“You men and women working here far from the sound of drums and guns, working in your civilian capacity in accordance with your highly specialized skills, are winning your part of this war: the battle of research,” said Knox. “This war is being fought in the laboratories as well as on the battlefields.”
The employees spread out from one side of the room to the other, from foreground to background, a mass occupying the enormous space like gas filling a hot air balloon. Knox, a dot at the far end of the room, stood at a podium in front of a giant American flag. White men dominated the crowd from front to back, the majority in some permutation of shirtsleeves and ties or jackets and sweaters, a good number in the coveralls of mechanics and laborers. A cluster of grandees in tweeds and armbands identifying them as minders to the secretary and his entourage stood off to the side in the front. Whiz kids of the day—John D. Bird, Francis Rogallo, John Becker, their names already circulated as being among the top in the discipline—smiled from a few rows back. Clustered in the left corner of the room stood twenty or so black men, all wearing work coats and dungarees, a few sharpening their outfits with newsboy caps or brimmed hats. White women were sprinkled throughout the crowd, many in the front row, their knee-length skirts sensibly accessorized with the practical footwear that could stand up to treks across the Langley campus. Flanking John Becker were more female faces—brown faces, peering out from the middle distance. Thelma Stiles smiled, Pearl Bassette’s glasses caught the light of the flash. Tiny Miriam Mann’s head was barely visible over the shoulders of the crowd. Who would have thought that such a mélange of black and white, male and female, blue-collar and white-collar workers, those who worked with their hands and those who worked with numbers, was actually possible? And who would guess that the southern city of Hampton, Virginia, was the place to find it?
After the presentation, the women of West Computing walked over to the cafeteria. Employees who never saw one another, who worked in different groups or buildings, might run into one another in the cafeteria, catch a glimpse of Henry Reid or the NACA’s phlegmatic secretary, John Victory, in town for a visit, or maybe get an earful of salty language from John Stack, who oversaw the wind tunnels involved in high-speed research. Thirty minutes and back to work. Just enough time for a hot lunch and a little conversation.
Most groups sat together out of habit. For the West Computers, it was by mandate. A white cardboard sign on a table in the back of the cafeteria beckoned them, its crisply stenciled black letters spelling out the lunchroom hierarchy: COLORED COMPUTERS. It was the only sign in the West Area cafeteria; no other group needed their seating proscribed in the same fashion. The janitors, the laborers, the cafeteria workers themselves did not take lunch in the main cafeteria. The women of West Computing were the only black professionals at the laboratory—not exactly excluded, but not quite included either.
In the hierarchy of racial slights, the sign wasn’t unusual or out of the ordinary. It didn’t presage the kind of racial violence that could spring out of nowhere, striking even the most economically secure Negroes like kerosene poured on a smoldering ember. This was the kind of garden-variety segregation that over the years blacks had learned to tolerate, if not to accept, in order to function in their daily lives. But there in the lofty environment of the laboratory, a place that had selected them for their intellectual talents, the sign seemed especially ridiculous and somehow more offensive.
They tried to ignore the sign, push it aside during their lunch hour, pretend it wasn’t there. In the office, the women felt equal. But in the cafeteria, and in the bathrooms designated for colored girls, the signs were a reminder that even within the meritocracy of the US Civil Service, even after Executive Order 8802, some were more equal than others. Even the group’s anodyne title was both descriptive and a little deceptive, allowing the laboratory to comply with the Fair Employment Act—West Computing was simply a functional description on the organizational chart—while simultaneously appeasing the Commonwealth of Virginia’s discriminatory separate-but-equal statutes. The sign in the cafeteria was evidence that the law that paved the way for the West Computers to work at Langley was not allowed to compete with the state laws that kept them in their separate place. The front door to the laboratory was open, but many others remained closed, like Anne Wythe Hall, a dormitory for single white women working at Langley. While Dorothy walked several blocks each morning from the Lucys’ house to the bus, the women at the dormitory enjoyed special bus service. There was nothing they could do about that, or the separate “Colored girls” bathroom. But that sign in the cafeteria . . .
It was Miriam Mann who finally decided it was too much to take. “There’s my sign for today,” she would say upon entering the cafeteria, spying the placard designating their table in the back of the room. Not even five feet tall, her feet just grazing the floor when she sat down, Miriam Mann had a personality as outsized as she was tiny.
The West Computers watched their colleague remove the sign and banish it to the recesses of her purse, her small act of defiance inspiring both anxiety and a sense of empowerment. The ritual played itself out with absurd regularity. The sign, placed by an unseen hand, made the unspoken rules of the cafeteria explicit. When Miriam snatched the sign, it took its leave for a few days, perhaps a week, maybe longer, before it was replaced with an identical twin, the letters of the new sign just as blankly menacing as its predecessor’s.
The signs and their removal were a regular topic of conversation among the women of West Computing, who debated the prudence of the action. As the sign drama played itself out in the Langley cafeteria, an incident that would have national repercussions took place in Gloucester County, just twenty miles away. Irene Morgan worked at the Baltimore-based aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin Company, assigned to the production line of the B-26 Marauder. In the summer of 1944 she came home to Virginia on the Greyhound bus to visit her mother, but was arrested on the return trip to Baltimore for refusing to move to the Colored section. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund took the case and planned to use it to challenge segregation rules on interstate transportation. In 1946, the Supreme Court, in Morgan v. Virginia, held that segregation on interstate buses was illegal. But what hope had the West Computers of making a federal case out of something so banal as a cafeteria sign? More likely, whoever kept the table stocked with signs would just decide that it was time to get rid of the troublemakers. “They are going to fire you over that sign, Miriam,” her husband, William, told her at night over dinner. Negro life in America was a never-ending series of negotiations: when to fight and when to concede. This, Miriam had decided, was one to fight. “Then they’re just going to have to do it,” she would retort.