By the summer of 1943, American troops have been fighting in World War II for a year and a half. Camp Pickett, thirty miles from Farmville, Virginia, is one of many training centers that Black and white soldiers pass through before embarking for Europe. Dorothy Vaughan, a Black mother of four, is working in the camp laundry. The work is hard, and the pay, 40 cents per hour, is low for war workers. However, that wage is more than what Dorothy earns as a high school math teacher during the rest of the year.

Dorothy was born in 1910. A gifted student, she skipped two grades on the way to becoming high school valedictorian. She studied math in college, and a professor recommended she go on to graduate school. The Great Depression had begun, however, and so, to help support her parents, she instead became a math teacher. By 1943, she had a family of her own and was teaching at Farmville’s Negro high school. In the spring, she applied for the Camp Pickett job, to earn extra money that would someday help to pay for her children’s college educations. However, Dorothy felt inspired by a newspaper article about Black women at Hampton Institute, near the Langley facility, studying to be engineers. When she saw a notice advertising jobs for women with knowledge of mathematics to work at Langley, she filled out an application for that job, too.