Reaching for the Moon by Katherine Johnson

Author:Katherine Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

Shortly after we arrived in Newport News and got settled, Eric helped Jimmie land a job as a painter at the Newport News shipyard. The shipyard was one of the largest shipbuilding facilities in the world. US Navy battleships, aircraft carriers, ocean liners, oil tankers—all sorts of sea vessels were being built there. Shipyard workers made far more than teachers, so Jimmie was happy to find work there. Before long he was entertaining our daughters by taking them to ship christenings.

The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing, as the two nations competed in the battle between Communism and democracy.

It was a very scary time.

A series of incidents had taken place in which American citizens had spied for the Soviet Union. To protect our nation’s secrets, President Truman had issued an order requiring that all government employees be tested to ensure they were loyal to the United States. This era became known as the Red Scare, and many ordinary citizens were accused of sympathizing with the Communists. Innocent people were fired from their jobs and ostracized by their communities.

The mood had gotten worse in 1949, when the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb. Suddenly people worried that the Soviets might drop the bomb on us. At that point President Truman ordered the development of the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. From time to time the federal Office of Civil Defense would sound an air-raid siren all around the nation or in local communities so that people could rehearse what to do in the event we were bombed. Schoolchildren were taught to engage in “duck and cover” drills, where they would climb under their desks and protect their heads.

As a result of all this, there was lots of work at the shipyard. The pay was good and—thanks to the pressure of Colored leaders like A. Philip Randolph and the fact that the nation suddenly realized that they needed us—in 1948 President Truman had ordered that discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin within the armed forces had to end. With the Soviet threat as great as it was, our nation could not afford to exclude anyone from the workforce. The era required all hands on deck.

After Jimmie started working, I was determined to pursue the job Eric had told me about at NACA. NACA was located at the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory at Langley Field in Hampton. (Today NACA is known as NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Langley Field is known as Langley Air Force Base.) Much of the community worked at Langley, so the more people I met, the more I learned about it.

The Laboratory consisted of eight different departments located in separate buildings. There were wind tunnels, airstrips, and other facilities where researchers tested airplane parts and theories of math and science.

I had heard through the grapevine that a former math teacher named Dorothy Vaughan was running NACA’s highly regarded West Area computing unit, which was composed entirely of Colored women.

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