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 close relationship with the army flyers served as a constant reminder to the engineers that every experiment they conducted had real-world implications.

But there was no way that Randolph, or the men at the laboratory, or anyone else could have predicted that the hiring of a group of black female mathematicians at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory would end at the Moon.

Front Royal, Charlottesville, and Norfolk—found themselves sitting at home in the fall of 1958. “I would rather have my children live in ignorance than have them go to school with Negroes,” one white parent told a reporter. A total of ten thousand of the shut-out students lived in Norfolk: 5,500 of those from military families stationed at the naval base, white students as well as black paying the price for the state’s racial crusade.

fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.

An enduring symbol of American boyhood (girls weren’t allowed to race until the early 1970s), the All-American Soap Box Derby mixed good old American whiz-bang ingenuity with family fun. The competition had started as a Depression-era distraction, a way to create something out of nothing when nothing was what most people had.