The film Hidden Figures is based on true events. The book was written by Margot Lee Shetterly and it’s interesting to note that the movie came out before the book was published. That’s the Hollywood film industry for you! Hidden Figures presents many issues which would make excellent research topics. Which ones stand out in your mind?
The following are some facts I found on the Internet:
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
“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
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
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
About running to find a colored restroom: 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.
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
These women are much to be admired. What do you find the most admirable about them? Would you consider them heroes? If you had a daughter, which one of these women would you like your daughter to emulate? Hope you enjoyed the film as much as I did!
Use the comment section to record your thoughts on the questions I’ve given you in this post. Two paragraphs should be enough to express yourself. Be brief and precise.~~LMMolina
Check out the following video for more details on Katherine Johnson’s career during her time with NASA.