Many people go through life desperate to find who they are at their core, but some of us are lucky enough to know the mark we want to leave from an early age. Mary Jackson, NASA’s first Black female engineer, certainly falls into that category. Her ambitious spirit and unwavering thirst for knowledge helped her soar to astronomical heights, while also opening doors for numerous others.
Jackson was born on April 9, 1921, in Hampton, Virginia. Throughout her life, she was a remarkable student who truly valued her education, graduating from high school with highest honors and earning a dual degree in mathematics and physical science at the Hampton Institute—now known as Hampton University—in 1942.
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From there, she went on to serve as a math teacher at a Black school in Calvert County, Maryland before returning to Hampton.
In 1951, she started working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics as a member of its segregated West Area Computing unit, a group of African American female mathematicians also referred to as the ‘West Computers.’ She reported to Dorothy Vaughan, a computer programmer who made a significant impact on the U.S. space program. Jackson held this position at a time when African Americans were still being segregated from Whites by law. At NACA, Black employees were not allowed to use the same bathrooms and dining facilities as their White counterparts.
Two years later, Jackson left the West Computers and started working for engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki. While there, she was able to conduct experiments in a high-speed wind tunnel that was capable of generating winds twice the speed of sound. Czarnecki later encouraged her to enter a program so she could be promoted from mathematician to engineer. But since Virginia’s schools were still segregated, she had to request special permission to join her White peers in the classroom.
Regardless of the barriers of segregation and gender bias, Jackson continued to rise above time and time again due to her self-assuredness and ability to ignore those who doubted her. In the end, she completed the necessary courses, and in 1958, she made history as the first Black woman to serve as an engineer at NASA.
Over the next two decades, she led a distinguished career as an aerospace engineer, focusing on the airflow around aircraft and authoring or co-authoring roughly a dozen research reports.
In her eyes, her own achievements weren’t the only measure of true success. She was deeply passionate about ensuring that her own success could create opportunities for others, proving that the sky is truly the limit when going after your dreams. Adamant about sharing her love of science and breaking a glass ceiling, in 1979, she left engineering and took a demotion to become manager of the Langley’s Federal Women’s Program at NASA.
She retired from Langley’s in 1985 and had received a myriad of honors throughout her career, including an Apollo Group Achievement Award and being named Langley’s Volunteer of the Year in 1976. She also served as the chair of one of the center’s annual United Way campaigns, was a Girl Scout troop leader for more than three decades and was a member of the National Technical Association, the oldest African American technical organization in the United States.
Jackson passed away in 2005, but her legacy and monumental impact will forever live on, continuing to help others find who they are and live the lives they are destined to live.
She and other West Computers—including Vaughan and Katherine Johnson—were the inspiration for Margot Lee Shetterly’s book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race,” which was made into an acclaimed film in 2016.
