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Hidden Figures: Thesis Statement

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

By Richard Brody

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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Hidden Figures

67 pages • 2 hours read

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Prologue-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-7

Chapters 8-13

Chapters 14-19

Chapter 20-Epilogue

Key Figures

Index of Terms

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Essay Topics

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Summary and Study Guide

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race is a 2016 nonfiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly. Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia, where her father worked at Langley Research Center, on which the book is centered. Thus, she knew firsthand both the story and many of the people involved. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the business school at the University of Virginia. The book won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and Shetterly won the 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction. Hidden Figures was made into a film, which also came out in 2016.

The story focuses on four African American women as examples of the many such women who worked at Langley. The title is a play on the meaning of the word “figures” in the sense of both people and numbers. Each was largely hidden from the public view: Most people think of White male astronauts when they think of NASA , and the countless mathematical calculations that lie behind the agency’s accomplishments are known only to specialists. Shetterly’s goal is to make known the stories of women like those she was acquainted with growing up.

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With a mandate to desegregate the federal workforce for the war effort during World War II, more opportunities became available for African Americans. Likewise, because so many Black and White men were away fighting the war, women had greater access to employment than ever before. Dorothy Vaughan was the first of the main characters hired as a mathematician by Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (later Langley Research Center). She was one of the female African American “computers” (as they then called people who did calculations) who made up the West Computing area. She eventually rose to become head of the area for nearly a decade before it was closed.

Mary Jackson began working for Dorothy in 1951. After a couple of years, Mary joined an engineering group and would go on to become an engineer. Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson joined West Computing two years after Mary, but soon joined the Flight Research Division, leading to a distinguished career that directly contributed to the space program in the 1960s. The flight trajectories she calculated were used for Project Mercury and the Moon landings of 1969 and subsequent years. Finally, Christine Darden was hired by NASA in 1967, worked in sonic boom research, and went on to earn her PhD. Each found success by persevering in the face of direct and indirect discrimination based on both their race and gender.

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In addition to the careers of the four women profiled, Shetterly tells of their personal lives—the struggles they endured on the road to success, their community involvement, and the times in which they lived. The last becomes a thread in the book, as Shetterly weaves her tale of NASA with one outlining the development of the civil rights movement. By comparing their respective trajectories in 20th-century history, she shows how the latter influenced the former and their narratives merged into one.

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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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Film credits.

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

Writer (based on the book by)

• Margot Lee Shetterly
• Allison Schroeder

Cinematographer

• Mandy Walker
• Peter Teschner
• Benjamin Wallfisch
• Pharrell Williams
• Hans Zimmer

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Women Who Shaped History

A Smithsonian magazine special report

The True Story of “Hidden Figures,” the Forgotten Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

A new book and movie document the accomplishments of NASA’s black “human computers” whose work was at the heart of the country’s greatest battles

Maya Wei-Haas

As America stood on the brink of a Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater, spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians. Women were the solution. Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. Sharp and successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed.

Many of these “computers” are finally getting their due , but conspicuously missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by courageous, African-American women. Called the West Computers, after the area to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and engineers of all races and genders to follow.

“These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary,” says Margot Lee Shetterly. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women’s lives and accomplishments. The book's film adaptation, starring Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson, is now open in theaters.

“We've had astronauts, we’ve had engineers— John Glenn , Gene Kranz , Chris Kraft ,” she says. “Those guys have all told their stories.” Now it’s the women’s turn.

Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. Built in 1917, this research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day into war machines. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration  (NASA) as the space race gained speed.

The West Computers were at the heart of the center’s advancements. They worked through equations that described every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the greater mission of the project. They contributed to the ever-changing design of a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more aerodynamic. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing pool for specific projects— Christine Darden worked to advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. NASA dissolved the remaining few human computers in the 1970s as the technological advances made their roles obsolete.

The first black computers didn’t set foot at Langley until the 1940s. Though the pressing needs of war were great, racial discrimination remained strong and few jobs existed for African-Americans, regardless of gender. That was until 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights activist, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the continued injustices of racial discrimination. With the threat of 100,000 people swarming to the Capitol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, preventing racial discrimination in hiring for federal and war-related work. This order also cleared the way for the black computers, slide rule in hand, to make their way into NACA history.

Exactly how many women computers worked at NACA (and later NASA) over the years is still unknown. One  1992 study  estimated the total topped several hundred but other estimates, including Shetterly’s own intuition, says that number is in the thousands.

As a child, Shetterly knew these brilliant mathematicians as her girl scout troop leaders, Sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors and as parents of schoolmates. Her father worked at Langley as well, starting in 1964 as an engineering intern and becoming a well-respected climate scientist. “They were just part of a vibrant community of people, and everybody had their jobs,” she says. “And those were their jobs. Working at NASA Langley.”

Surrounded by the West Computers and other academics, it took decades for Shetterly to realize the magnitude of the women’s work. “It wasn't until my husband, who was not from Hampton, was listening to my dad talk about some of these women and the things that they have done that I realized,” she says. “That way is not necessarily the norm”

The spark of curiosity ignited, Shetterly began researching these women. Unlike the male engineers, few of these women were acknowledged in academic publications or for their work on various projects. Even more problematic was that the careers of the West Computers were often more fleeting than those of the white men. Social customs of the era dictated that as soon as marriage or children arrived, these women would retire to become full-time homemakers, Shetterly explains. Many only remained at Langley for a few years.

But the more Shetterly dug, the more computers she discovered. “My investigation became more like an obsession,” she writes in the book. “I would walk any trail if it meant finding a trace of one of the computers at its end.”

She scoured telephone directories, local newspapers, employee newsletters and the NASA archives to add to her growing list of names. She also chased down stray memos, obituaries, wedding announcements and more for any hint at the richness of these women’s lives. “It was a lot of connecting the dots,” she says.

“I get emails all the time from people whose grandmothers or mothers worked there,” she says. “Just today I got an email from a woman asking if I was still searching for computers. [She] had worked at Langley from July 1951 through August 1957.”

Langley was not just a laboratory of science and engineering; “in many ways, it was a racial relations laboratory, a gender relations laboratory,” Shetterly says. The researchers came from across America. Many came from parts of the country sympathetic to the nascent Civil Rights Movement, says Shetterly, and backed the progressive ideals of expanded freedoms for black citizens and women.

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

The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space.

But life at Langley wasn’t just the churn of greased gears. Not only were the women rarely provided the same opportunities and titles as their male counterparts, but the West Computers lived with constant reminders that they were second-class citizens. In the book, Shetterly highlights one particular incident involving an offensive sign in the dining room bearing the designation: Colored Computers.

One particularly brazen computer, Miriam Mann, took responding to the affront on as a her own personal vendetta. She plucked the sign from the table, tucking it away in her purse. When the sign returned, she removed it again. “That was incredible courage,” says Shetterly. “This was still a time when people are lynched, when you could be pulled off the bus for sitting in the wrong seat. [There were] very, very high stakes.”

But eventually Mann won. The sign disappeared.

The women fought many more of these seemingly small battles, against separate bathrooms and restricted access to meetings. It was these small battles and daily minutiae that Shetterly strove to capture in her book. And outside of the workplace, they faced many more problems, including segregated busses and dilapidated schools. Many struggled to find housing in Hampton. The white computers could live in Anne Wythe Hall, a dormitory that helped alleviate the shortage of housing, but the black computers were left to their own devices.

“History is the sum total of what all of us do on a daily basis,” says Shetterly. “We think of capital “H” history as being these huge figures—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King.” Even so, she explains, “you go to bed at night, you wake up the next morning, and then yesterday is history. These small actions in some ways are more important or certainly as important as the individual actions by these towering figures.”

The book and movie don’t mark the end of Shetterly’s work She continues to collect these names, hoping to eventually make the list available online. She hopes to find the many names that have been sifted out over the years and document their respective life’s work.

The few West Computers whose names have been remembered, have become nearly mythical figures—a side-effect of the few African-American names celebrated in mainstream history, Shetterly argues. She hopes her work pays tribute to these women by bringing details of their life’s work to light. “Not just mythology but the actual facts,” she says. “Because the facts are truly spectacular.”

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Maya Wei-Haas | | READ MORE

Maya Wei-Haas is a freelance science writer who specializes in geology of Earth and beyond. Her work has been featured in  National Geographic, News from Science,  and   AGU’s  EOS.

Hidden Figures

Margot lee shetterly, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Racism and Inequality

In 1943, the United States found itself embroiled in World War II, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the NACA) in Langley, VA needed mathematicians to crunch numbers for its engineers. Jim Crow laws mandated segregation between blacks and whites in the NACA’s home state of Virginia, and African-Americans who lived there had to make do with “separate but equal” bathrooms, water fountains, parks, restaurants and schools. The NACA recruited highly qualified female mathematicians…

Black computers like Dorothy Vaughan , Katherine Johnson , and Mary Jackson depended on their families and communities to thrive. Extended family, the church, and civic organizations like the Girl Scouts all played a part in their achievements. Shetterly offers a portrait of the bonds between members of the black middle class in the Jim Crow South, then demonstrates the ways in which the NACA’s black employees also benefitted from the integrated community that slowly…

Luck, Persistent Action, and Hard Work

Pioneering black computers like Johnson , Vaughan and Jackson worked very hard. They also benefitted from healthy doses of luck. Shetterly argues that hard work and persistence set the stage for luck to make a difference in a person’s life, and she uses the term “serendipity” to describe what happens when random chance collides with preparedness. Serendipity, according to Shetterly, was a key ingredient in the West Area computers’ accomplishments.

Black computers like Johnson and…

Scientific Progress vs. Social and Political Progress

During World War II, military and computing technology advanced rapidly, a trend that continued through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Hidden Figures traces a part of that history, which Shetterly calls “Aeronautics’ evolution from a wobbly infancy to a strapping adolescence.” She contrasts the high-speed evolution of defense and computing technology with the slow progress of the movement for equality and civil rights, which moved haltingly in the face of…

Power in Hidden Figures: A critical discourse analysis

This article examines the concept of power in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. This true story portrays the lives of three mathematicians who prevailed over oppressive racial and gender relations (i.e. as African American women) while working at National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the early 1960s. The method driving this analysis is critical discourse analysis (CDA). The ultimate objective of this analysis is to expose the racial and sexist discrimination experienced by the main protagonists in the movie and, more generally, the inequalities that Black women faced in the post-Second World War era. Several key constructs are emphasized: racial discrimination, sexism and discursive power tools such as word connotations, social semiotics and suppression/lexical absence.

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Hidden Figures (2017)

Is kevin costner's character based on a real person.

Not exactly. In researching the Hidden Figures true story, we learned that Kevin Costner's character, Al Harrison, is based on three different directors at NASA Langley during Katherine Johnson's time at the research facility. The movie's director, Theodore Melfi, was unable to secure the rights to the guy he wanted, so he decided to make Costner's Al Harrison a composite character. -Today Show Kevin Costner's character, Al Harrison, is a composite of three different directors at the NASA Langley Research Center.

What are some of Katherine Johnson's accomplishments at NASA?

Over the course of her three decades at NASA, Katherine Johnson's biography includes an impressive list of accomplishments. She calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard's groundbreaking 1961 spaceflight (America's first human in space), she verified the calculations for John Glenn's first American orbit of Earth, she computed the trajectory of Apollo 11's flight to the moon, and she worked on the plan that saved Apollo 13's crew and brought them safely back to Earth. For her accomplishments, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 24, 2015. - NASA Katherine Johnson Documentary

Did Katherine's father really move the family 120 miles each school year so that she and her siblings could continue their education?

Yes. Born in 1918, Katherine G. Johnson's impressive intellect was evident from the time she was a child. She was fascinated with numbers and became a high school freshman by age 10. In her hometown of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, school for African-Americans normally stopped at the eighth grade for those who could afford to attend. Katherine's father, Joshua, was determined to see his children reach their potential, so he drove the family 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia, where blacks could pursue an education past the eighth grade, through high school, and into college. He rented a house for the family to stay during the school year and journeyed back and forth to White Sulphur Springs for his job at a hotel. He did this for eight years, so that each of his four children could go to high school and college. Katherine proved to be so smart that she skipped several grades, graduating high school at age 14 and from West Virginia State College at 18. -NASA During the school year, Katherine's parents, Joshua and Joylette Coleman (left), moved the family 120 miles so that their four children could receive a high school and college education. Actors Jaiden Kaine and Karan Kendrick portray the couple in the Hidden Figures movie (right).

Did black women have to abide by segregation laws when they first started working at Langley in the 1940s?

Yes. "At the time the black women came to work at Langley [in 1943], this was a time of segregation," says Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly. "Even though they were just starting these brand new, very interesting jobs as professional mathematicians, they nonetheless had to abide by the state law, which was that there were segregated work rooms for them, there were segregated bathrooms, and there were segregated cafeterias. On their table in the cafeteria was a sign that said 'colored computers,' which sort of sounds like an iMac or something, right, today? But this referred to the black women who were doing this mathematical work." They were essentially human computers. -Al Jazeera

Did Katherine Johnson feel the segregation of the outside world while working at NASA?

No. "I didn't feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research," says the real Katherine G. Johnson. "You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job...and play bridge at lunch. I didn't feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn't feel it." Even though much of the racism coming from Katherine's coworkers in the movie seems to be largely made up (in real life she claimed to be treated as a peer), the movie's depiction of state laws regarding the use of separate bathrooms, buses, etc. was very real. African-American computers had also been put in the segregated west section of the Langley campus and were dubbed the "West Computers." - WHROTV Interview In Margot Lee Shetterly's book, Hidden Figures , she writes about a cardboard sign on one of the tables in the back of NASA Langley's cafeteria during the early 1940s that read, "COLORED COMPUTERS." This particularly struck a nerve with the women because it seemed especially ridiculous and demeaning in a place where research and intellectual ability was focused on much more than skin color. It was Miriam Mann, a member of the West Computers, who finally decided to remove the sign, and when an unknown hand would make a new sign a few days later, Miriam would shove that sign into her purse too. Eventually, the signs stopped reappearing at some point during the war. Unlike Taraji P. Henson's character in the movie, the real Katherine G. Johnson says that she didn't feel any segregation while working at NASA.

Did they really think Katherine G. Johnson was the janitor there to empty the garbage can?

Margot Lee Shetterly's book was released after the movie wrapped but her book proposal and notes were utilized by the filmmakers. No. This does not appear in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures book , on which the movie is based, and seems to be an element of fiction created by the filmmakers. It should be noted that the movie was actually based on just a 55-page proposal for the book, which might in part explain some of the movie's deviations. The book was released on September 9, 2016, long after production on the movie had wrapped. However, the filmmakers did have access to the author and her notes. -Space.com

Was Katherine Johnson hired directly into NASA's space program?

No. The Hidden Figures true story confirms that she was hired in 1953 at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia to work as part of a female team nicknamed "Computers Who Wear Skirts." She then began to assist the all-male flight research team, who eventually welcomed her on board. Like in the movie, she worked with airplanes in the Guidance and Navigation Department. In those days, NASA still went by the initials NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which in 1958 became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) thanks to the Space Act of 1958. -WHROTV

Is Jim Parsons' character, NASA engineer Paul Stafford, based on a real person?

No. In fact-checking the Hidden Figures movie, we learned that white collar statistician Paul Stafford, portrayed by Jim Parsons, is a fictional character. He was created to represent certain racist and sexist attitudes that existed during the 1950s. In the film, he thwarts every effort Katherine (Taraji P. Henson) makes to get ahead, including reducing her job qualifications to secretarial duty, omitting her byline on official reports, and telling her it's not appropriate for women to attend space program briefings. By the end of the movie, Stafford's fictional storyline includes the character having a change of heart, which is emphasized when he brings Katherine a cup of coffee. Like Kevin Costner's character, Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) and Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) are also fictional.

Is Kirsten Dunst's character, Vivian Mitchell, based on a real person?

No. Hard-nosed supervisor Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) is a fictional character created to represent some of the unconscious bias and prejudice of the era. She is at best a composite of some of the supervisors who worked at NASA Langley.

Were the women really known as "computers"?

Yes. Before the days of electronic computers that we're familiar with today, the women hired at NASA to calculate trajectories, the results of wind tunnel tests, etc. had the job title of "computer." In simple terms, these were mathematicians who performed computations. Even when electronic computers were first used at NASA, human computers like Katherine Johnson still often performed the calculations by hand to verify the results of their electronic counterparts. -NASA Buy the Hidden Figures T-Shirt featuring the inspirational NASA women.

When did women begin working as NASA "computers"?

NACA (the precursor to NASA) hired five women in 1935 to be part of their first computer pool at the Langley Research Center. NACA began recruiting African-American women shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which thrust the U.S. into the war and increased the demand for workers in the defense industry. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which prohibited "discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin." -PopularMechanics.com

Was Dorothy Vaughan NACA's first black supervisor?

Yes. As we explored the Hidden Figures true story, we discovered that Dorothy Vaughan became NACA's first black supervisor in 1948, five years before Katherine Johnson started working there. Vaughan was also an advocate and voice for the women in the "West Computers" pool. The movie shows her leading the women down the hall to their next assignment, an obvious nod to the team of astronauts walking down the hall in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff . -PopularMechanics.com Like in the movie, the real Dorothy Vaughan (left) was a leader for the West Computers at Langley. Octavia Spencer (right) portrays Vaughan in the movie.

Was Katherine really told that women aren't usually included in the space program briefings?

Yes. "I asked permission to go," says Katherine, "and they said, 'Well, the girls don't usually go,' and I said, 'Well, is there a law?' They said, 'No.' Then my boss said, 'Let her go.' And I began attending the briefings." In the Hidden Figures movie ( watch the trailer ), Jim Parsons' character, Paul Stafford, tells Katherine (Taraji P. Henson) that women don't go to the briefings. "There's no protocol for women attending," Stafford states. After she continues to question this unspoken rule, their boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), decides to let her attend the briefing.

Did Katherine have to run across the NASA Langley campus to use the bathroom?

Not exactly. In Margot Lee Shetterly's book, this is something that is experienced more by Mary Jackson (portrayed by Janelle Monáe) than Katherine Johnson. Mary went to work on a project on NASA Langley's East Side alongside several white computers. She was not familiar with those buildings and when she asked a group of white women where the bathroom was, they giggled at her and offered no help. The closest bathroom was for whites. Humiliated and angry, Mary set off on a time-consuming search for a colored bathroom. Unlike in the movie, there were colored bathrooms on the East Side but not in every building. The sprint across the campus in the movie might be somewhat of an exaggeration, but finding a bathroom was indeed a point of frustration. As for Katherine Johnson herself, Shetterly writes that when Katherine started working there, she didn't even realize that the bathrooms at Langley were segregated. This is because the bathrooms for white employees were unmarked and there weren't many colored bathrooms to be seen. It took a couple years before she was confronted with her mistake, but she simply ignored the comment and continued to use the white restrooms. No one brought it up again and she refused to enter the colored bathrooms.

Was Mary Jackson really NASA's first African-American female engineer?

Yes. Mary Jackson, portrayed by Janelle Monáe in the movie, was hired to work at Langley in 1951. Like in the movie, she accepted an assignment assisting senior aeronautical research engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki (renamed Karl Zielinski in the movie ), who encouraged her to pursue a degree in engineering, which required her to take after-work graduate courses. She petitioned the city of Hampton to be able to attend graduate classes alongside her white peers. She won, got her degree, and was promoted to engineer in 1958. -PopularMechanics.com NASA's first African-American female engineer, Mary Jackson, and her onscreen counterpart, actress Janelle Monáe.

How did Katherine Johnson's first husband die?

Katherine Johnson's first husband, James Francis Goble, died in December 1956 from an inoperable tumor located at the base of his skull. His health had been slowly declining for a year and he had spent much of that time in the hospital. He had to quit his job as a painter at the Newport News shipyard (he had previously been a chemistry teacher but gave up the job in 1953 when the family moved so that Katherine could take the position at NASA). Before his death, Katherine had promised her husband that she would keep their three adolescent daughters on a path to college. She now had to play the role of both mother and sole breadwinner. Katherine established new rules around the house and assigned chores to the children, including having their mother's clothes ironed and ready in the morning and having dinner ready when she got home. -Hidden Figures book

Did the women mathematicians at NASA get to meet astronauts like John Glenn?

Yes. "We did get to meet the astronauts," says the real Katherine Johnson. "They weren't as excited as we were, and we just looked at them in awe." -WHROTV Watch the Hidden Figures Movie now on Amazon Video instant streaming.

Did Katherine Johnson really compute John Glenn's trajectory?

Yes. "When John Glenn was to be the first astronaut to go up into the atmosphere and come back, and they wanted him to come back in a special place, and that was what I did, I computed his trajectory," says Katherine Johnson. "From then on, any time they were going to compute trajectories, they were given mostly, all of them to my branch, and I did most of the work on those by hand." - WHROTV Katherine Johnson Interview

Did John Glenn really ask that Katherine double-check the electronic computer's calculations for his first Earth orbit?

Yes. Fact-checking the Hidden Figures movie confirmed that John Glenn personally requested that Katherine recheck the electronic computer's calculations for his February 1962 flight aboard the Mercury-Atlas 6 capsule Friendship 7—the NASA mission that concluded with him becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. The scene in the movie unfolded in almost exactly the same way it does in real life, with Glenn's request for Katherine taken nearly verbatim from the transcripts. He even refers to her as "the girl." "Get the girl to check the numbers... If she says the numbers are good... I'm ready to go." -NASA Astronaut John Glenn (left), pilot of the Mercury-Atlas 6 spaceflight, call sign "Friendship 7," is pictured on February 20, 1962. Actor Glen Powell (right) portrays John Glenn in the movie.

When did Katherine Johnson retire from NASA?

In researching Katherine Johnson's biography, we learned that she was hired in 1953 and retired from NASA in 1986, for a career that spanned approximately 33 years. Prior to NASA, she had worked as a school teacher and a stay-at-home mom. -NASA

What is probably the biggest difference between the Hidden Figures movie and the true story?

"You might get the indication in the movie that these were the only people doing those jobs, when in reality we know they worked in teams, and those teams had other teams," author Margot Shetterly explained. "There were sections, branches, divisions, and they all went up to a director. There were so many people required to make this happen. ... But I understand you can't make a movie with 300 characters. It is simply not possible." -Space.com

What did the real Katherine Johnson think of the movie?

"Katherine Johnson saw the movie and she really liked it," said author Margot Shetterly ( Space.com ). Katherine told the Daily Press, "It sounded good...It sounded very, very accurate."

Broaden your knowledge of the Hidden Figures true story by viewing the Katherine G. Johnson interview and documentary below. Then watch an interview with Tracy Drain, a current NASA scientist who discusses her journey to NASA and the real-life women who inspired the movie.

• Official Hidden Figures Movie Website

‘Hidden Figures’ and the power of pragmatism

Just when we need it, a space movie filled with real, tangible hope

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We love a good space movie, don’t we?

We’ve had some grand, engulfing ones make appearances in late fall/early winter over the past few years with 2013’s Gravity and 2015’s The Martian . I’m including the recent Arrival , too, even though, admittedly, it’s more of an alien movie than a space one.

Johnson, Vaughn, and Jackson are friends who work as (human) computers for NASA. They compute complex math problems as part of a group of black women hired to do the same. The conditions of their employment are not ideal. They’re segregated away from the white computers, they’re hired on as temp employees, and Vaughn, the de facto leader of the black computers, isn’t recognized as a supervisor even though she clearly performs supervisory work. But Johnson, Vaughn, and Jackson have a couple of factors on their side: confidence in their abilities that is reinforced by friendship, and the deadline pressure of an actual race to space with the Soviets.

Over and over, Hidden Figures demonstrates how these women, especially Johnson, were able to ascend through NASA. It wasn’t because their white colleagues suddenly decided to stop being racist, but because it was in NASA’s interest for them to do so. When Johnson is tapped to double-check the work of Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons), he tries his best to sabotage her. He barely conceals his contempt for her in their interactions. He redacts the calculations Johnson needs to see to do her job. Johnson’s prickly boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) comes to her aid in working with Stafford, not because he’s sympathetic, or even aware of her specific plight as the only black woman in the department, but because he’s in a hurry to put a guy in earth’s orbit before the Soviets do.

Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae) offers some help to NASA mission specialist Karl Zielinski (Olek Krupa).

Hopper Stone

When Johnson needs a security clearance to get her work done faster, it’s Harrison who grants it over Stafford’s protests because they have a common interest in meeting the government’s stringent deadlines.

When Jackson needs a court order to allow her to take night classes at an all-white school so that she can enter NASA’s engineering program, she appeals to the ego of the judge in the case. “Out of all the cases you hear today, which one’s gonna make you the first ?” Jackson asks, making his decision a question of judicial legacy. She convinces him that they both have an interest in history not remembering him as a retrograde bigot. This, by the way, is precisely what Slate’s Lara Bazelon recently argued may save the Roberts Court from becoming a rubber stamp for the incoming Trump administration.

Maybe it’s not heartwarming, but it’s certainly realistic. The country pulled together to best a common enemy at the behest of a young, photogenic president who inspired optimism, even as it was wrestling with an internecine conflict over civil rights. Johnson even manages to needle Harrison into letting her attend Pentagon briefings to provide up-to-date calculations when it becomes clear that they have a common interest in not killing astronaut John Glenn.

While Hidden Figures illustrates that good that can come of dismantling barriers in the pursuit of common interests, it doesn’t offer white absolution. Johnson, Vaughn, and Jackson don’t allow the cruelties of living in a racist country to permanently steal their joy — Mary’s saucy demeanor feels like a direct rebellion against it — but Hidden Figures also acknowledges the difficulties of working in a place surrounded by white people who barely tolerate your presence. That’s a shift from just 10 years ago, when Sony Pictures released The Pursuit of Happyness .

Hidden Figures and Pursuit of Happyness heavily feature their protagonists constantly running — it’s a recurring motif of both films. Will Smith’s character, Chris Gardner, is running to acquire shelter, running to acquire clients, running to sell the bone density scanners that earn him a living, but mostly running to keep his white employers happily ignorant of his plight as a homeless, unpaid intern at Dean Witter. Johnson, on the other hand, must run from her new office, with white colleagues who won’t deign to share a coffeepot with her, half a mile every time she has to use the restroom, because that’s the distance to the closest facility designated for black women.

HIDDEN FIGURES is the incredible untold story of brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit.

Hopper Stone.

Both films feature white people who are oblivious to the struggles and lives of their black colleagues, but there’s an enormous difference between what the two movies have to say about that obliviousness and the way white people have walled themselves off with segregated housing and education . Unlike Pursuit of Happyness , which offers no critique of such willful oblivion, Hidden Figures implicates it in a jarring, tearful, pissed-off monologue from Johnson. When Harrison asks where Johnson disappears every day for 40 minutes, there’s an office showdown in which a dripping wet Johnson, who’s had to run a mile in the rain just to use the restroom , explodes, not just about the restroom but about an entire workplace structure that’s built to reinforce her inferiority.

The only jewelry she’s expected to wear is a string of white pearls, but NASA doesn’t pay her enough to afford them. She’s in violation of a sexist dress code that mandates she wear skirts and sweaters, but not blouses, because she doesn’t make enough money to buy a new wardrobe, again because her pay and position are not commensurate with her work. She’s expected to double-check the math of a colleague who redacts his work because he can’t countenance that a black woman might know just as much, if not more than he does. All of Johnson’s frustrations come tumbling out in a scene that is utterly human.

Johnson is no silent martyr who grinds until her white colleagues finally recognize her genius and decide to gift her with the recognition and respect she deserved all along. She realizes that’s a pipe dream. And so she pushes, and she keeps pushing, even when it’s impolite, even when it makes white people uncomfortable. Where Pursuit of Happyness didn’t bother suggesting any sort of moral deficiency on the part of do-nothing, know-nothing white people, Hidden Figures shouts it. Harrison takes it upon himself to desegregate the restrooms, mostly because he can’t afford for his top computer to waste 40 minutes a day running back and forth.

The black women of Hidden Figures are constantly pushing — whether it’s Johnson pushing Harrison to allow her to attend Pentagon briefings, or Vaughn stealing a library book to learn Fortran, the programming language for the IBM computer threatening to put her out of a job. After a librarian informed her that the book came from a part of the library restricted only to whites, Vaughn tucked it away and took it anyway, because how else was she going to learn?

But even common interests can’t serve those who can’t see them, and in that regard, Vivian Mitchell, the obstructionist head of the white computers played by an icy Kirsten Dunst, becomes a cinematic metonym for the 53 percent of white women who voted for Donald Trump, an admitted sexual assaulter who said women who have abortions must be punished for doing so. Mitchell is so determined to block Vaughn and her fellow computers from achieving any sort of progress — and so interested in maintaining a racist status quo she’s convinced benefits her — that she ends up undercutting herself in the process. When NASA needs programmers for its new IBM computer, it’s Vaughn’s team who is armed with knowledge of Fortran , while Mitchell’s group is left in the cold.

Besides communicating about the power of common interests, Hidden Figures demonstrates why sneering dismissively at “identity politics” or using the term as a pejorative amounts to little more than hogwash. When you stand in the way of progress for women and people of color, you are only hobbling yourself. Hidden Figures offers a beautiful illustration of how hollow the call to “Make America Great Again” really rings, because an America without black women isn’t just an America without the women who birthed, nursed, and raised so many white children at the expense of their own. There will be no white ethnostate like the one white nationalist Richard Spencer dreams of creating because an America without black women is an America without its most educated demographic in the workforce. It is an America devoid of a group, who instead of pouting and throwing hissy fits as automation threatens to make its jobs obsolete , instead picks itself up, dusts itself off, and answers with steely resolve and a thirst for more education, as Dorothy Vaughn did.

An America without black women is an America lacking the energy, the bravery, the optimism, and the determination to power its wildest dreams, like sending a man hurtling into space to orbit the earth and then bringing him safely back home — you know, its moon shots.

Soraya Nadia McDonald is the senior culture critic for Andscape. She writes about pop culture, fashion, the arts and literature. She is the 2020 winner of the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism, a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism and the runner-up for the 2019 Vernon Jarrett Medal for outstanding reporting on Black life.

Race and Gender in “Hidden Figures” (2016) Essay (Movie Review)

Summary of hidden figures, analysis: intersectionality of race and gender, evaluative conclusion: the moral behind hidden figures, works cited.

Events depicted in the movie Hidden Figures (2016, directed by Theodore Melfi) are set in the time when the United States competed with Russia to put a man in space. When working on this task, NASA unexpectedly found talented scientists among the group of African-American women-mathematicians who helped the entire organization succeed in reaching its goals. The movie follows the real-life stories of three brilliant and talented women, Katherine Goble, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan. Because of her skills in analytic geometry, Katherine was assigned to assist the Space Task Group under the supervision of Al Harrison; the woman immediately felt the pressure of her predominantly male white colleagues to perform her tasks quickly and efficiently without attracting too much attention to her persona. Katherine was the first black woman that worked on the team of male engineers in the environment that was quite dismissive of African-American women. Meanwhile, Dorothy was informed that she was not going to get a raise due to her being a representative of the colored group. Mary was able to brilliantly identify a problem in an experimental capsule’s heat shields.

During their work, women had to deal with numerous instances of unfair treatment towards female employees of color, which can be considered the key theme of the movie. Despite this, Katherine managed to get along with her colleagues, who ultimately recognized and praised her for the contributed. Mary convinced the court to allow her to pursue a degree in engineering while Dorothy became a supervisor of the Programming Department. The movie’s epilogue revealed that Katherine Goble was the one who calculated Apollo 11 and Space Shuttle trajectories and later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, the same year when NASA called the Computational Building at the Langley Research Center in honor of Katherine Johnson.

The literary element of Hidden Figures’ analysis will be focused on the specific theme: the intersectionality of race and gender. The three women depicted in the movie broke racial and gender barriers to meet their professional and personal goals (“Hidden Figures – At the Intersection of Race, Gender and Technology”). In the movie, racial barriers were more evident, like, for example, in the scene with segregated bathrooms. When assigned to help with calculations on the launch of Space Task Group, Katherine had to work on the east campus (Silman). There was a scene when she asked her only female (and white) colleague where the restroom was. The woman replied, “I have no idea where your bathroom is” (qtd in Silman). Because of this, Katherine had to experience the humiliation of running half a mile in heels across the campus to visit a “colored bathroom.” It is noteworthy that the director managed to bring the injustices that women of color experienced down to the personal level, which was reflected in the most basic and routine activities such as going to the restroom.

Discussing the restroom scene within the context of the main theme of race and gender in Hidden Figures is important because it showed the tension between the urgent scientific work and the lack of logic associated with the discrimination that limited Katherine as a woman and a mathematician. In this case, segregation is not only an injustice towards a woman of color but also a barrier that prevented one of the brightest American minds from achieving success. Scenes such as when other engineers put out a “colored” coffee pot for Katherine made modern viewers angry at the injustice and the lack of sensitivity the white men in the department had (Silman). Dorothy also experienced difficulties in being a Black woman in the male-dominated workplace. Throughout the movie, Dorothy’s supervisor Vivian consistently disrespected her and refused to give her the promotion she truly deserved.

However, as the movie progressed, viewers saw the barriers of discrimination against African-American women being destroyed. There was a groundbreaking scene in which Al Harrison (Katherine’s supervisor) broke down the sign that said: “colored bathroom” (Heathman). The scene was symbolic since it represented the desire of NASA as an organization to smash the barriers their Black employees had to face. The three women’s stories may remind viewers of how some people fought for equality in marches of protest while others fought a different battle in office buildings by trying to prove their skills and value to those people who were not better than them in any way (“Hidden Figures – At the Intersection of Race, Gender and Technology”).

If to apply Daniel Bonevac’s “Making Moral Arguments” to the analysis and evaluation of Hidden Figures , it is important to differentiate between factual and moral premises that will lead to a conclusion and forming of an argument. In the case of Hidden Figures , the factual premise used for the formation of the government was that African-American women were discriminated against in the workplace, even when working on projects of governmental significance. The moral premise is that mistreating individuals based on their skin color or gender is wrong because these characteristics do not affect their value as productive workers. Therefore, women of color should not experience discrimination, which was the principal argument of Hidden Figures overall. Evaluating the significance of the movie is impossible without stating that discussions about race and gender are still relevant to this day. While African-American women can hold any position in society and achieve success in life, it is important to remember that five decades ago they did not have this kind of freedom.

The understanding of Hidden Figures in the light of watching changed dramatically compared with the first impression because the movie did not resort to over-exaggeration and did not make a mistake of suggesting that racism completely disappeared when the “colored bathroom” sign was removed. It was unexpected since too many movies present a stereotypical scenario of a happy ending without acknowledging the historical facts (Cruz). It is crucial to mention that after Katherine’s, Mary’s, and Dorothy’s success, women of color were still oppressed and perceived as inferior. Even today women of color working in STEM fields are more likely to be forced to prove themselves to their colleagues (Gupta).

To conclude, Hidden Figures is a remarkable story of the victory of intelligence over bias and prejudice. The depiction of the mundane events that occurred in the workplace showed that even the brightest minds were once put in a box and forced to follow the illogical rules that made no sense. It is recommended to watch the movie to enrich one’s knowledge of African-American experiences at the times of segregation of exclusion.

Cruz, Lenika. “What Sets the Smart Heroines of Hidden Figures Apart.” The Atlantic . 2017. Web.

Gupta, Shalene. “Study: 100% of Women of Color in STEM Experience Bias.” Fortune . 2015. Web.

Heathman, Amelia. “Hidden Figures: The True Story Behind the Women who Changed NASA’s Place in the Space Race.” Wired . 2017. Web.

“Hidden Figures – At the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Technology.” IBM . 2017. Web.

Silman, Anna. “Hidden Figures Shows How a Bathroom Break Can Change History.” The Cut . 2017. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 31). Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016). https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/

"Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)." IvyPanda , 31 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)'. 31 October.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/.

1. IvyPanda . "Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Race and Gender in "Hidden Figures" (2016)." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-gender-in-the-hidden-figures-movie/.

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Photos show 3 hidden gems you missed from the total solar eclipse

• The total solar eclipse was so eventful that you may have missed a few hidden gems.
• While everyone was looking for the diamond ring, other strange phenomena took place.
• Photos show the weird shadows, solar prominences, and views from space you probably missed.

The total solar eclipse that swept the US on Monday was so eventful that you might have missed some gems, even if you were in the path of totality .

Everyone expected to see the diamond ring or the 360-degree sunset, but so much more happened.

Thankfully, this may be one of the most heavily documented solar eclipses ever, so there are plenty of photos .

Here are some Easter eggs you may have missed, especially if you were peeping through clouds.

Solar prominences

Plasma loops often arc outward from the sun's surface, but you can't see them on a regular day. When the moon moved in front of the sun on Monday afternoon, though, it blocked the bright disc of our star.

That made the sun's outer atmosphere visible to the naked eye — that white glow around the moon — along with those solar prominences. In the above image from Cleveland, they're the pink spikes and loops protruding into space.

The sun is nearing the maximum of its 11-year solar cycle, which means it's displaying more activity than usual. That made this total solar eclipse extra special .

Weird shadows

When the shape of the sun's disc in the sky changes as the moon eclipses it, shadows can get weird. That even happens in places that only experience a partial eclipse, like in the above image from Wisconsin.

As the moon's disc creeps across the sun, crescent-shaped shadows can appear on the ground in an ever-repeating mosaic. They're basically a pinhole projection of the eclipse, sometimes created by trees.

Shadows become even more eerie in the path of totality. In a phenomenon called shadow bands, long gray ripples appear and move rapidly along the ground or the sides of buildings just before and after totality. Scientists still aren't sure what causes them.

Space station view

Seeing a solar eclipse is basically being in the moon's shadow . Nothing shows that better than the view from the International Space Station, where you can simply see the round shadow of the moon cast over the Earth.

You can even see the difference between the darkest part of the shadow — the umbra, where totality happens — and the fainter, outer part of the shadow — the penumbra, where people saw a partial solar eclipse.

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