why there were women's staffs of computers, but that was
a thing that there was, at least the perception was
going on. One of the computers at the Harvard College
Observatory was Anti Jump Cannon, who developed the method for
classifying stars that is still used today. During World War Two,

(05:34):
hundreds of women worked as computers at the US Army's
Ballistic Research Laboratory, doing the math for the firing tables
for rockets and artillery. This included civilian women with degrees
in math or science, as well as women from the
Women's Army Corps. Women worked as computers at the Manhattan
Project that Los Alamos National Laboratory as well. Some were

(05:55):
women with math or physics degrees who had been recruited
for that work, and others were the wives of other
Losalamos employees thanks to hidden figures. Today, the idea of
a whole department of human computers is heavily associated with
Langley and the Space race, but within the NACA, computing
departments weren't unique to Langley. Other NACA facilities had them

(06:17):
as well. They also significantly predate the Space program. Langley
created its first computing pool in nineteen thirty five, hiring
five women as computers. These women did their calculations by hand,
with the help of slide rules, mathematical tables, and mechanical calculators.
Before the computing pool was established, Langley's engineers and scientists

(06:40):
had been performing all of their calculations themselves, and the
idea was that moving the calculating work over to a
dedicated department could free up those men to focus on
the science and the engineering, while also making the process
of computing faster and more accurate. That's also why all
of those wartime departments were women, because the men were

(07:01):
needed to go to combat roles. At first, many of
the men who had previously done their own calculations resisted
this idea and doubted whether women could do the necessary mass.
But the creation of the computing group had exactly the
outcome the organization had been looking for. It was faster
and more accurate. Plus, since women were being hired for

(07:22):
the positions, they could be paid much less than the
engineers and scientists whose work they were absorbing. Of course,
we are not endorsing that fact that the administrators liked it.
There's a lot to unpack. It's unfortunate, but that was
part of the logic train. Yeah, Computing was also considered
a sub professional position, while engineering was a professional one.

(07:46):
So the top of the ranks for a computer was mathematician,
and that was equivalent to an entry level position for
a male engineer. So, in other words, the top of
the computing ranks lined up with the bottom of the
engineering ranks. And that brings us to how this job
occupied a complicated spot in the grand scheme of things.
Often women computers were paid significantly more than they might

(08:09):
have been in other work that was open to them,
think of things like teaching school. But at the same time,
many of the women who were hired to be computers
were overqualified for the job, and as we just talked about,
they were handling work that had previously been done by
men who were higher up in the ORG chart. Because
the computers were women and their jobs were seen as

(08:30):
subordinate to those of male engineers, they also faced sexism
in a way that they might not have in other industries.
These disparities became even more pronounced when Langley started recruiting
black women to work as computers. In July of nineteen
forty one, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order eighty eight two,
which said, in part quote, there shall be no discrimination

(08:53):
in the employment of workers in defense industries and in
government because of race, creed, color, or national origin. This
executive order followed extensive advocacy by A. Philip Randolph and
other black labor and civil rights leaders, and it also
established the Fair Employment Practices Committee to make sure that
order was enforced. This executive order came as the United

(09:16):
States was preparing for war. The previous May, the President
had called for the US to build fifty thousand aircraft.
This was a dramatic increase in aircraft production up from
fewer than one hundred airplanes a month. Langley was where
aircraft manufacturers were having their high performance aircraft tested and improved.

(09:36):
Langley engineers would put aircraft through test flights and wind
tunnels and evaluate their performance and suggest improvements and refinements
on the design. The goal was to make aircraft safer, faster,
and more effective. So when the President made this call
for more aircraft, that gave Langley a lot more work
to do, and the NACA had to hire a lot

(09:58):
more people across the facility to do it. The expansion
was so huge and dramatic that it led to a
housing crisis in the area around Langley, addressed in part
by building a dormitory to house some of the women.
A three hundred and seventy two unit dorm opened in
the summer of nineteen forty three with a house mother
who locked everything up at eleven PM. At first, a

(10:20):
lot of these new hires were white candidates, but before
long there just weren't enough white candidates to fill all
the jobs, many of which were intended to be temporary
wartime positions and not long term careers. So after Executive
Order eighty eight OHO two, the administration at the NACA
started actively recruiting black candidates to Phillies jobs. Langley had

(10:43):
black employees before this point, but mostly doing things like
janitorial work and groundskeeping in food service. This was the
first time that Langley had recruited black employees for professional
and sub professional roles. Although the executive order barred discrimination
in hiring, Virginia, where Langley is located, was still racially

(11:03):
segregated by law, so this newly hired group of black
computers who started work in nineteen forty three were placed
in a segregated section known as the West Computing Group
or just the West Group, in which black women reported
to white supervisors. This also meant adding segregated restrooms and
a segregated area of the lunch room. Segregation was so

(11:26):
strictly maintained that many of the white computers and lab
employees didn't realize that the West Group even existed. There
was one computer named Maria Mann who made it a
point of repeatedly removing the colored computer sign that was
used to mark the black's only part of the cafeteria.
She would just basically take it and put it in

(11:46):
her purse and leave, and a few days later it
would show back up on the table again, and all
the computers are like, we know, we know this is
where you want us to sit. We know this is
our designated area. You don't have to keep pointing it
out to us. And her husband was like, Miriam, they're
going to fire you. Miriam was kind of like, they're
going to have to. She kept doing it until they

(12:07):
finally stopped putting the sign there. I'm like, that would
be a firing well earned. In my opinion. We mentioned
a few minutes ago how a woman might be better
paid as a computer than she had been while working
at another job, while still being overqualified for that computing job.
This was particularly true for black women. Many had done
exceptionally well in their study of math and had advanced degrees,

(12:31):
years of experience teaching math and science, or both. Many,
but certainly not all, of the white computers did not.
They might have a math degree but little to no
experience beyond college. Additionally, teaching was really one of the
most prestigious jobs that was available to black women in
the nineteen forties. Within their communities, black teachers were really

(12:51):
regarded with a lot of respect and admiration, and the
increase in pay between working as a teacher and working
as a computer could be even more dramatic for black
computers than it was for white ones. Black teachers overwhelmingly
taught in segregated schools for black children, and they tended
to have poorer facilities and much lower pay than the

(13:12):
schools for white children. But once they got to Langley,
these women were just a computer. They were often looked
down on by the engineers whose calculations they were carrying out.
Although the women hired as computers typically enjoyed and excelled
at math, other people perceived that work as tedious drudgery.
It could almost feel like a simultaneous step up and

(13:35):
a step down, And for many of the women, the
fact that they were doing critical wartime work at a
facility as prestigious as Langley, but still being segregated by
their race was even more galling. It was a little
bit later, but still into this same world that Mary
Jackson's stepped when she got hired to work at Langley,
and we will get to her after a sponsor break.

(14:05):
Mary Jackson was born Mary Winston on April ninth, nineteen
twenty one, in Hampton, Virginia, not far away from Langley.
She was from a large family and her parents, Ella
and Frank Winston, were extremely focused on making sure all
of their children got a good education and were really
good citizens and role models. Mary attended high school at
George P. Phoenix Training School, which was on the campus

(14:28):
of Hampton Institute, which is now Hampton University. Hampton Institute
has actually come up on the show before, most recently,
it is where Susan laflesh Pecatt continued her studies before
going to medical school and becoming the first Native American
woman in the US to earn an MD. Hampton Institute
was founded in eighteen sixty eight to teach trade and

(14:49):
industrial skills to freed people, as well as to train
them to become teachers. By the nineteen twenties that had
become a college with numerous courses of study. The city
of Hampton didn't provide education for black children beyond elementary school,
so the Hampton Institute had established Phoenix Training School for
that purpose. Mary graduated from Phoenix with highest honors and

(15:12):
went on to college at the Hampton Institute. She expected
that she would become a teacher, but she pushed herself
to finish a double major in mathematics and physical science,
even though that was a far more strenuous course of
study than she would need to teach. She graduated in
nineteen forty two and was soon hired as a teacher
at a segregated school for black students in Maryland. About

(15:34):
a year later, Mary moved back home. Her father had
become ill and she came back to help look after him,
but she found that she couldn't get a teaching job
back in Hampton. Two of her sisters were already teaching
in Hampton, and there were nepotism rules that kept her
from being able to join them, so she had to
find a job somewhere else. She started out as the

(15:55):
secretary at the King Street USO, doing everything from keeping
the books to acting as a host. The King Street
USO was one of the many USO centers established to
serve black members of the military. The USO had a
policy of serving the entire military regardless of race, but
a lot of places had segregated USO centers for reasons

(16:15):
ranging from black service members requesting them to Jim Crow
laws requiring them. Mary worked at the King Street USO
until the end of World War Two, and it was
there that she met her husband, lev Jackson, who was
a serviceman from Alabama. They got married in nineteen forty four,
and in nineteen forty six they had their first child together,
a son who was also named Levi. Throughout all this

(16:37):
Jackson was active with the Bethel Ame Church, where she
and her family had long been members. She also started
serving as a leader for the church's Girl Scout troupe,
which she would do for about thirty years. She did
not yet have a daughter. Her daughter, Carolyn, was born
several years later, but she loved the Girl Scouts. She
was a teacher, a mentor, and a big sister for

(16:57):
the girls in the troupe, many of whom were from
working class and poor families with parents who did agricultural
or domestic work. While she was working as the Girl
Scout leader, Jackson started doing something that would also be
a hallmark of her time at NASA and before that,
the NACA. She really wanted the girls that she worked
with to see what was possible beyond what was familiar

(17:19):
to or expected of them, and she wanted to open
as many doors for them as she could. So she
arranged all kinds of field trips and projects aligned with
all the various merit badges to really try to broaden
their experience of the world and encourage them to set
really ambitious goals for themselves. Later on, Jackson would also
play a key role in integrating the Black and White

(17:40):
Girl Scout councils in the area into one integrated council
in her part of Virginia. Jackson returned to work when
Levi Junior turned four. She applied for a clerical position
with the Army and a computing position at Langley. The
offer from the Army came first, and she worked there
for a few months before being offered the computer job
at Langa, where the Army agreed her skills would be

(18:02):
of better use. She started her job as one of
the West Area Computers on April fifth, nineteen fifty one,
at the age of twenty six. That was just a
few months after Dorothy Vaughan became the head of the
West Area Computers, having started out as one of the
West Area's mathematicians. This made Vaughan the first black supervisor
at Langley. This was almost three years after President Harry

(18:25):
Truman had signed executive Orders ninety nine eighty and ninety
nine eighty one that happened on July twenty sixth, nineteen
forty eight, and ordered the desegregation of the federal workforce
and the US Armed Forces, but segregation was still required
by law in Virginia. That had not changed, so when
Jackson started work at Langley, the West Area computers were still,

(18:48):
in the words of administrative officer Kemball Johnson quote, composed
entirely of Negro women. The restroom and cafeteria facilities were
also still segregated. It had, however, bec I'm a lot
more common for the West Area computers to be assigned
out to other departments at Langley for periods of days
to months to work on specific projects. This became more

(19:10):
and more common as the white East Area computers shrank
in number as their members were promoted or permanently transferred
into other departments. In nineteen fifty three, after two years
in the West Computing Group, Mary Jackson was assigned to
a project on Langley's East side along with several white computers.

(19:30):
Jackson didn't know the layout of the buildings on the
East side at all, and when she asked her coworkers
from that side of the campus for directions to the
restroom they pointedly told her that they did not know
where her restroom was. Jackson was frustrated and angry, not
just about the insult of her bathroom and the dismissive
way that her colleagues had talked to her, but also

(19:51):
about being a second class citizen at Langley because of
her race, even though she was a computer and she
had more experience than some of her colleagues did. Later
that day, she ran into Kashmirez Zarniki, who worked at
Langley's supersonic pressure tunnel. He asked how she was doing,
and she answered him honestly. From a number of angles,

(20:11):
it was socially unacceptable for a black person to unload
their feelings on a white person, especially when it came
to racism and discrimination. And it's not entirely clear whether
Jackson had just gotten so fed up that she lost
her temper or whether she had perceived Zarnaki, who had
immigrated from Poland, as someone it was safe to be
candid with, but either way, Zarnaki asked her why she

(20:34):
didn't come work for him, and she agreed to, and
this was before he learned that she had majored in
both math and science. We don't want to apply that
these racial disparities in who it's okay to like vent
feelings to we like. We don't want to imply that
those disparities are gone, but that was what was happening
at the time. So Jackson really made a name for

(20:57):
herself almost immediately in in this new department when she
completed some calculations for John Becker, who was the chief
of the Compressibility Division and was multiple rungs up the
ladder above Zarnecki. Jackson's final numbers didn't look quite right,
and Becker insisted that they were wrong, but Jackson insisted

(21:18):
that they were right. It turned out that Jackson had
done all the calculations flawlessly, but the data that Becker
had given her to start with was wrong. This earned
her an apology and praise not only for her skill,
but also her confidence and her insight. Jarnickie soon suggested
Jackson join the Engineer Training program. The NACA had very
few women engineers at all, and no black women engineers.

(21:41):
The Engineer Training program required after work classes from the
University of Virginia, which were held at Hampton High School,
which was still white's only, so to take the needed
courses to become an engineer, Jackson had to get a
special dispensation from the City of Hampton to allow her
to take the classes that she needed. She did, and
in nineteen fifty eight, after she finished her courses, Mary

(22:04):
Jackson was promoted to engineer. This made her the NACA's
first black woman engineer and possibly the first black woman
working as an aeronautical engineer anywhere in the United States.
Nineteen fifty eight was a year of big changes at Langley,
and we're going to get to those after we first
paused for another sponsor break. In nineteen fifty eight, the

(22:34):
NACA and other similar organizations were merged together into the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. As part of
that whole process, the West Area Computing Group, which at
that point was the last segregated department in the organization,
was finally formally disbanded. There were only nine employees of
the West Computers by then, including Dorothy Vaughan, who had

(22:56):
been running it for seven years. At that point, those
remaining computers were moved to various engineering groups around Langley,
and Vaughan was one of the ones who started working
with the IBM computers that were gradually making human computers obsolete.
Women who had been working with mathematical tables and mechanical
calculators began working with punch cards instead. Mathematicians were gradually

(23:18):
replaced by data analysts, and the teams working with the
IBM computers were integrated in terms of both race and gender,
although over time more and more of the data analysts
were young men. Mary Jackson co authored her first paper
in nineteen fifty eight as well effects of nose angle
and mock number on transition on cones at supersonic speeds.

(23:40):
She continued to work with Zarnecki at the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel.
In addition to her work as an engineer, Jackson informally
mentored women and minorities, especially the ones who were hoping
to get promoted into engineering roles. In a way, she
was replicating and building on something that had always existed
at the West Computing Group. Because they were segregated from

(24:02):
the white staff, the West Computing Group had developed a
deep network of support and resources among themselves. This gave
them the tools to try to mitigate some of the
racial discrimination that they faced on the job, something that
black men who were scattered across the organization could struggle with,
so as Jackson mentored people, she tried to maintain that
support network, including connecting to the former West Group computers

(24:25):
who were now working in other parts of the organization.
As the Space race wound down and the US aeronautics
industry became less focused on the idea of supersonic transport,
Langley went through numerous reorgs and reductions in force. Jackson
continued to work in the supersonic pressure tunnel, specializing in
how air behaves in proximity to supersonic aircraft. She took

(24:49):
classes in the programming language Fortrand to be able to
work with the IBM computers as well, but eventually her
career hit a glass ceiling. Staff at Langley were paid
according to the Sale Service pay scale known as the
GS scale, which ranks people in pay grades from one
to fifteen. Jackson got up to GS twelve, which was
the top of the non management scale for her role.

(25:11):
There were very few women at Langley in grade GS
thirteen or above, and Jackson found that no matter how
hard she worked, she just could not get to that
next level. In nineteen seventy nine, Casmirez Zarnecki retired and
by that point Jackson had written or co written twelve
technical publications for NASA and its predecessor. But rather than

(25:32):
continuing to struggle for another promotion that seemed like it
would just never come, she decided to change directions. A
position had opened up as Langley's Federal Women's Program Manager.
This was a role that would let Jackson focus on
what she had been doing informally as well as through
the committees that she had been on at work, and
it was also a demotion down to GS eleven, which

(25:54):
she willingly accepted for the sake of helping other people.
In nineteen eighty one, she was offered the role of
Equal Opportunity Specialist, and she went to Washington, d C.
To train for it. She spent the last years of
her career at NASA focused on making sure women and
minorities had equal opportunities at Langley. In these roles, Jackson
took a more formal approach to the mentoring that she

(26:16):
had been doing while she was still an engineer. She
realized that a lot of the people who seemed like
they were being overlooked for promotions had basically the same
degree and experience as their peers, but they might be
missing one particular course or one specific skill. She started
intentionally seeking out people who fit this pattern to encourage

(26:37):
them to go take that one class they needed to
close the gap. But she paid particular attention to women
in the lower ranks of the organization who had the
right skills and background otherwise to become an engineer. She
also kept this focus outside of work, working as a
Girl Scout leader and doing extensive lecturing and workshops at
high schools in her area, demonstrating for students that neither

(26:58):
engineering nor lay dad was a world reserved only for
white men. She said of this work quote, sometimes they
are not aware of the number of black scientists and
don't even know of the career opportunities until it is
too late. Jackson retired from Langley in nineteen eighty five.
She kept up her volunteer community and church work after retiring,
and she died on February eleventh, two thousand and five,

(27:21):
at the age of eighty three. She died in a
retirement home in Hampton, Virginia, and was survived by her children,
as well as grandchildren and great grandchildren. In twenty eighteen,
the Salt Lake City Board of Education unanimously voted that
Jackson Elementary School in Salt Lake City, previously named for
President Andrew Jackson, would be renamed Mary W. Jackson Elementary School.

(27:43):
That same year, the US Senate passed the Hidden Figures
Congressional Gold Medal Act, which would award the Congressional Gold
Medal to Catherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and doctor
Christine Darden. Darden was the first black person of any
gender to be promoted to the senior executive service at Langley.
The House referred the bill to a committee in November

(28:04):
of twenty eighteen. As of when we are recording this,
which is the end of January twenty nineteen, there have
not been further updates on it, perhaps unsurprisingly given what
January was like in the government. That is true. Uh oh, Mary,
I love her so much. I do too. If you

(28:24):
want to learn more about the computers and more about
like life at Langley during all this time, really do
go read Hidden Figures. You can also, if you like,
go amuse yourself by reading the one star reviews of
the book Hidden Figures by people who clearly thought they
were signing up to read a novel. Oh well, yeah,

(28:50):
it's things like this book introduces ten new characters in
a paragraph and then just never follows up on them.
Beginning I was weren't character, there's honey, They were people, people,
all blister hearts. Thanks so much for joining us on

(29:11):
this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.