Spotlight Woman of the Week - Mary Jackson

Every time we get to the finish line they move it. Every time.

-Mary Jackson

Oh, where would we have been had racism or sexism never existed! Countless talents were slaughtered at the hands of preposterous notions and injustice. But maybe that is why we treasure those who did not just battle society and its injustice but also strived to do great things. One such inspiration worth emulation would be Mary Jackson, NASA's First Female African American Engineer.

Mary W. Jackson, a native of Hampton Virginia, had a rather interesting trajectory to her groundbreaking engineering career at the NASA Langley Research Center. Graduating from Hampton Institute in 1942 with a dual degree in Math and Physical Sciences, Jackson accepted a job as a math teacher at a black school in Calvert County, Maryland. She had also begun tutoring high school and college students, which she continued to do for the rest of her life. In 1943, she returned to Hampton, where she became a bookkeeper at the National Catholic Community Centre there. She had been a receptionist and clerk at the Hampton Institute's Health Department; a stint as a homemaker the birth of her son- Levi and a job as a clerk at the Office of the Chief Army Field Forces at Fort Monroe.

It took her three career switches before being recruited as a computer by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, working under group supervisor Dorothy Vaughan in the segregated West Area Computing section in 1951. After spending two years in the computing pool, she was offered a chance to work for Kazimierz Czarnecki, a Polish engineer, in the 4-foot by 4-foot Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, a 60,000-horsepower wind tunnel capable of blasting models with winds approaching twice the speed of sound to study forces on a model.

Impressed by Jackson, Czarnecki encouraged her to undergo training so she could be promoted to an engineer. But for that, she needed to take graduate-level courses in mathematics and physics to be promoted from a mathematician to an engineer to qualify for the job. These courses were offered in a night program by the University of Virginia, held at the all-white Hampton High School. Jackson, against the wishes of her husband, petitioned the City of Hampton to allow her to attend the classes.

"I plan on being an engineer at NASA, but I can't do that without taking them classes at that all-white high school, and I can't change the colour of my skin. So, I have no choice but to be the first, which I can't do without you, sir."

(Hidden Figures movie- Mary Jackson)

Completing the courses, Jackson was promoted to aerospace engineer in 1958, thus becoming NASA's first black female engineer. That was the same year she co-authored her first report, Effects of Nose Angle and Mach Number, on Transition on Cones at Supersonic Speeds with Czarnecki.

She analysed data from the wind tunnel experiments and real-world aircraft flight experiments at the Theoretical Aerodynamics Branch of the Subsonic-Transonic Aerodynamics Division at Langley to understand airflow, including thrust and drag forces, in order to improve the United States planes.

In her later years, she worked for multiple departments like the High-Speed Aerodynamics Division, Full-Scale Research Division, Compressibility Research Division, and the Subsonic-Transonic Aerodynamics Division as an engineer. In nearly two decades, she went on to author or co-author twelve technical papers for NACA and later NASA. She mentored women and other minorities to improve their careers, guiding them on how to study in order to qualify for promotions. She had also been a member of the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.

As the years progressed, the promotions decelerated, and Jackson was exasperated at her inability to break into management-level grades. By 1979, Jackson had achieved the senior-most title within the engineering department and that compelled her to make one last dramatic and drastic career change.

She left her engineering career and accepted a demotion in order to work as an Equal Opportunity Specialist administrator. She returned to Langley as the Federal Women's Program Manager in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs after completing training at NASA Headquarters. She sought to bring about change and to showcase the achievements of women and other minorities in the area. She also served as a Program Manager for Affirmative Action. She sought to influence the careers of women working at NASA in science, engineering, and mathematics. She stayed on at NASA until 1985, when she retired. 

She passed away on February 11, 2005, at age 83. Posthumously, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. An elementary school was renamed in her honour to replace one that had been named after President Andrew Jackson. In June of 2020, NASA announced the Washington D.C.’s headquarters would be renamed the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters. Later that year, a satellite named ÑuSat 17 or “Mary” was launched into space in her honour.

Her journey was captured in Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. In 2016, the same year as the book’s publishing, a film adaptation of Hidden Figures was released. The film had Mary Jackson portrayed by Janelle Monae, as one of the three central protagonists, recounting their work on the Project Mercury during Space Race. The film was critically acclaimed and received three Academy Award nominations. 

What is especially inspiring about Mary Jackson’s journey is not her ‘never flinch from a challenge’ personality or the fact that she battled against all odds in an era where racism and sexism ran rampant in the society to reach success, but the fact that she could also leave it all to encourage and influence a woman to pursue careers in the mathematical, scientific and technological fields. Mary Jackson was not just a brilliant aeronautical engineer and mathematician but also a feminist and activist in the truest sense.

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