Mary Jackson

Mary Winston grew up in Hampton, Virginia, and graduated from Hampton Institute in 1942 with degrees in mathematics and physical science. She taught school, worked as a bookkeeper and an army secretary, married Levi Jackson and had two children. In 1951 she was hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of NASA, as a mathematician in the West Area Computing unit at Langley, where Black women did calculations by hand in a separate building with separate toilets.

After two years an engineer named Kazimierz Czarnecki asked her to join his team on the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel, which blasted models with air at nearly twice the speed of sound, and suggested she train as an engineer. The graduate courses she needed were taught at night at Hampton High School, which was for white students only. She petitioned the City of Hampton for special permission to attend, and got it.

In 1958 she became NASA's first Black woman engineer. Over the next two decades she wrote or co-wrote a dozen technical reports on how air flows around aircraft at supersonic speeds, and rose to the most senior engineering grade.

In 1979, seeing that she could go no further herself and that other women were stuck, she took a demotion to become Langley's Federal Women's Program Manager, working to get women and minorities hired and promoted. NASA named its Washington headquarters after her in 2020.