HIDDEN FIGURES, EXCERPT...

"In 1939, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit against the state of Virginia on behalf of a black teacher at Norfolk's Booker T. Washington High School. The black teacher and her colleagues, including the principal, earned less than the school 's white janitor. The NAACP 's legal eagles , led by the fund's chief counsel, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Houston 's top deputy , a gangly, whip-sharp, Howard University law school grad named Thurgood Marshal shepherded the 'Alston v. Norfolk' case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered Virginia to bring Negro teachers salaries up to the white teachers' level . It was a victory, but a year too late for Katherine [Goble] : when a $110 a month job offer came from a Morgantown , West Virginia, high school for the 1939 school year, Katherine jumped at it . Pay equalization might have been a battle in Virginia, but West Virginia got on board without a fight.... "In the spring of 1940, at the end of a busy school day, Katherine was surprised to find Dr. Davis, the president of her alma mater, waiting outside her classroom. After exchanging pleasantries with his former student, Davis revealed the motive for his visit. As a board member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Davis worked closely with Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall in the slow, often dispiriting, and sometimes dangerous prosecution of legal cases on behalf of black plaintiffs in the South. The Norfolk teachers' case was just one of many in their master plan to dismantle the system of apartheid that existed in American schools and workplaces. "In anticipation of the day that had come, Davis, as shrewd a political operative as he was an educator, had walked away from an offer of $4 million from the West Virginia legislature to fund a graduate studies program at West Virginia State College. Davis' gamble was that if there were no graduate program at the Negro college, all-white West Virginia University would be compelled to admit blacks to its programs under the Supreme Court's 1938 'Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada' decision. West Virginia 'S Governor saw the handwriting on wall : the choice was to integrate or , like its neighbor to the east , dig in and contest the ruling. Rather than fight , Holt moved to integrate the state 's public graduate schools, asking his friend Davis in a clandestine meeting to handpick three West Virginia State College graduates to desegregate the state university, starting in the summer of 1940. "'So I picked you ,' Davis said to Katherine that day outside her classroom; two men, then working as principals in other parts of West Virginia would join her." P.70, 74-75, "Those Who Move Forward," HIDDEN FIGURES by Margot Lee Shetterly (2016)