NASA is renaming its Washington, D.C. headquarters building in honor of Mary W. Jackson, the first African American female engineer at NASA. Jackson is best known to those outside NASA as one of the central characters followed in Margot Lee Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures, and in the movie of the same name, where she was portrayed by actress Janelle Monáe. Jackson began her career at NASA—before it even was NASA—as one of the “computers” in the segregated West Area Computing Unit. In the days when electronic computers were room-sized beasts with less power and storage than a smart watch, the Black women mathematicians of the West Area Computing Unit crunched calculations manually, as well as helping to develop programs for NASA’s computers on the ground and on spacecraft. The safety and success of the entire space program was in their hands—and minds—though they received very little in the way of credit for decades.
Jackson was recruited by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1951, seven years before NASA even existed. She served as a research mathematician before being assigned to experiments in the world’s first supersonic wind tunnel. Her success with those experiments led to her being recommended for engineering classes—which required special permission for her to enter segregated classrooms that were then restricted to white males. She became NASA’s first Black female engineer in 1958.
Despite a dual degree in math and physics, Jackson was working as a bookkeeper and secretary when recruited by the agency that would become NASA. After three decades in her career as a mathematician and engineer, Jackson moved to the Federal Women’s Program in 1979, where she initiated programs focused on the hiring and promotion of female mathematicians, engineers, and scientists. She was a transformative figure in every sense—opening minds, enabling a new generation, and putting the nation on the path to space. For two decades, she was one of the principle researchers on how planes and spacecraft interact with the air at hypersonic speeds.
In 2019, she was awarded the Congressional Medial of Honor. Unfortunately, that award—which came three years after Shetterly’s book had made Jackson and the other women of the segregated computing unit much better known—arrived more than a decade after Jackson’s death. Jackson’s colleagues, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Christine Darden, were also recognized with Congressional Medals.
The new computing center at Langley was named for Johnson in 2017, and the then 99-year-old mathematician was on hand to dedicate the building. NASA’s testing facility in Fairmont, West Virginia is also named for Johnson. In 2019, a bipartisan bill in Congress renamed the section of highway that runs past NASA’s headquarters as “Hidden Figures Way.”
“We are honored that NASA continues to celebrate the legacy of our mother and grandmother Mary W. Jackson,” said Carolyn Lewis, Mary’s daughter. “She was a scientist, humanitarian, wife, mother, and trailblazer who paved the way for thousands of others to succeed, not only at NASA, but throughout this nation.”