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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

Mrs. Land worked as a computer out at Langley,”

First sentence

What I wanted was for them to have the grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as a part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.

Education topped her list of ideals; it was the surest hedge against a world that would require more of her children than white children, and attempt to give them less in return.

Negro life in America was a never-ending series of negotiations: when to fight and when to concede.

Their facilities might be separate, but as far as the West Computers were concerned, they would prove themselves equal or better, having internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far.

Mary didn’t have the power to remove the limits that society imposed on her girls, but it was her duty, she felt, to help pry off the restrictions they might place on themselves. 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. You can do better—we can do better, she told them with every word and every deed.

She and her generation were the first in the history of the world to come of age with the possibility of human extinction as a by-product of human ingenuity.

Discrimination they had come to expect, if not accept. But the prospect of integration planted a new fear in the souls of Christine and fellow members of the Brown v. Board of Ed generation: that as blacks, they would not be good enough—smart enough—to sit next to whites in a classroom and succeed.

There was America before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and there was America after; King’s message would ever after remind all the citizens of the nation that the Negro dream and the American dream were one and the same.