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Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

The untold story of the brilliant minds behind America's space race

Title: Hidden Figures

Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

Publisher: William Morrow and Company

Genre: True Accounts, Society & Culture, 20th century American history

First Publication: 2016

Language: English

Setting: Hampton, VA

Book Summary: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program.

Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’, calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘coloured computers’ used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets and astronauts, into space.

Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War and the women’s rights movement, ‘Hidden Figures’ interweaves a rich history of humankind’s greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.

Book Review - Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shatterly

Book Review: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Hidden Figures tells the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four African American women who blazed the trail for others to follow in the fields of mathematics and engineering at NASA.

NASA, originally known as NACA ( National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics ) began hiring women during WWII as female computers. These women essentially did the work of mathematicians but were labelled as subprofessionals in order to be paid less. In 1943 there was a push to hire qualified black women because the demand could not be satisfied with white employees only.

“Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.”

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly is a remarkable account of a small number of intelligent, hard-working, driven and admirable African American women who made significant contributions to the Space Race and to the fields of math, science and engineering. At a time when many parts of the United States still practiced segregation and racial prejudices were still widespread, their story is even more extraordinary. What a day it must have been for those women standing in that room in 1969 as the culmination of their dedication and perseverance was about to peak as the first man made his way to the moon!

I particularly enjoyed how this book focused on the individual stories of each woman. I was so inspired by the sacrifice, determination, and intelligence of these ladies. The book incorporates the history that coincides with the stories moving from WWII and aviation research to the Cold War and the Space Race . The book focuses a lot on the Civil Rights Movement and the push to end school segregation. At the onset of the story, the black mathematicians are forced to work on the west side of the Langley campus until the 60s when integration occurs.

“Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status–none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.”

This book is thoroughly researched and introduces us to four of these gifted women and their stories as they took the plunge into careers as mathematicians – or ‘computers’, as they were called before the age of information technology and digital electronics. Author Margot Lee Shetterly also provides us with many details of the civil rights movement, school segregation and eventual integration, and the aeronautic industry.

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“Hidden Figures” Is a Subtle and Powerful Work of Counter-History

By Richard Brody

Katherine Johnson Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson in “Hidden Figures.”

The basic virtue of “Hidden Figures” (which opens on December 25th), and it’s a formidable one, is to proclaim with a clarion vibrancy that, were it not for the devoted, unique, and indispensable efforts of three black women scientists, the United States might not have successfully sent people into space or to the moon and back. The movie is set mainly in 1961 and 1962, in Virginia, where a key NASA research center was (and is) based, and the movie is aptly and thoroughly derisive toward the discriminatory laws and practices that prevailed at the time.

The insults and indignities that black residents of Virginia, and black employees of NASA , unremittingly endured are integral to the drama. Those segregationist rules and norms—and the personal attitudes and actions that sustained them—are unfolded with a clear, forceful, analytical, and unstinting specificity. The efforts of black Virginians to cope with relentless ambient racism and, where possible, to point it out, resist it, overcome it, and even defeat it are the focus of the drama. “Hidden Figures” is a film of calm and bright rage at the way things were—an exemplary reproach to the very notion of political nostalgia. It depicts repugnant attitudes and practices of white supremacy that poisoned earlier generations’ achievements and that are inseparable from those achievements.

“Hidden Figures” is a subtle and powerful work of counter-history, or, rather, of a finally and long-deferred accurate history, that fills in the general outlines of these women’s roles in the space program. Its redress of the record begins in West Virginia in 1926, where the sixth-grade math prodigy Katherine Coleman is given a scholarship to a school that one of her teachers refers to as the only one in the region for black children that goes beyond the eighth grade. She quickly displays her genius there—but the school’s narrow horizons suggests the sharply limited opportunities for black people over all.

The nature of those limits is indicated in the very next scene, which cuts ahead to a lonely road in Virginia in 1961. There, a car is stalled, its hood open. Katherine is there with her two other African-American friends and colleagues. She’s sitting pensively in the passenger seat; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is beneath the engine, trying to fix it; and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) is standing impatiently beside the car. A police cruiser approaches. They tense up; Dorothy says, “No crime in a broken-down car,” and Mary responds, “No crime being Negro, neither.” Their fearful interaction with the officer—a white man, of course, with a billy club in hand and a condescending bearing—is resolved with a comedic moment brought about by the women’s deferential irony. What emerges, however, is nothing less than an instance in a reign of terror.

Dorothy is the manager and de-facto supervisor of a group of “computers”—about thirty black women, all skilled mathematicians—that includes Katherine and Mary. Dorothy is awaiting a formal promotion to supervisor, but a talk with a senior administrator makes clear that it’s not to be; the clear but unspoken reason is her race. (Tellingly, Dorothy addresses that official, played by Kirsten Dunst, as “Mrs. Mitchell,” who, in turn, calls her by her first name.) Mary, endowed with engineering skill, is summoned to a team led by an engineer named Zielinski (Olek Krupa), a Polish-Jewish émigré who escaped the Holocaust and who encourages her to seek formal certification as an engineer. To do so, Mary will have to take additional classes—but the only school that offers them is a segregated one, whites-only, from which she’s barred.

When NASA astronauts ceremoniously arrive at the research center, the black women “computers” are forced to stand together as a separate group, conspicuously divided from the other scientists. (Only John Glenn, played by Glen Powell, greets them, and does so warmly, shaking their hands and lingering to chat with them about their work.)

As for Katherine—now Katherine Goble, the widowed mother of three young girls—she’s plucked from the pool of mathematicians to join the main research group, headed by Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). There, she’s the only black person and the only woman (other than the secretary, played by Kimberly Quinn). She once again rapidly displays her mathematical genius, but not before being taken for the department custodian; forced to drink from a coffeepot labelled “colored”; treated dismissively by the lead researcher, Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons); and compelled to walk a half-mile to her former office in order to use the “colored ladies’ room.” (Moreover, the contrast between that depleted and dilapidated facility and the well-appointed and welcoming white-women’s bathroom proves the meaning of “separate but unequal.”)

Each of the three women has a particular conflict to confront, a particular focus in the struggle for equality. Mary’s struggle takes place in a public forum: she petitions a Virginia state court for permission to take the needed night classes in a segregated school. She’s not represented by a lawyer, and speaks on her own behalf; but, rather than making her case in open court, she makes a personal plea to the judge that’s as much about him and his outlook as it is about her, and her work and its usefulness. What her plea isn’t about is law, rights, or justice.

The omission is no accident; it’s set up by dramatic contrast with the angry insistence of Mary’s husband, Levi (Aldis Hodge), a civil-rights activist, that she not bother pursuing a job as an engineer: “You can’t apply for freedom. . . . It’s got to be demanded, taken.” Mary says that there’s “more than one way” to get opportunities, but the deck of this debate is stacked by the terms in which Levi couches it, saying that there’s no such thing as a woman engineer—at least, not a black one—and blaming her for not being home often enough to take proper care of their children.

Dorothy’s pursuit of a formal promotion to supervisor also takes place against the backdrop of the civil-rights movement. She learns that her entire department of human “computers” will soon be replaced by an electronic computer—an enormous I.B.M. mainframe that’s being installed. A gifted technician, Dorothy seeks out a book from the local library (a segregated library from which she’s thrown out), in which she’ll learn the programming language Fortran; she soon becomes NASA ’s resident expert. On that trip to the library, in the company of her two sons on the cusp of adolescence, they witness a protest by civil-rights activists chanting “segregation must go” and see police officers, with police dogs, approaching the protesters. Dorothy and her sons pause and look, until she tells them to “pay attention that we’re not part of that trouble.” But, sitting in the back of the bus with them, she emphasizes that “separate and equal aren’t the same thing,” and adds, “If you act right, you are right.”

Katherine, too, fights for her dignity and for opportunities at work. Her calculations very soon prove indispensable to the effort to put the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, into outer space. (The scene in which she displays her calculations to the entire office of scientists features a small but brilliant stroke of film editing, which suggests that she envisioned the effect of that bold step before she took it.) She’s fighting prejudice against blacks, against women (none has ever been admitted to a Pentagon briefing, where she can get the information she needs for her analyses), and against bureaucracy itself. Paul, who has been the department’s resident genius, and to whom she reports, is resentful of his subordinate—a black woman, for good measure—outshining him in mathematical talent and analytical insight.

Eventually, upbraided by the head of the department, Al, in the presence of the entire staff, Katherine explodes with rage, setting forth the full litany of indignities to which she’s subjected because of her skin color, before storming out. But this sublimely righteous outburst is posed on a solid meritocratic basis. Katherine isn’t the only black woman to have worked in the main research department under Al; there has been a veritable parade of black women “computers” stationed in that department, and each has been found wanting and has been sent back to the pool. As a result, none has effected any change in the status of black employees or of women at NASA . Katherine’s outburst is effective because Katherine, unlike her predecessors, is indispensable. Taking her claims to heart, Al plays a heroic role, championing Katherine’s work and treating her with due respect—but his heroism is a conditional and practical one, spurred by his single-minded devotion to the space program.

In “Hidden Figures,” the civil-rights movement isn’t just a barely sketched backdrop; it’s in virtual competition with the efforts in personal advancement and achievement heroically made by the three women at the center of the film. In the movie, the three women never speak directly of civil rights. In the warmhearted romance at the center of the movie—Katherine’s relationship with Col. Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali)—the subject never comes up. (Katherine Johnson is now ninety-eight; a title card at the end of the film declares that she and Johnson recently celebrated their fifty-sixth wedding anniversary.) The movie presents three women whose life experiences have been extraordinary; their work, their personal lives, and their struggle for justice are uncompromisingly heroic. What the movie is missing, above all, is their voices.

These women are not in any way submissive or passive. On the contrary, each one speaks up and takes action at great personal risk. (For instance, Dorothy steals a book that the library won't let her borrow and then speaks sharply to the guard who hustles her and her sons out.) The movie's emphasis on individual action and achievement in the face of vast obstacles is both beautiful and salutary, but its near-effacement of collective organization and political activity at a time when they were at their historical apogee—for that matter, its elision of politics as such—narrows the drama and, all the more grievously, the characters at its center.

What the women at the center of “Hidden Figures” lived through in their youth, in the deep age of Jim Crow, and, later, at a time of protest and of legal change, remains unspoken; their wisdom and insight remain unexpressed. For all the emotional power and historical redress of the movie—above all, in the simple recognition of the centrality of its three protagonists to the modern world—it pushes to the fore a moderation, based solely on personal accomplishment, in pursuit of justice. This is different from the civil-rights goal of a universal equality based on humanity alone, extended to the ordinary as well as to the exceptional. This is, by no means, a complaint about the real-life people on whom the movie is based; it’s purely a matter of aesthetics, a result of decisions by the director and screenwriter, Theodore Melfi, and his co-writer, Allison Schroeder, about how they imagined and developed the characters. (I found myself thinking, by contrast, of recently published stories by the late filmmaker Kathleen Collins , with their incisive observations regarding participants and observers of civil-rights activism.)

Melfi and Schroeder are white; perhaps they conceived the film to be as nonthreatening to white viewers as possible, or perhaps they anticipated that it would be released at a time of promised progress. Instead, it’s being released in a time of resurgent, unabashed racism. The time for protest has returned; for all the inspired celebration of hitherto unrecognized black heroes that “Hidden Figures” offers, and all the retrospective outrage that “Hidden Figures” sparks, I can only imagine the movie as it might have been made, much more amply, imaginatively, and resonantly, linking history and the present tense, by Ava DuVernay or Spike Lee, Julie Dash or Charles Burnett.

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Woody Allen Reëmerges with a Movie About Getting Away with Murder

By Doreen St. Félix

By Andrew Marantz

What Sets the Smart Heroines of Hidden Figures Apart

Movies about brilliant scientific or mathematical minds often focus on their subject’s ego—not so with a new film about three African American women who worked at NASA in the ’60s.

When it comes to historical movies about brilliant minds, especially in the realms of math or the sciences, audiences can all but expect a tale of ego. Films such as A Beautiful Mind , The Theory of Everything , and The Imitation Game all lean in some way on the idea of the inaccessible genius—a mathematician, computer scientist, and theoretical physicist all somehow removed from the world.

Hidden Figures is not that kind of film: It’s a story of brilliance, but not of ego. It’s a story of struggle and willpower, but not of individual glory. Set in 1960s Virginia, the film centers on three pioneering African American women whose calculations for NASA were integral to several historic space missions, including John Glenn’s successful orbit of the Earth. These women—Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan—were superlative mathematicians and engineers despite starting their careers in segregation-era America and facing discrimination at home, at school, and at work.

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And yet Hidden Figures pays tribute to its subjects by doing the opposite of what many biopics have done in the past—it looks closely at the remarkable person in the context of a community. Directed by Theodore Melfi ( St. Vincent ) and based on the nonfiction book of the same title by Margot Lee Shetterly, the film celebrates individual mettle, but also the way its characters consistently try to lift others up. They’re phenomenal at what they do, but they’re also generous with their time, their energy, and their patience in a way that feels humane, not saintly. By refracting the overlooked lives and accomplishments of Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson through this lens, Hidden Figures manages to be more than an inspiring history lesson with wonderful performances.

From the start, Hidden Figures makes clear that it is about a trio, not a lone heroine. Katherine (played by a radiant Taraji P. Henson) is the film’s ostensible protagonist and gets the most screen time. But her story is woven tightly with those of Mary (Janelle Monáe) and Dorothy (Octavia Spencer); the former became NASA’s first black female engineer , the latter was a mathematician who became NASA’s first African American manager . (It’s worth noting that, as a dramatization, the film makes tweaks to the timeline, characters, and events of the books.)

Hidden Figures begins in earnest in 1961. Katherine, Mary, and Dorothy are part of NASA’s pool of human “computers” —employees, usually women, charged with doing calculations before the use of digital computers. Due to Virginia’s segregation laws, African American female computers have to work in a separate “colored” building at the Langley Research Center. But the U.S. is so desperate to beat the Soviet Union into space that NASA becomes a reluctant meritocracy: Because of her expertise in analytic geometry, Katherine is assigned to a special task group trying to get Glenn into orbit. She arrives at her new job to find she’s the sole brown face in the room.

Katherine is closest to the excitement, but Hidden Figures widens its scope beyond her. Mary must navigate layers of racist bureaucratic hurdles in her quest to become an engineer. Dorothy is fighting for a long overdue promotion, while the arrival of an IBM machine threatens to put her team of computers out of work. The women consistently out-think their higher-ranked (usually white, male) colleagues, whether by learning a new programming language, solving problems in wind-tunnel experiments, or calculating narrow launch windows for space missions. Each is uniquely aware of the broader stakes of her success—for other women, for black people, for black women, and for America at large—and this knowledge is as much an inspiration as it is a heavy weight.

Early on, Dorothy shares her ambivalence about Katherine’s prestigious new assignment. “Any upward movement is movement for us all. It’s just not movement for me,” she says, disappointed after a setback at work. It’s a subtle, but loaded point, and one of the most thought-provoking lines in the film. Of course she’s proud of Katherine, and of course Katherine is paving the way for others. But individual victories are often simply that—Katherine knocking down one pillar of discrimination doesn’t mean countless more don’t remain. Still, Dorothy’s frustration with her stagnation at work doesn’t translate to defeatism or selfishness. She spends much of the film maneuvering to protect her team’s jobs, even if it means risking her own status and security.

Their intellect may not be broadly relatable (again, they’re exceptional for a reason), but their sense of rootedness is. Though most of their time and energy go to their careers, the women of Hidden Figures don’t take their relationships with each other and with their friends and families for granted. If one gets held up at work for hours, the other two wait in the parking lot until they can all drive home. On the weekends, they go to church and neighborhood barbecues and spend time with their children. They don’t “have it all,” but they do strive for balance and connection. (Another “feel-good film” from 2016, Queen of Katwe , also used the concept of community and interdependence to undermine the built-up notion of isolated talent.)

Despite the racism and sexism Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary face, Hidden Figures is a decidedly un-somber affair. The breezy script by Melfi and Allison Schroeder opts not to dwell much on the particulars of aeronautical science; instead, it revels in the intelligence and warmth of its subjects, in their successes both in and out of the office, and it wants viewers to do so too. Hidden Figures doesn’t hide its efforts to be a crowdpleaser—depending on audience size, you can expect clapping and cheering after moments of victory, and loud groans whenever egregious acts of racism take place (there are many). A buoyant soundtrack by Pharrell Williams, Hans Zimmer, and Benjamin Wallfisch and regular doses of comic relief help keep the tone light and optimistic despite the serious issues at hand.

Rounding out Hidden Figures ’ all-star cast are Kevin Costner, as Katherine’s boss and eventual ally; an appropriately un-funny Jim Parsons as a new colleague of Katherine’s who can barely tolerate her presence; Kirsten Dunst as Dorothy’s manager and the epitome of the racist-who-thinks-she’s-not type; Glen Powell as an affable John Glenn; and Mahershala Ali as Katherine’s kindly love interest, Jim Johnson. Because of the engaging performances that Henson, Monáe, and Spencer give, each main character is fascinating to watch in her own right. But it’s their dynamic that makes it a joy to see them onscreen together.

Hidden Figures doesn’t try to push many artistic boundaries, but it tells its story so well that it doesn’t really have to. The film also avoids the most glaring missteps of historical movies that deal with race: At no point does it try to give viewers the impression that racism has been “solved,” and its white characters exist on a constantly shifting spectrum of racial enlightenment. What’s more, the film’s straightforward presentation belies its fairly radical subject matter. As K. Austin Collins notes at The Ringer , Hidden Figures “might be one of the few Hollywood movies about the civil rights era to imagine that black lives in the ’60s, particularly black women’s lives, were affected not only by racism but also by the space race and the Cold War.”

The Hidden Figures author, Shetterly, has discussed how the film only portrays a fraction of the individuals who worked on the space program— and how the movie was meant to speak to the experiences of the many African American women working at NASA at the time. Watching this particular story unfurl on the big screen, it’s hard not to think of how many more movies and books could be made about women like Katherine Johnson—talented women shut out of promotions and meetings and elite programs and institutions and, thus history, because they weren’t white. Even today, barriers remain. A 2015 study found 100 percent of women of color in STEM fields report experiencing gender bias at work, an effect often influenced by their race. Black and Latina women, for example, reported being mistaken for janitors (a scene that, fittingly, takes place in Hidden Figures ).

With the complex social forces that shaped its characters’ lives still so relevant today, Hidden Figures is powerful precisely because it’s not a solo portrait or a close character study. Certainly, Hollywood will be a better industry when there are more films about the egos and personal demons and grand triumphs of black women who helped to change the world. But Hidden Figures shines with respect for sisterhood and the communistic spirit, and in casting its spotlight wide, the film imparts a profound appreciation for what was achieved in history’s shadows.

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Hidden Figures : Book summary and reviews of Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

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Hidden Figures

The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

by Margot Lee Shetterly

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Published Sep 2016 368 pages Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion Publication Information

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Book summary.

The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space—a powerful, revelatory contribution that is as essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America as Between the World and Me and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks . The basis for the smash Academy Award-nominated film starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner.

Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black "West Computing" group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens. Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.

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Reader reviews.

The #1 New York Times bestseller Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction Winner Black Caucus of American Library Association Best Nonfiction Book Winner NAACP Image Award Best Nonfiction Book Winner National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Communication Award "Much as Tom Wolfe did in The Right Stuff , Shetterly moves gracefully between the women's lives and the broader sweep of history ... Shetterly, who grew up in Hampton, blends impressive research with an enormous amount of heart in telling these stories" - Boston Globe "Meticulous… the depth and detail that are the book's strength make it an effective, fact-based rudder with which would-be scientists and their allies can stabilize their flights of fancy. This hardworking, earnest book is the perfect foil for the glamour still to come." - Seattle Times "Margot Lee Shetterly does not play the austere historian in Hidden Figures . She is right there at the beginning with evocative memories of her childhood, visiting her father—an engineer turned climate scientist—at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia…Hidden Figures…is clearly fueled by pride and admiration, a tender account of genuine transcendence and camaraderie. The story warmly conveys the dignity and refinements of these women. They defied barriers for the privilege of offering their desperately needed technical abilities." - The New York Times Book Review - Janna Levin "Shetterly crafts a narrative that is crucial to understanding subsequent movements for civil rights." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Shetterly's highly recommended work offers up a crucial history that had previously and unforgivably been lost. We'd do well to put this book into the hands of young women who have long since been told that there's no room for them at the scientific table." - Library Journal (starred review) "Much of the work will be confusing to the mathematically disinclined, but their story is inspiring and enlightening." - Kirkus

Author Information

Margot lee shetterly.

Margot Lee Shetterly is a writer who grew up in Hampton Virginia, where she knew many of the women in Hidden Figures . She is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and the recipient of a Virginia Foundation of the Humanities grant for her research into the history of women in computing. She lives in Charlottesville, VA.

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Still from the film Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi.

Hidden Figures is a groundbreaking book. But the film? Not so much

Has Hollywood’s need for the feel-good factor done Margot Shetterley’s book – and the history of Nasa’s black women mathematicians – a disservice?

I n the opening scenes of Hidden Figures , released in the UK on Friday, we are introduced to Dorothy Vaughan – played with verve and wit by Octavia Spencer – as a pair of legs sticking out from under the bonnet of a broken-down car. One detail immediately stands out: Vaughan’s legs are light beige and shiny. She is wearing stockings that don’t match her skin tone, presumably because that was all that was available to her.

Although the scene goes on to establish the deep racism of the time in more direct ways, the small detail of the stockings tries to put viewers in the shoes of someone like Vaughan. It reminds us how these women were made to feel like outsiders in their own country in small and large ways, even as they helped the nation succeed on the global stage.

In writing history, the devil is always in the details. Margot Shetterly’s groundbreaking book, Hidden Figures , reorients our view of the space race by telling the stories of Nasa’s black women mathematicians. It casts them as protagonists in the grand drama of American technological history rather than mere details. But the film based on Shetterly’s book straddles the line between allowing these women to be the protagonists of their story and crowding them out of the spotlight. The bravura performances of Taraji P. Henson (who plays Katherine Johnson), Janelle Monáe (who plays Mary Jackson), and Octavia Spencer are hindered by the film’s framing.

The film follows Vaughan, Johnson, and Jackson as they work feverishly on the calculations for the launch and re-entry of John Glenn’s 1962 mission as the first American to orbit the Earth. In the early 1960s, the US was falling behind the Soviets in the space race: already the USSR had launched the first satellite and put the first person into orbit. By the time of Glenn’s orbit, the US was desperate for a win in the space race, and – by extension – the Cold War.

Mary Jackson at work in NASA’s Langley Research Centre.

As the women race to complete the needed calculations, Johnson is promoted, owing to her exceptional mathematical talent. While this makes her into the film’s hero, it also puts her into direct contact with many of the white, male Nasa engineers who see her as a black woman first and only secondarily as a person and coworker. At this point, Nasa manager Al Harrison, played by Kevin Costner, comes into the frame.

Despite being an amalgam of three different Nasa employees, Harrison somehow seems to do no actual work. Perhaps this is a subtle satire of the management class, but it also means his character simply takes up space in someone else’s story. Costner is shoehorned into the story as the white male hero who lifts the women up. The role is problematic, uncritically centring an unremarkable white man in a story about three brilliant black women, and the decision to cast a well-known star steals focus from the female leads. Other men in the film manage to support the main characters without stealing the limelight, like the Jewish émigré who supports Jackson’s attempts to get the certification she needed to become the first black woman at Nasa to hold the title of engineer. Harrison’s character, meanwhile, is an unfortunate meta-commentary on Hollywood’s continued reliance on racist and sexist storytelling tropes that weakens the film and its message.

Henson, Monáe, and Spencer shine in their roles when given the space to do so. Spencer’s Vaughan engages with the most important of technological advances in a way that shows her brilliance and foresight. That technology is not the space capsule, but Nasa’s new IBM computer. Vaughan sees the writing on the wall for her section of women “computers” with the arrival of a machine designed to make their jobs unnecessary. Instead of fighting the change she immediately warms to the new machine, learning to program in FORTRAN without being asked and getting the women she supervises to make themselves indispensable to the coming technological regime by becoming early computer experts.

In the end, Hidden Figures is an often uplifting film with problematic elements and myopic framing. None of those problems are present in Shetterly’s book, which deftly moves between talking about people and institutions in ways that make the book both a joy to read and an instruction manual for other historians writing the history of technology. Unlike the book, the film tells a straightforward, simplistic story, and does so with rather plodding pacing and humdrum cinematography.

It also leaves unresolved the tension between what the women are doing and the reasons they’re doing it. In the film, there’s no discussion of the problematic fact that these talented women are submerged in the process of helping the US fight a Cold War designed to extend American political hegemony – the same structure that has subjugated them and their loved ones. As Shetterly puts it in her book:

So much money spent so that ... a dozen white men could take the express train to a lifeless world? Negro women and men could barely go to the next state without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, and service stations that wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the bathroom.

Though the film inserts a few scenes that hint at the indignity and terror of living as a black woman in the Jim Crow South, it oddly keeps racism at arms length from a narrative that, without it, would never have existed.

Overall, Hidden Figures is an enjoyable but limited film, despite excellent performances from its female leads. Shetterly’s book focuses on the lives of remarkable people who, up to now, have been ignored because they were women and because they were black. It shows why they were important while allowing them to remain human. The film takes the stories of three of these women and gives them the Hollywood treatment. It tries to be a feel-good movie about a historical period in which black people were often brutally denied their civil rights, and it lionizes a problematic technological proxy war. Disappointingly, the film hides the details that are most meaningful and instructive as we face an era of renewed international turmoil, misguided technological utopianism, and resurgent racism.

Marie Hicks’s book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing , looks at how gendered labour discrimination caused the decline of British computing. She can be found on Twitter as @histoftech .

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Review: ‘Hidden Figures’ Honors 3 Black Women Who Helped NASA Soar

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By A.O. Scott

Dec. 22, 2016

“Hidden Figures” takes us back to 1961, when racial segregation and workplace sexism were widely accepted facts of life and the word “computer” referred to a person, not a machine. Though a gigantic IBM mainframe does appear in the movie — big enough to fill a room and probably less powerful than the phone in your pocket — the most important computers are three African-American women who work at NASA headquarters in Hampton, Va. Assigned to data entry jobs and denied recognition or promotion, they would go on to play crucial roles in the American space program.

Based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, the film, directed by Theodore Melfi (who wrote the script with Allison Schroeder), turns the entwined careers of Katherine Goble (later Johnson), Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan into a rousing celebration of merit rewarded and perseverance repaid. Like many movies about the overcoming of racism, it offers belated acknowledgment of bravery and talent and an overdue reckoning with the sins of the past. And like most movies about real-world breakthroughs, “Hidden Figures” is content to stay within established conventions. The story may be new to most viewers, but the manner in which it’s told will be familiar to all but the youngest.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. There is something to be said for a well-told tale with a clear moral and a satisfying emotional payoff. Mr. Melfi, whose previous film was the heart-tugging, borderline-treacly Bill Murray vehicle “St. Vincent,” knows how to push our emotional buttons without too heavy a hand. He trusts his own skill, the intrinsic interest of the material and — above all — the talent and dedication of the cast. From one scene to the next, you may know more or less what is coming, but it is never less than delightful to watch these actors at work.

Start with the three principals, whose struggles at NASA take place as the agency is scrambling to send an astronaut into orbit. Katherine Goble is the central hidden figure, a mathematical prodigy played with perfect nerd charisma by Taraji P. Henson. Katherine is plucked from the computing room and assigned to a team that will calculate the launch coordinates and trajectory for an Atlas rocket. She receives a cold welcome — particularly from an engineer named Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) — and is not spared the indignities facing a black woman in a racially segregated, gender-stratified workplace. The only bathroom she is allowed to use is in a distant building, and she horrifies her new co-workers when she helps herself to a cup of coffee.

Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) and Mary (Janelle Monáe) also face discrimination. Dorothy, who is in charge of several dozen computers, is repeatedly denied promotion to supervisor and treated with condescension by her immediate boss (Kirsten Dunst). The Polish-born engineer (Olek Krupa) with whom Mary works is more enlightened, but Mary runs into the brick wall of Virginia’s Jim Crow laws when she tries to take graduate-level physics courses.

Movie Review: ‘Hidden Figures'

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “hidden figures.”.

In “Hidden Figures,” three African-American women play crucial rolls in the 60s space race while battling racial and gender inequality at NASA. In his review A.O. Scott writes: Like many movies about the overcoming of racism, “Hidden Figures,” offers belated acknowledgment of bravery and talent and an overdue reckoning with the sins of the past. There is something to be said for a well-told tale with a clear moral and a satisfying emotional payoff. The director Ted Melfi knows how to push our emotional buttons without too heavy a hand. He trusts his own skill, the intrinsic interest of the material and—above all—the talent and dedication of the cast. From one scene to the next, you may know more or less what is coming, but it is never less than delightful to watch these actors at work.

“Hidden Figures” effectively conveys the poisonous normalcy of white supremacy, and the main characters’ determination to pursue their ambitions in spite of it and to live normal lives in its shadow. The racism they face does not depend on the viciousness or virtue of individual white people, and for the most part the white characters are not treated as heroes for deciding, at long last, to behave decently. Two of them, however, are singled out for commendation: John Glenn , portrayed by Glen Powell as a natural democrat with no time for racial hierarchies; and Al Harrison, the head of Katherine’s group, for whom the success of the mission is more important than color.

Kevin Costner, who plays Al, is an actor almost uniquely capable of upstaging through understatement. He is also one of the great gum-chewers in American cinema, a habit that, along with the flattop haircut and heavy-framed glasses, gives Al an aura of midcentury no-nonsense masculine competence. He desegregates the NASA bathrooms with a sledgehammer and stands up for Katherine in quieter but no less emphatic ways when her qualifications are challenged.

It’s a bit much, maybe, but Mr. Costner, as usual, does what he can to give the white men of America a good name. The movie, meanwhile, expands the schoolbook chronicle of the conquest of space beyond the usual heroes, restoring some of its idealism and grandeur in the process. It also embeds that history in daily life, departing from the televised spectacle of liftoffs and landings and the public drama of the civil rights movement to spend time with its heroines and their families at home and in church. The sweetest subplot involves the romance between Katherine, a widow with three daughters, and a handsome military officer played by Mahershala Ali.

“Hidden Figures” makes a fascinating and timely companion to “Loving,” Jeff Nichols’s film about the Virginia couple who challenged their state’s law against interracial marriage, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. The two movies take place in the same state in the same era, and focus on the quiet dramas that move history forward. They introduce you to real people you might wish you had known more about earlier. They can fill you with outrage at the persistence of injustice and gratitude toward those who had the grit to stand up against it.

Hidden Figures Rated PG. Your children should see it. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes.

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Hidden Figures

Margot lee shetterly, everything you need for every book you read..

In 1943, in the midst of World War II, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, VA seeks to hire hundreds of junior physicists and mathematicians to help in the war effort by supporting engineers in performing aeronautical research as part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the NACA). At the time, mathematicians, who are commonly called “computers,” are almost all women. Further, Jim Crow laws are still in place in the South, which means that Hampton is a segregated place. Langley hires some black female computers, but places them in a segregated office called West Area.

In the summer of 1942, Dorothy Vaughan , a math teacher, is also working in a miltary laundry room in order to earn extra money and to support the American war effort. Married with children, Dorothy comes from a middle class black family, well-respected and well-known by other black families in town. One day she sees an advertisement for jobs at the NACA. She applies, and is hired as a mathematician. She accepts the job, even though it requires her to move quite a distance and be away from her family.

At around the same time, Katherine Coleman is a math major at West Virginia. She is such an excellent mathematician that she is invited to integrate a nearby university, where she has been accepted into a master’s program in mathematics. She completes the summer session of the master’s program, but then drops out of the program to start a family.

Meanwhile, Dorothy Vaughan begins work at the NACA. As a black computer, she must work in the segregated West Area Computing room. White computers, run by white Head Computers Margerey Hannah and Blanche Shopsin , work out of a different office on the East Side of Langley’s campus, called East Area. The black computers, much to their consternation, are also made to sit together in the cafeteria at a table marked with a sign that reads “Colored Computers.” Nonetheless, the black computers play an important role in helping the engineers at Langley improve American fighter planes and develop ever more powerful bomb payloads.

After the war, Dorothy fears she will be let go by the NACA, but instead she is made a permanent employee in 1946. Even so, she finds it hard to move up the ranks: there are few opportunities available to women, and even fewer for black women. Yet when the Head Computer Margery Hannah gets promoted and Margarery’s second, Blanche, unexpectedly falls ill and dies, Dorothy is asked to fill the role. For a number of years she serves only as the “acting head” of the West Area computing division, but she performs so well that she becomes full head of the unit in 1951. That same year, Mary Jackson joins West Computing, working as a computer under Dorothy Vaughan.

Globally, the “Cold War” between the United States and the Soviet Union becomes more intense. Yet as the United States dedicates itself to fighting the spread of Communist oppression around the globe, many black Americans, including many at the NACA wonder why at the same time the United States perpetuates the oppression of African-Americans on its own soil.

Yet the NACA, perhaps, offers more opportunities than much of the rest of society. An NACA engineer named Kazimierz Czarnecki invites Mary Jackson to join his research team. Impressed by Mary’s intelligence, he then pushes her to become an engineer. Slowly, but surely, the NACA begins to integrate. That doesn’t mean bias against women and blacks is absent from the organization. It is a place where the chief officer, John Becker , thinks little of accusing Mary of making a mistake in her calculations. But it is also a place where she can use her skills to prove to him that he’d actually made the mistake. Her willingness to stand up for herself inspires other black computers, and shows those in leadership positions that Mary has what it takes to succeed.

Katherine starts work at Langley in 1953, after learning about the job from a relative at a wedding. She joins the Flight Research Division, where she impresses the engineers in the group with her expertise in analytical geometry. Once again, the NACA proves to be a place where prejudice continues to exist, and yet also a place where it seemingly can be overcome. On her first day in her new office, a white man one desk over stands up and walks away when she greets him. She ignores his rudeness, knowing if she’s going to survive at Langley, she’ll have to be resilient. Two weeks later she and the white man become fast friends, after they discover they are both from West Virginia. Similarly, it is a place where Katherine’s mathematical skill can get her moved from the computing pool into a group led by the head of the Flight Research Division, Henry Pearson. But Pearson, while seemingly promoting Katherine, also fails to give her a raise. Yet the integration that has already occurred continues to make change, as Dorothy Vaughan fights to get Katherine the raise she has earned.

Katherine quickly proves herself in her new role. Her first assignment is to solve the reason behind the recent crash of a small propeller plane. Her research helps reveal how turbulence from one plane can affect the flight of another, a discovery that ultimately leads to changes in air traffic regulations. Katherine’s abilities ensure that she is accepted by her white peers, and as she gains this acceptance she starts to ignore the COLORED bathroom signs at Langley.

Meanwhile, the world rapidly changes, both technologically and socially. Technologically, electronic computers become increasingly powerful (and the NACA buys its first computer), and in 1957 the Soviet Union launches Sputnik, the first satellite into space. Meanwhile, Civil Rights protests lead to lawsuits which result in Brown v. Board of Education , the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that bans segregation in all public schools in the United States. Yet despite the ruling, many states, including Virginia, fiercely resist integrating. These different events affect the black computers at Langley in all sorts of ways. For instance, Mary Jackson has to fight anti-integration efforts in her question to get continuing education and become an engineer. At the same time, Dorothy starts to realize that her role as a computer is likely to get replaced by the electronic computers.

The launch of Sputnik also kicks off a Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union. In particular, the United States ramps up its efforts to develop spacecraft that can send a man into space — an effort given the name Project Mercury. (The NACA is also renamed; it becomes NASA.) These efforts offer opportunity, and Katherine, thrilled at the challenge, contributes massive amounts of research to the NACA’s efforts to build a working spacecraft. However, she is also initially not allowed to attend the editorial meetings where research reports are critiqued before they are published. She persists in her effort to be included, however. Not only does she eventually get to join these meetings, but she also becomes the first woman to publish a research report for the newly formed Space Task Group. NASA also becomes increasingly integrated, even as the regions around Langley continue to fight against desegregation, which creates an odd and frustrating contradiction for NASA’s black engineers and their families.

As time passes, Mary Jackson helps her son win the local soap box derby race, making him the first African-American child ever to do so. Mary is painfully aware any daughter of hers would have been shut out of the competition because of her gender, but is also grateful that the racial barrier, at least, has been broken. For her part, faced with the rise of electronic computers, Dorothy Vaughan teaches herself the programming language FORTRAN so that she can program the computers that will replace her, thereby saving her job.

Project Mercury progresses, with a launch date in 1961. That same year, President John F. Kennedy signs an executive order mandating Affirmative Action employment policies. Even so, the Russians remain ahead of the United States in the Space Race, and are the first to launch a cosmonaut (Yuri Gagarin) into space. While the United States accomplishes the same feat with John Glenn in 1962 (and with Katherine checking the electronic computers calculations for Glenn’s flight), President John F. Kennedy announces the ambition for Americans to land the first man on the moon.

Katherine Johnson and the rest of the Space Task Group work hard on figuring out how to send a man to the moon. While some black activists protest the mission, angry that poor African-Americans have been neglected while federal money goes to space travel, Katherine, though sympathetic to these arguments, remains dedicated to her scientific mission. In 1969, Katherine and a group of hundreds of other black women watch Apollo 11 land safely on the moon, thanks in part to Katherine’s calculations and contributions. Katherine remembers all the women who helped her get to this point. She dreams of someday calculating the flight trajectory that will send humans to Mars.

Hidden Figures

46 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-7

Chapters 8-13

Chapters 14-19

Chapter 20-Epilogue

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Shetterly describes many of the activities the main characters were involved in outside of work, such as in their church or the community. Because the focus here is on their careers, why do you think Shetterly includes so much of their personal activities? What message does she give by doing so? Give specific examples, drawing on the lives of all four characters.

Shetterly mentions A. Philip Randolph twice, during key moments 20 years apart. In 1941, he helps convince Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue an executive order banning discrimination in federal agencies and departments. In 1963, he has a large role in the groundbreaking March on Washington that became famous for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Who was Randolph and how important was he in the civil rights movement? What were the key issues and accomplishments he was responsible for?

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Hidden Figures

By margot lee shetterly, hidden figures essay questions.

Hidden Figures tells a story that spans three decades, during which there's a world war and multiple social and scientific movements that affect thousands of Langley employees. What techniques does Shetterly use to make that story feel cohesive?

Shetterly makes the narrative of Hidden Figures feel cohesive using techniques that include point-of-view characters (like Johnson, Vaughan, and so on) and continual comparison. The four women provide the framework of almost every chapter. The events of the time period at Langley are filtered through their personal experiences. Shetterly uses examples from their home life (like Jackson making a soapbox car with her son, or Vaughan taking her children out for picnics) to illustrate the larger societal forces at work (like upward mobility and housing inequality). The POV focus differentiates Hidden Figures from a purely historiographical account, and as a result, it's easier to relate to and remember the facts the story presents.

Another technique to make thr story feel cohesive is a continual comparison between the American civil rights movement and the scientific movement at Langley. Drawing parallels between different forms of development highlights both similarities and differences in their progress. As aerospace engineering booms during and after WWII, so does civil-rights activism and action from the federal government; though the space race makes rapid progress in the 60s, the quest for racial equality seems to stall out. Comparisons like this inform our understanding of both movements, which makes both more memorable, as well as reminding us that no part of history exists in a vacuum.

Hidden Figures outlines many of the forces that encouraged America to eventually desegregate. Which do you think was the most important? Why?

There are many possible answers, including but not limited to:

Conflict with the USSR during the Cold War put pressure on America to make allies among nations that only recently were liberated from colonization. America's racist domestic policies simply made this more difficult, as non-white countries could look at American newspapers and see that their potential ally was treating non-white people poorly on their own soil. In order to support its own claims of defending democracy, America needed to clean up its public image.

Pressure from activists like A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., and others rose to the front of the national discussion. Their ideas were supported by community action, like the Greensboro sit-in, student walk-outs, and marches on Washington. Hidden Figures mentions these nonviolent protests to emphasize their effectiveness, especially in conjunction with the great black scholars of the time, like W. E. B. Du Bois, who promoted ideals of equality and excellence.

Wartime shortages created a desperate need for labor and innovation. In WWII, a high percentage of previous job holders (i.e., white men) were fighting abroad, and segregation only perpetuated the shortage of workers. Later, while NASA pushed against promoting women above computing/math aide roles, a third of engineering graduates in the USSR were women. Wasting over half of the nation's resources put America behind, and that economic pressure encouraged legislation that allowed women and people of color to gain recognition for their abilities.

What is the significance of the COLORED COMPUTERS sign in Hidden Figures ?

The lunch table in the Langley cafeteria at which the West Computers are made to sit is marked by a sign that says COLORED COMPUTERS. There are other black employees at Langley (notably the male engineers), but they primarily eat in their work areas or nearby restaurants that will serve black folks. The women eat in the segregated cafeteria, though, and that sign is the most visible symbol of their difference: not different because of who they are, but different because of how they have been treated by a society that keeps them separate. Miriam Mann begins to steal that sign, putting it in her purse every lunch, until Langley stops replacing it. This is the most personal of the many nonviolent protests depicted in the book, as Mann risks her job (which she loves) to remove that symbol of inequality. The sign's disappearance doesn't mean the colored computers can sit at another table, but it does mean the women can eat and talk in peace, without being visibly confronted by society's inequality.

Though there are no black astronauts by the end of Hidden Figures , there is a popular black face in space: Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek . Why does Shetterly mention Lieutenant Uhura?

Lieutenant Uhura is an example of the importance of representation. The huge amount of money and energy America invested in space travel left many black folks feeling understandably abandoned. Promises of change from politicians over the last decade were put on the back burner in favor of putting a man on the moon—and a white man at that, supported by the televised room of white engineers and white politicians.

Shetterly explains this, and then mentions Lieutenant Uhura, who, like Katherine Johnson and many others involved in America's progress in space, was black, brilliant, and really good at her job. There might not be black astronauts in real life, but children can watch someone who looks like them on one of the most popular television shows ever. Martin Luther King Jr. himself was a Trekkie, and he personally encouraged Nichelle Nichols to continue with the show, because seeing her onscreen inspired that next generation to dream.

Christine Darden comes to Langley years later than Vaughan, Johnson, and Jackson. Why does Shetterly include her as a "main character"?

Even though Darden isn't at Langley during WWII or the space boom, her perspective is still important to the narrative of Hidden Figures . Firstly, her arrival at Langley demonstrates the generational improvements made in the last few decades, thanks to the steadfast work of Vaughan, Jackson, Johnson, and numerous others. There's no COLORED COMPUTERS sign; there are some female engineers (though still not many); Darden is able to pursue a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, which was almost inconceivable 20 years before.

Secondly, Darden's younger perspective makes for a better story at times. Some things are better from a more youthful angle, like explaining the crisis at Little Rock while Darden herself is a high schooler—it's more relatable and immediate. On the flip side, learning about Sputnik from Darden's perspective simplifies things, allowing Shetterly to talk more about the national climate, less about the technicalities of Sputnik. Any NASA mathematician would certainly have been very interested in the nitty-gritty "how it works" of Sputnik, while Darden's perspective focuses more on the national influence of the satellite.

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Hidden Figures Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Hidden Figures is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What is the area rule?

I think this has something to do with professional blacks not having the same areas as whites. Not knowing her way around the East Area, Mary asks the white women she is working with for directions to the bathroom. She is humiliated by their...

How are societal norms changed economic need

All of the women featured in Hidden Figures serve as examples of the power of hard work. This theme is explored in their professional achievements as well as their personal lives, where their reliability and engagement boosts their community. On...

Mobilization

They analyzed data and performed mathematical calculations for the research taking place at NACA.

Study Guide for Hidden Figures

Hidden Figures study guide contains a biography of Margot Lee Shetterly, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures Summary
Character List

Lesson Plan for Hidden Figures

About the Author
Study Objectives
Common Core Standards
Introduction to Hidden Figures
Relationship to Other Books
Bringing in Technology
Notes to the Teacher
Related Links
Hidden Figures Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Hidden Figures

Introduction
Historical accuracy

Movie Reviews

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I’ve been a computer programmer for 29-1/2 years, so I suppose I would be a tad biased toward a film that uses FORTRAN as a means of exacting socially relevant revenge. In “Hidden Figures,” the FORTRAN punch cards coded by Dorothy Vaughan ( Octavia Spencer ) prove that she is not only qualified to be the first employee supervisor of color in the space program, but that her “girls” (as she calls them) have the skills to code the IBM mainframe under her tutelage. Vaughan’s victory comes courtesy of the programming manual she had to lift from the segregated library that vengefully refused to loan it to her because it wasn’t in the “colored section.” When her shocked daughter protests her unconventional borrowing methods, Vaughan tells her, “I pay my taxes for this library just like everybody else!”

Vaughan is one of the three real-life African-American women who helped decipher and define the mathematics used during the space race in the 1960s. “Hidden Figures” tells their stories with some of the year’s best writing, directing and acting. Co-writer/director Theodore Melfi (adapting Margot Lee Shetterly's book with co-writer Allison Schroeder) has a light touch not often found in dramas like this, which makes the material all the more effective. He knows when to let a visual cue or cut tell the story, building on moments of repetition before paying off with scenes of great power. For example, to depict the absurdity of segregated bathrooms, Melfi repeats shots of a nervously tapping foot, followed by mile-long runs to the only available bathroom. This running joke culminates in a brilliantly acted, angry speech by Taraji P. Henson that is her finest cinematic moment to date.

Henson plays Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who, in the film’s opening flashback, is shown to have a preternatural affinity for math in her youth. Her success at obtaining the education she needs is hindered by Jim Crow, but she still manages to earn degrees in math and a job at NASA’s “Colored Computer” division. In an attempt to beat Russia to the moon, NASA has been looking for the nation’s best mathematicians. The importance of the space race forces them to accept qualified candidates of any stripe, including those society would normally discourage.

We meet the adult version of Johnson as she’s sitting in Vaughan’s stalled car with her NASA colleague Mary Jackson ( Janelle Monae ). The dialogue between the three women establishes their easy rapport with one another, and introduces their personalities. Vaughan is no-nonsense, Jackson is a wise ass with impeccable comic timing and Johnson is the clever optimist. They are similarly educated, though each has their own skill set the film will explore.

Vaughan’s mechanical skills are highlighted first: Spencer’s legs jut out from underneath her broken down car as she applies the trade taught to her by her father. Her supervisory expertise is also on display when a police officer shows up to investigate. Though the cop situation is resolved in an amusing, joyous fashion, “Hidden Figures” never undercuts the fears and oppressions of this era. They’re omnipresent even when we don’t see them, and the film develops a particular rhythm between problems and solutions that is cathartic without feeling forced.

At the request of Vaughan’s supervisor ( Kirsten Dunst ), Johnson is sent to a room full of White male mathematicians to assist in some literal rocket science. The calculations have stumped everyone, including Paul Stafford ( Jim Parsons ), the hotshot whose math Johnson is hired to check. Parsons is a bit of a weak link here—his petulance, while believable, is overplayed to the point of cartoonish villainy—but the overall attitude in the room made me shudder with bad memories of my own early career tribulations. I’ve been the only person of color in a less than inviting work environment, and many of Henson’s delicate acting choices vis-à-vis her body language held the eerie feeling of sense memory for me. Though she remains confident in her work and presents that confidence whenever questioned, Henson manifests on her person every hit at her dignity. You can see her trying to hold herself in check instead of going full-Cookie Lyon on her colleagues.

In addition to the unwelcome men in the room, Johnson also has to deal with the tough, though fair complaints of her grizzled supervisor, Al Harrison ( Kevin Costner ). Costner is a perfect fit here; he should consider running out the rest of his career in supporting mentor roles. He and Henson play off each other with an equal sense of bemusement, and when the film gives him something noble to do, it hides the cliché under the nostalgic sight of “ Bull Durham ”'s Crash Davis holding a baseball bat.

While Johnson tries to keep John Glenn (charmingly played by Glen Powell ) from exploding atop a rocket and Vaughan fights FORTRAN and Dunst for the right to be a supervisor, Janelle Monae is secretly walking off with the picture. Mary Jackson wants to be the first Black engineer at NASA, yet as with Vaughan’s library book, she’s hindered by Jim Crow practices. Jackson takes her case to court, and the scene where Monae wordlessly reacts to the outcome is one of the year’s best. With this and “ Moonlight ,” Monae has established herself as a fine actress able to handle both comedy and drama. The awards praise for Spencer is certainly justified, but Monae is the film’s true supporting player MVP.

Watching “Hidden Figures” I thought about how I would have felt had I seen this movie 30 years ago, when I made the decision to study math and computer science. I might have felt more secure in that decision, and certainly would have had better ideas on how to handle some of the thorny racial situations into which I found myself. The strange thing for me is that I saw more Black programmers in this movie than I’ve encountered in my entire career. I had few points of reference in this regard, and the I.T. world reflects that. Even today, some of my customers look at me funny when I show up to fix the problem.

Hopefully, “Hidden Figures” will inspire women and people of color (and hell, men too) with its gentle assertion that there’s nothing unusual nor odd about people besides White men being good at math. But my secret fantasy is that this feel-good film will be a huge hit at the box office. Under its great acting, bouncy Pharrell score and message is a film that’s as geeked out about math as a superhero film is about its comic book origins. So much so that it does my mathematician’s heart proud. It deserves to make as much money as any planet in the Marvel Universe does. This is one of the year's best films.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Hidden Figures (2016)

127 minutes

Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson

Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughn

Janelle Monae as Mary Jackson

Kevin Costner as Al Harrison

Aldis Hodge as Levi Jackson

Kirsten Dunst as Vivian Michael

Glen Powell as John Glenn

Mahershala Ali as Jim Johnson

Jim Parsons as Paul Stafford

Olek Krupa as Karl Zielinski

Theodore Melfi

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Allison Schroeder

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Peter Teschner
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The Power of Hidden Figures: Feminist and Antiracist Values in American History

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The “Hidden Figures” Movie Review Essay

Introduction.

In the film ‘Hidden Figures’, directed by Theodore Melfi, NASA discovered the unexplored potential in a team of African-American women statisticians who acted as the mastermind responsible for one of the most critical missions in American history as the country competed against Russia to launch a man into space. Viewers follow these women as they speedily soar the tiers of NASA together with several of history’s most innovative scientists, mainly entrusted with computing the monumentally important liftoff of astronaut John Glenn into space and ensuring his safety while reentering Earth. The film is founded on the unbelievable exciting factoids and anecdotes of three women renowned as computer scientists.

Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Gobels Johnson cut far above all gender, color, and occupation barriers. Their genius and drive to aim high – past what the human race had ever accomplished—firmly established them as great American heroes in American history. Being the leader gives Dorothy, played by Octavia Spencer, the ability to show off her administrative and planning capabilities. She embraces programming to discover an alternative method to stay pertinent when her role is no longer vital. Dorothy utilizes her voice to advocate for wage equality for the women under her supervision. The day following the March on Washington, she commemorates her 20th year of service. Despite the difficulties, she and West Computers were successful.

When women were not even permitted to participate in editing sessions, Taraji P. Henson’s character Katherine persisted in getting a document released under her name. John Glenn asks Katherine to individually examine the work of the electronic computers as yet another proof of her exceptional abilities. Katherine has earned the respect of her coworkers due to her assistance on John Glenn’s expedition. She keeps working for NASA and contributes to the effort to send a man to the moon. She views her professional successes and those of human computers as evidence that everything is feasible.

As Mary Jackson, Janelle Monáe, an engineer, was one of the main characters. She is forthright about the prejudice at Langley, where she operates as a human computer. She soon advances as a crew member conducting wind tunnel experiments thanks to her stridency and abilities. After a manager notices that Mary has a foundation in physics and the ability to think critically required to be an engineer, she ultimately emerges as Langley’s first Black female engineer. He extends an invitation to Mary to participate in his team and urges her to pursue her studies, which will ultimately help her make history.

Although the 1969 moon missions served as the Space Race’s primary finale, neither the film’s plot nor the existence of the participants is centered on this event. In the film’s climax, the director contrasts the exhilaration preceding the moon launch with the unhappiness Black people in America experience due to continuing discrimination after years of struggling for racial equality. The Space Race had a particular commencement, a definite end, and an unquestionable winner. It started in 1957 when the Russians deployed Sputnik and ended in 1969 when American astronauts stepped foot on the moon. Other incidents demonstrate that people must still do more work before all Americans may realize equitable treatment in the law and the minds of the public. However, Katherine’s ultimate experience near the end gives viewers hope that these goals are still within reach.

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Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
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Moving from World War II through NASA's golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War and the women's rights movement, 'Hidden Figures' interweaves a rich history of mankind's greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world. 349 pages, Paperback.
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Margot Lee Shetterly. Margot Lee Shetterly is a writer who grew up in Hampton Virginia, where she knew many of the women in Hidden Figures. She is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and the recipient of a Virginia Foundation of the Humanities grant for her research into the history of women in computing. She lives in Charlottesville, VA.
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Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly is the 2016 nonfiction account of the Black women who worked as human "computers" at NACA and NASA from the 1930s to the 1960s.It chronicles the lives and achievements of three Black women — Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, and Mary Jackson — and the racism and gender discrimination they overcame during World War II, the Civil Rights Movement ...
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Hidden Figures Movie Summary. Hidden Figures (2016, directed by Theodore Melfi) is a movie that will simultaneously inspire and make people angry at the injustice African-American women face both in professional and daily life. The main characters of Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan worked at NASA and saw many opportunities for their professional growth; however, their bosses ...
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