Katherine Johnson's story is the most famous of the group, largely because of Margot Lee Shetterly's 2016 book and the film Hidden Figures. But even Johnson's story was obscure for decades, because the work of the Black women mathematicians at NACA and NASA was deliberately kept invisible. When Johnson began working at Langley Research Center in 1953, the facility was racially segregated: she spent her first two weeks in the all-Black West Area Computing section, a pool of Black women mathematicians hired to perform calculations by hand for engineers who were often, as Shetterly notes, not as strong in mathematics as the women doing their calculations. Johnson was eventually moved into specific project work, where her contributions became foundational to the early space program.

In 1961, Katherine Johnson calculated the flight trajectory for Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 mission — the first American in space. The following year, she performed the calculations for John Glenn's Friendship 7 orbital mission. Glenn, despite having access to the IBM electronic computers that NASA was beginning to use, reportedly refused to fly until 'the girl' — Johnson — had personally verified the computer's numbers. The machines were prone to errors. Glenn trusted Johnson. The mission was successful. When President Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, she was 97 years old. NASA named a computational research facility after her in 2017. She died in 2020 at 101. Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson have since had NASA's Washington headquarters renamed in their honor.

Clarence Ellis is less well known, which is a significant omission. In 1969, he became the first Black American to earn a PhD in computer science, at the University of Illinois. He went on to work at Xerox PARC — the legendary Silicon Valley research lab where the computer mouse, the graphical user interface, laser printing, and Ethernet were developed — and co-invented OfficeTalk, the first operational groupware system: software that allows multiple people to work on the same document simultaneously from different locations. This is the technology that became Google Docs, Microsoft SharePoint, and virtually every collaborative software tool in use today. Clarence Ellis is not a household name in tech. He spent his career at a facility that produced some of the most influential inventions in computing history, and his contribution was foundational.

Mark Dean entered IBM as a chief engineer in the early 1980s as part of the 12-person team that developed the first IBM PC. He holds three of the nine original patents on that machine — including the patent for the bus architecture that allows peripherals (keyboards, monitors, printers) to connect to a computer. He later led the team that developed the first gigahertz microprocessor in 1999, a chip that could perform a billion calculations per second. His work is embedded in virtually every personal computer and device that followed the IBM PC. He has also been an outspoken advocate for diversity in STEM, and has noted the irony of being one of the most patent-holding engineers in computer history while Black engineers remain significantly underrepresented in the field.

The structural barriers that these individuals navigated are documented and ongoing. Katherine Johnson worked in a segregated facility, used separate bathrooms, and was initially assigned to a pool rather than to individual project work. Clarence Ellis attended graduate school in an era when Black academics were rarely advised toward computer science. Mark Dean has described experiences of being underestimated throughout his career. Today, according to the National Science Foundation, Black people account for 4.3 percent of U.S. engineering undergraduates and 7.45 percent of those employed in science and engineering — despite being 13 percent of the general population. Venture capital funding for Black founders is documented at less than 2 percent of total VC investment. The pipeline argument — that there are not enough qualified Black candidates — does not survive contact with the history of who built the field and who was systematically discouraged from entering it.