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CHAPTER EIGHT

Those Who Move Forward

Katherine Goble would have eventually found her way back to the classroom, but a fever hastened the process: in 1944, her husband, Jimmy, the chemistry teacher at the Negro high school in Marion, Virginia, had fallen ill with undulant fever. The illness, which came from drinking unpasteurized milk, had sickened at least eight people in Smyth County that summer. Weeks, sometimes months, of sweats, fatigue, poor appetite, and pain lay in store for the unfortunate victims. There was no way Jimmy would be able to start the school year that fall, so the principal offered Jimmy’s yearlong contract to Katherine instead. Despite being a full-time wife and mother for the last four years, Katherine had been careful to keep her teaching certificate current.

It would be her second time around as a teacher at the school. In 1937, newly graduated from West Virginia State Institute, eighteen-year-old Katherine applied for a position at the Marion school, which was just on the Virginia side of the border. “If you can play the piano, the job is yours,” the telegram read. She bade farewell to her home state and boarded a bus in Charleston, the state capital, settling in for the three-hour ride to Marion. Upon entering Virginia, she and the other black passengers, who had been interspersed with whites throughout the bus, were ordered to move to the back. A short time later, the driver evicted the black passengers, announcing that service wouldn’t continue into the town’s Negro area. Katherine paid a cab to take her to the house of the principal of the Marion school, where she had arranged to rent a room.

For the two years she taught in Marion, Katherine earned $50 a month, less than the $65 the state paid similarly trained white teachers in the county. In 1939, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit against the state of Virginia on behalf of a black teacher at Norfolk’s Booker T. Washington High School. The black teacher and her colleagues, including the principal, made less money than the school’s white janitor. The NAACP’s legal eagles, led by the fund’s chief counsel, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Houston’s top deputy, a gangly, whip-smart Howard University law school grad named Thurgood Marshall, shepherded the Alston v. Norfolk case to the US Supreme Court, which ordered Virginia to bring Negro teachers’ salaries up to the white teachers’ level. It was a victory, but a year too late for Katherine: when a $110-a-month job offer came from a Morgantown, West Virginia, high school for the 1939 school year, Katherine jumped at it. Pay equalization might have been a battle in Virginia, but West Virginia got on board without a fight.

Katherine always made sure that people knew she was from West Virginia, not Virginia. West Virginia’s hilly terrain offered cool evening breezes, whereas Virginia was sweltering and malarial. The antebellum plantation system had never taken root in West Virginia the way it had farther east and south. During the Civil War, the mountain state seceded from Virginia and joined the Union. This didn’t make West Virginia an oasis of progressive views on race—segregation kept blacks and whites separate in lodging, schools, public halls, and restaurants—but the state did offer its tiny black population just the slightest bit more breathing room. Compared to West Virginia, the state’s Negro residents thought, Virginia was the South.

Born and raised in White Sulphur Springs, Katherine was the youngest of Joshua and Joylette Coleman’s four children. “You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you,” Joshua told his children, a philosophy he embodied to the utmost. Dressed neatly in a coat and tie whenever he was on business in town, Joshua quietly commanded admiration from both blacks and whites in tiny White Sulphur Springs; you never had to tell anybody to respect Josh Coleman.

Though educated only through the sixth grade, Katherine’s father was a mathematical whiz who could tell how many board feet a tree would yield just by looking at it. As soon as their youngest daughter could talk, Joshua and Joylette realized that she’d inherited her father’s winning way with people and his mind for math. Katherine counted whatever crossed her path—dishes, steps, and stars in the nighttime sky. Insatiably curious about the world, the child peppered her grammar school teachers with questions and skipped ahead from second grade to fifth. When teachers turned around from the blackboard to discover an empty desk in Katherine’s place, they knew they’d find their pupil in the classroom next door, helping her older brother with his lesson. The children’s school, the only one in the area for Negroes, terminated with the sixth grade. When Katherine’s older sister, Margaret, graduated from the White Sulphur Springs schoolhouse, Joshua rented a house 125 miles away so that all four children, supervised by their mother, could continue their education at the laboratory school operated by West Virginia State Institute.

Income from the Coleman farm slowed to a trickle during the hardscrabble years of the Depression. Anxious for a way to support the household and cover the cost of the children’s education, Joshua moved the family into town and accepted a job as a bellman at the Greenbrier, the country’s most exclusive resort. (It was here, years later, that he met Dorothy Vaughan’s husband, Howard.) The enormous white-columned hotel, built in the classical revival style, sprawled on a manicured estate in the middle of White Sulphur. Joseph and Rose Kennedy spent their 1914 honeymoon in room 145 of the hotel. Bing Crosby, the Duke of Windsor, Lou Gehrig, Life magazine publisher Henry Luce, actress Mary Pickford, a young Malcolm Forbes, the emperor of Japan, and assorted Vanderbilts, Du Ponts, and Pulitzers all converged on White Sulphur Springs throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, where they Charlestoned, cha-chaed, and rumbaed the night away. Even as breadlines snaked through America’s main streets and drought broke the backs of tens of thousands of farm families, “Old White” remained a magnet for glamorous international guests who golfed, took the waters at the resort’s famed springs, and basked in its unbridled luxury.

The Greenbrier segmented its serving class carefully. Negroes worked as maids, bellmen, and kitchen help, while Italian and Eastern European immigrants attended the dining room. During summers home from Institute, the Coleman boys pulled stints as bellmen, and Katherine and her sister took jobs as personal maids to individual guests. Accommodating the every need of the visiting gentry—cleaning their rooms; washing, ironing, and setting out their clothes; anticipating their desires while appearing invisible—was a sow’s ear of a job that Katherine deftly spun to silk. One demanding French countess, with a habit of holding forth for hours on the telephone to friends in Paris, began to suspect that her walls had ears. “Tu m’entends tout, n’est-ce pas?” the countess inquired, seeing the reserved Negro maid paying close attention to her every bon mot. Katherine nodded sheepishly. The countess marched Katherine down to the resort’s kitchen, and for the rest of the summer, the high school student spent her lunchtime in conversation with the Greenbrier’s Parisian chef. Katherine’s development from solid high school French student to near-fluent speaker with a Parisian accent astonished her language teacher that fall. The following summer the hotel placed Katherine as a clerk in its lobby antiques store, making much better use of her charisma. Henry Waters Taft, a well-known antitrust lawyer and brother to President William Howard Taft, frequented the Greenbrier, and one day in the store, Katherine taught him Roman numerals.

In 1933, Katherine entered West Virginia State College as a fifteen-year-old freshman, her strong high school performance rewarded with a full academic scholarship. The college’s formidable president, Dr. John W. Davis, was, like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, part of the exclusive fraternity of “race men,” Negro educators and public intellectuals who set the debate over the best course of progress for black America. Though not as large or as influential as schools like Hampton, Howard, or Fisk, the college nonetheless had a solid academic reputation. Davis pushed to bring the brightest lights of Negro academe to his campus. In the early 1920s, Carter G. Woodson, a historian and educator who had earned a PhD in history from Harvard seventeen years after Du Bois, served as the college’s dean. James C. Evans, an MIT engineering graduate, ran the school’s trade and mechanical studies program before accepting a position as a Civilian Aide in the War Department in 1942.

On staff in the math department was William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, movie-star handsome with nut-brown skin and intense eyes fringed by long eyelashes. Just twenty-seven years old, Claytor played Rachmaninoff with finesse and a mean game of tennis. He drove a sports car and piloted his own plane, which he once famously flew so low over the house of the school’s president that the machine’s wheels made a racket rolling over the roof. Math majors marveled to hear Dr. Claytor, originally from Norfolk, advancing sophisticated mathematical proofs in his drawling “country” accent.

Claytor’s brusque manner intimidated most of his students, who couldn’t keep up as the professor furiously scribbled mathematical formulas on the chalkboard with one hand and just as quickly erased them with the other. He moved from one topic to the next, making no concession to their bewildered expressions. But Katherine, serious and bespectacled with fine curly hair, made such quick work of the course catalog that Claytor had to create advanced classes just for her.

“You would make a good research mathematician,” Dr. Claytor said to his star seventeen-year-old undergraduate after her sophomore year. “And,” he continued, “I am going to prepare you for this career.”

Claytor had taken an honors math degree from Howard University in 1929 and, like Dorothy Vaughan, had received an offer to join the inaugural class of the school’s math graduate program. Dean Dudley Weldon Woodard supervised Claytor’s thesis and recommended that he follow his footsteps to the University of Pennsylvania’s doctoral program. Claytor’s dissertation topic, regarding point-set topology, delighted the Penn faculty and was acclaimed by the mathematical world as a significant advance in the field.

Brilliant and ambitious, Claytor waited in vain to be recruited to join the country’s top math departments, but West Virginia State College was his only offer. “If young colored men receive scientific training, almost their only opening lies in the Negro university of the South,” commented W. E. B. Du Bois in 1939. “The [white] libraries, museums, laboratories and scientific collections in the South are either completely closed to Negro investigators or are only partially opened and on humiliating terms.” But as was the unfortunate case in many Negro colleges, the position at the college came with a “very heavy teaching load, scientific isolation, no scientific library, and no opportunity to go to scientific meetings.”

As if trying to redeem his own professional disappointment through the achievements of one of the few students whose ability matched his impossibly high standards, Claytor maintained an unshakable belief that Katherine could meet with a successful future in mathematical research, all odds to the contrary. The prospects for a Negro woman in the field could be viewed only as dismal. If Dorothy Vaughan had been able to accept Howard University’s offer of graduate admission, she likely would have been Claytor’s only female classmate, with virtually no postgraduate career options outside of teaching, even with a master’s degree in hand. In the 1930s, just over a hundred women in the United States worked as professional mathematicians. Employers openly discriminated against Irish and Jewish women with math degrees; the odds of a black woman encountering work in the field hovered near zero.

“But where will I find a job?” Katherine asked.

“That will be your problem,” said her mentor.

Katherine and Jimmy Goble met while she was teaching at Marion. Jimmy was a Marion native, home on college break. They fell in love, and before she headed off to West Virginia, they got married, telling no one. West Virginia might have come to equalization, but it still held the line on barring married women from the classroom.

In the spring of 1940, at the end of a busy school day, Katherine was surprised to find Dr. Davis, the president of her alma mater, waiting outside her classroom. After exchanging pleasantries with his former student, Davis revealed the motive for his visit. As a board member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Davis worked closely with Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall in the slow, often dispiriting, and sometimes dangerous prosecution of legal cases on behalf of black plaintiffs in the South. The Norfolk teachers’ case was just one of many in their master plan to dismantle the system of apartheid that existed in American schools and workplaces.

In anticipation of the day that had now come, Davis, as shrewd a political operative as he was an educator, had walked away from an offer of $4 million from the West Virginia legislature to fund a graduate studies program at West Virginia State College. Davis’s gamble was that if there was no graduate program at the Negro college, all-white West Virginia University would be compelled to admit blacks to its programs under the Supreme Court’s 1938 Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada decision. West Virginia’s Governor Homer Holt saw the writing on the wall: the choice was to integrate or, like its neighbor to the east, dig in and contest the ruling. Rather than fight, Holt moved to integrate the state’s public graduate schools, asking his friend Davis in a clandestine meeting to handpick three West Virginia State College graduates to desegregate the state university, starting in the summer of 1940.

“So I picked you,” Davis said to Katherine that day outside her classroom; two men, then working as principals in other parts of West Virginia, would join her. Smart, charismatic, hardworking, and unflappable, Katherine was the perfect choice. As Katherine walked out of the door on her last day at the Morgantown high school, her principal, who was also an adjunct professor in West Virginia State’s math department, presented her with a full set of math reference books to use at the university, a hedge against any “inconveniences” that might arise from her need to use the white school’s library.

She enrolled in West Virginia University’s 1940 summer session. Katherine’s mother moved to Morgantown to room with her daughter, bolstering her strength and confidence during her first days at the white school. Katherine and the two other Negro students, both men entering the law school, chatted during registration on the first day. She never saw them again on campus and sailed off alone to the math department. Most of the white students gave Katherine a cordial welcome; some went out of their way to be friendly. The one classmate who protested her presence employed silence rather than epithet as a weapon. Most importantly, the professors treated her fairly, and she more than met the academic standard. The greatest challenge she faced was finding a course that didn’t duplicate Dr. Claytor’s meticulous tutelage.

At the end of the summer session, however, Katherine and Jimmy discovered that they were expecting their first child. Being quietly married was one thing; being married and a mother was quite another. The couple knew they had to tell Joshua and Joylette about their marriage and impending parenthood. Joshua had always expected that Katherine would earn a graduate degree, but the circumstances made finishing the program impossible. Katherine’s love for Jimmy and her confidence in the new path her life had taken softened her father’s hard line on graduate school, and he certainly couldn’t resist the thrill of the family’s first grandchild. Though disappointed, neither he nor the other influential men in her life—Dr. Claytor and Dr. Davis—would ever have asked her to deny love or sacrifice a family for the promise of a career.

In the four years since leaving graduate school, Katherine had not once regretted her decision to exchange the high-profile academic opportunity for domestic life. Most days she felt like the luckiest person in the world, in love with her husband and blessed with three daughters she adored. In idle moments her thoughts turned to Dr. Claytor and the phantom career he had assiduously prepared her for. In truth, the idea of becoming a research mathematician had always been an abstraction, and with the passage of time, it was easy to believe that the job was something that existed only in the mind of her eccentric professor. But in Hampton, Virginia, Dorothy Vaughan and scores of other former schoolteachers were proving that female research mathematicians weren’t just a wartime measure but a powerful force that was about to help propel American aeronautics beyond its previous limits.