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

by Margot Lee Shetterly

The vicious and easily identifiable demons that had haunted black Americans for three centuries were shape-shifting as segregation began to yield under pressure from social and legal forces. Sometimes the demons still presented themselves in the form of racism and blatant discrimination. Sometimes they took on the softer cast of ignorance or thoughtless prejudice. But these days, there was also a new culprit: the insecurity that plagued black people as they code-shifted through the unfamiliar language and customs of an integrated life.

Though bathrooms for the black employees were clearly marked, most of the bathrooms—the ones implicitly designated for white employees—were unmarked. As far as Katherine was concerned, there was no reason why she shouldn’t use those as well. It would be a couple of years before she was confronted with the whole rigmarole of separate bathrooms. By then, she simply refused to change her habits—refused to so much as enter the Colored bathrooms. And that was that. No one ever said another word to her about it. She also

this seems to be different from the movie

Those unevolved, backward rules were the flies in the Langley buttermilk. So she simply determined to pluck them out, willing into existence a work environment that conformed to her sense of herself and her place in the world.

Katherine, on the other hand, like the engineers around her, got into the habit of reading newspapers and magazines for the first few minutes of the day. She perused Aviation Week, trying to connect the dots between the latest industry advance and the torrent of numbers flowing through her calculating machine.

context for work

They were good-natured, outgoing, and respectful, and they always rose to the high standards their parents had set for them. In her children, Katherine saw the legacy of her parents and Jimmy’s parents and all their generations past, each pushing their energy and resources to the limits to lift their progeny toward the American dream, to a life that would surpass their own in material and emotional richness and access to the long-promised blessings of democracy.

The female mathematicians’ job security wasn’t immediately threatened by the machines, but Dorothy Vaughan perceived that mastering the machine would be the key to long-term career stability. When Langley sponsored a series of computation courses to be held after work and on weekends, Dorothy wasted no time enrolling. She encouraged the women in her group to do the same. “Integration is going to come,” she told her employees. The blurring of the color lines could put her and her reports in a position to qualify for the desirable jobs that were sure to open for people who were experts in managing the electronic computers. To keep moving forward, they needed to take advantage of every opportunity to make themselves as valuable as possible to the laboratory.

this happened way before the movie event too

Why not combine the resources to build a beautiful school for both black and white students? Throughout the South, municipalities maintained two parallel inefficient school systems, which gave the short end of the stick to the poorest whites as well as blacks. The cruelty of racial prejudice was so often accompanied by absurdity, a tangle of arbitrary rules and distinctions that subverted the shared interests of people who had been taught to see themselves as irreconcilably different.

wow I hadn't thought of it like that before.

The morning of October 5 was the official dawn of the space age, the public debut of man’s competition to break free of the bonds of terrestrial gravity and travel, along with all his belligerent tendencies, beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

“While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,”

where are we spending our energy?

But by leapfrogging the United States into space, the Russians had turned even local racial policy into fodder for the international conflict. In forcing the United States to compete for the allegiance of yellow and brown and black countries throwing off the shackles of colonialism, the Soviets influenced something much closer to Earth, and ultimately more difficult than putting a satellite, or even a human, into space: weakening Jim Crow’s grip on America.

In Prince Edward County, however, segregationists would not be moved: they defunded the entire county school system, including R. R. Moton in Farmville, rather than integrate. No municipality in all of America had ever taken such draconian action. As white parents herded their students into the new segregation academies, the most resourceful black families scrambled to salvage their children’s educations by sending them to live with relatives around the state, some as far afield as North Carolina. Prince Edward’s schools would remain closed from 1959 through 1964, five long and bitter years.

ignorance begets more ignorance

By recognizing the full complement of extraordinary ordinary women who have contributed to the success of NASA, we can change our understanding of their abilities from the exception to the rule. Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent.