Dorothy Vaughan

Dorothy Johnson was born on the twentieth of September 1910 at Kansas City, Missouri, the daughter of Leonard and Annie Johnson. The family moved to Morgantown, West Virginia, when she was eight. She graduated valedictorian of the segregated Beechurst High School of Morgantown in 1925 and entered Wilberforce University in Ohio on a full scholarship from the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She completed the bachelor's in mathematics summa cum laude in 1929 at nineteen.

She taught mathematics at Robert Russa Moton High School at Farmville, Virginia — the same Robert Russa Moton High School from which the 1951 Barbara Johns walkout would produce one of the four cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education — for the following fourteen years, marrying Howard Vaughan and raising six children during the same period. In December 1943 she answered a US Civil Service notice for mathematicians at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics — the wartime predecessor of NASA — at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia.

She was placed under the wartime executive orders prohibiting employment discrimination in federal agencies into the segregated West Area Computing Unit at Langley — the all-Black women's section that performed by hand and by mechanical desk calculator the trajectory, drag and lift computations for the agency's wind-tunnel research programmes. In 1949 — six years into her tenure — she was promoted to acting supervisor of the West Area Computers on the death of the previous supervisor; she was confirmed in the post in 1951, becoming the first Black supervisor at NACA and one of the few female supervisors at the agency.

She led the West Area Computers across the transition from mechanical to electronic computing in the late 1950s. Anticipating that the introduction of IBM mainframes would obsolete the human computers, she taught herself and her staff the FORTRAN programming language in 1958 — the first cohort of Langley mathematicians trained on the new IBM 704 system. The decision preserved the careers of her colleagues — including Katherine Johnson (placed in this archive), Mary Jackson (placed in this archive) and Annie Easley (placed in this archive) — across the digital transition.

She retired from NASA in 1971 after twenty-eight years and died at Hampton on the tenth of November 2008, at ninety-eight.

She is honored here as the supervisor of the West Area Computers.