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Dorothy Hampton Essay

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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). At the time, mathematicians, who are commonly called “computers,” are almost all women. Further, Jim Crow laws are still in place in the South, which means that Hampton is a segregated place. Langley hires some black female computers, but places them in a segregated office called West Area.
In the summer of 1942, Dorothy Vaughan, a math teacher, is also working in a military laundry room in order to earn extra money and to support the American war effort. Married with children, Dorothy comes from a middle class black family, well-respected and well-known by other …show more content…

Mary is painfully aware any daughter of hers would have been shut out of the competition because of her gender, but is also grateful that the racial barrier, at least, has been broken. For her part, faced with the rise of electronic computers, Dorothy Vaughan teaches herself the programming language FORTRAN so that she can program the computers that will replace her, thereby saving her job.
Project Mercury progresses, with a launch date in 1961. That same year, President John F. Kennedy signs an executive order mandating Affirmative Action employment policies. Even so, the Russians remain ahead of the United States in the Space Race, and are the first to launch a cosmonaut (Yuri Gagarin) into space. While the United States accomplishes the same feat with John Glenn in 1962 (and with Katherine checking the electronic computers calculations for Glenn’s flight), President John F. Kennedy announces the ambition for Americans to land the first man on the

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