In the summer of 1943, a war machine hungry for minds tore open a new door. Melvin Butler, a personnel officer at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia, was desperate for mathematicians and other professional assistants. White men were being swallowed by the military, while white women were already spoken for by eager employers. So, he had no choice but to turn to a specific group: Black women with college degrees.

One of these women was Dorothy Vaughan, who spotted the opening on a trip to the Farmville post office. That bulletin from a federal aeronautical laboratory in Hampton sought women for mathematical work. Dorothy was a thirty-two-year-old high school math teacher, valedictorian, and mother of four. She filled out the application with the same meticulous care she gave everything. She wrote that she’s ready to begin in 48 hours.

In her new role, Dorothy started earning more than she had as a teacher. The laboratory assigned her to the West Area Computing section, a newly formed unit segregated by design. It was staffed entirely by Black women whose alma maters, such as Hampton Institute or Virginia State, announced their race upfront. The room was full of calculating machines and women working them.

To understand what West Computing was, you have to understand what Langley was built on. The laboratory’s entire research operation ran on numbers, lift and drag, pressure distributions, airflow velocities, generated in wind tunnels and flight tests, and processed by hand. It was done one calculation at a time by teams of women called computers.

These women were college-educated mathematicians who sat at government-issue desks. Topped with Friden, Marchant, and Monroe calculating machines, they translated the raw output of aeronautical experiments into data that engineers could use to make aircraft faster, safer, and more efficient.

Langley had operated a white female computing pool since 1935. West Computing was its segregated mirror. Yet, the laboratory’s need for talent kept both groups employed. Despite this, the laboratory still posted a sign in the cafeteria: COLORED COMPUTERS. Their table stayed in the back until Miriam Mann, a colleague of Dorothy, decided to pluck it wordlessly into her purse one day. Yet whenever she did it, the sign was back in a week or so.