She applies, and is hired as a mathematician. One day she sees an advertisement for jobs at the NACA. Married with children, Dorothy comes from a middle class black family, well-respected and well-known by other black families in town. In the summer of 1942, Dorothy Vaughan, a math teacher, is also working in a miltary laundry room in order to earn extra money and to support the American war effort. Langley hires some black female computers, but places them in a segregated office called West Area. Further, Jim Crow laws are still in place in the South, which means that Hampton is a segregated place. At the time, mathematicians, who are commonly called “computers,” are almost all women. In 1943, in the midst of World War II, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, VA seeks to hire hundreds of junior physicists and mathematicians to help in the war effort by supporting engineers in performing aeronautical research as part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the NACA).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |