Dorothy Vaughan's Life And Accomplishments

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to work for NASA in 1943? Well a woman named Dorothy Vaughan did just that. She was born and raised in Kansas City, MO. Dorothy was born on September 20, 1910. When Dorothy was seven years old she and her father and mother, Leonard and Anne Johnson, moved to Morgantown, West Virginia. In Morgantown, West Virginia, Dorothy graduated from Beechurst High School in 1925. She later got a Bachelor of Science degree from Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1932, she married Howard Vaughan. During the next eleven years, Dorothy became a mathematics teacher at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. She moved in 1943, with her family and husband to Newport News, Virginia, and Dorothy became a mathematician at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics on December 1943. Dorothy was in the first group of African Americans to be mathematicians and scientists.

The exclusive order that was issued by president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prohibited discrimination based on race, religion and nationality in the defense industry but the way that Dorothy and the other colored women still had to according to state and local laws required colored mathematicians to work apart from their white female counterparts. She was told to calculate mathematical computations for engineers conducting aeronautical experiments in wind tunnels. Dorothy became the first black supervisor at NACA, and she was promoted manager of the West Area Computers. She was able to give female employees who deserved promotions or raises and she would often support white women as