Don’t forget Dorothy Hoover, another hidden treasure once lost to black history She was a pure math whiz who also helped bring NASA into the aeronautics age as shown in the movie ‘Hidden Figures’

Hidden Figures book cover

It would have been so easy for Dorothy E. Hoover to have remained hidden.

When the 81-year-old woman died in a Maryland suburb just outside the nation’s capital 17 years ago, she was living alone. Neither her few acquaintances nor her neighbors had any idea whether she had any family. But to ensure Hoover received a proper burial, a few good folks managed to piece together an incomplete portrait of a life they barely knew.

Now, all these years later, the blockbuster book and movie Hidden Figures have filled in some of the remaining gaps.

Those few good folks who knew Hoover at the time of her death were stunned to learn she was one of the first African-American women hired to work as a human “computer” for the nation’s space program, just like the women in the movie. Even more, Hoover was a pioneer among those pioneers.

“Every time I think about it now I get chills,” said Jennifer West, of Bowie, Maryland, who went to check on Hoover one frigid February day in 2000, found her near death, and unexpectedly became her surrogate family. “I feel this beaming happiness. I think it’s because she’s released now … I knew deep down there was more to her story.”

A HIDDEN TREASURE

Hoover isn’t mentioned in the movie, which shot to No. 1 one at the box office with its January release and is now nominated for an Academy Award. But her accomplishments are highlighted in the New York Times No. 1 best-selling book, Hidden Figures, that first told the story last year. Author Margot Shetterly said that while researching NASA’s archives for her book, she uncovered clues that led her to Hoover.

The first clue was a 1951 report about the federal space program’s fair employment practices, particularly at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. The report pointed out that one of the women in the West Area Computing Group, the segregated unit where Hoover and the other African-American female mathematicians worked, had even attained a GS-9 on the federal government’s 15-tier pay scale — very rare for an African-American woman in government at the time.

“That is absolutely insane!” Shetterly said. “I wondered who that could be in 1950. It was like a total mystery.”

OUR SHEROES

Shetterly soon identified that trailblazer as Hoover, who was hired at Langley in 1943 as a professional (P-1) mathematician. She then became the first of the West Area “computers” to leave her group and work directly with a white male scientist — a privilege that generally occurred only at the request of the scientist. By 1946, Hoover was doing calculations for Robert T. Jones, “one of the biggest deals in aeronautics history,” Shetterly said.

Hoover was promoted to shift supervisor, one of three in the West Computing Group, along with Dorothy Vaughan, whose struggle to become a supervisor is chronicled in the movie. By 1951, Hoover had earned the title of aeronautical research scientist and co-authored some technical reports, another thought to be impossible and hard-fought accomplishment.

Then, in 1952, at what seemed to be the pinnacle of her career, Hoover resigned from Langley and returned to Arkansas, her home state, to go back to school.

“Of all the women, she was a pure mathematician,” Shetterly said, surmising why Hoover left Langley. “She was just not into the engineering but really more into theoretical math.”

Hoover earned a master’s degree in physics from Arkansas A&M (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff) in 1954 and spent a year working on her doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1955, before moving in 1956 to the U.S. Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C. She stayed three years and then returned to the space program as a mathematician at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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