Mary Jackson

Mary Winston Jackson was born on the ninth of April 1921 at Hampton, Virginia, the daughter of Frank Cordova Winston — a Black domestic servant of the Hampton Tidewater — and Ella Scott Winston, a maid. She was raised in the small Black-Tidewater community of Hampton across the inter-war period.

She was placed at six at the Phenix Training School at Hampton — the principal Black training school of the Tidewater — and at sixteen took the bachelor’s in mathematics and physical sciences at the Hampton Institute in 1942 cum laude.

She took employment in 1942 as a Black-women’s United Service Organisation receptionist at the Fort Monroe officer’s club at Hampton during the war, and from 1943 to 1951 as a teacher of mathematics at the Coloured public schools at Calvert County, Maryland and at Hampton.

She was hired in April 1951 by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory at Hampton — initially assigned to the segregated West Area Computing section under Dorothy Vaughan.

She was reassigned in 1953 to the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel — the principal Mach-2 wind-tunnel facility at the Langley Compressible Research Division under the German-émigré engineer Kazimierz R. Czarnecki. Jackson worked at the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel for the following five years on the experimental aerodynamics of the Tunnel’s test articles.

She was advised at the close of 1953 by Czarnecki that she could advance to the engineer’s job-classification scale only with the completion of the graduate-engineering coursework at the University of Virginia at the Hampton High School after-hours programme. The University of Virginia after-hours engineering classes at the Hampton High School were segregated under the Virginia state-segregation laws of the period; Jackson would have had to petition the City of Hampton municipal court for permission to attend the after-hours classes alongside the white engineering trainees.

She filed in 1956 the municipal-court petition; the court granted it. She completed the graduate-engineering coursework at the University of Virginia after-hours classes at the Hampton High School between 1956 and 1958.

She was reclassified by NASA on the fourteenth of February 1958 from mathematician to aerospace engineer — the first African American woman aerospace engineer at NASA. She held the engineer’s position at NASA for the following twenty-one years.

She published as principal author or co-author twelve NASA technical reports across the period 1958 to 1979 — predominantly on the aerodynamic boundary-layer interaction of the Mach-2-to-Mach-6 supersonic and hypersonic flow regimes at the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel.

She was reassigned in 1979 — at the close of her supersonic-aerodynamics career — to the NASA Langley Federal Women’s Program manager position. She held the manager position for the remaining six years of her NASA career, where she focussed on the systematic advancement of the under-promoted female engineering staff of the Langley facility. She retired from NASA in 1985 after thirty-four years of service.

She died at Hampton, Virginia on the eleventh of February 2005 of natural causes, at eighty-three.

She is honored here as the first Black woman aerospace engineer at NASA.