The movie shows a tenacious Vaughan insisting that her title reflect the supervisory work she was already doing. In the film Hidden Figures, Oscar-winning actress Octavia Spencer plays Dorothy Vaughan, NASA's first African-American supervisor. In her book, she details the journeys and personal lives of Langley's star mathematicians, and recounts how women computers - both black and white - broke barriers in both science and society. She researched archives and interviewed former and current NASA employees and family members. Shetterly spent the next six years searching for more information. She recently told NPR's Michel Martin, "I knew that many of them worked at NASA. But it wasn't until about six years ago that she understood the magnitude of the work black women were doing there. She's African-American, and her father, extended family and neighbors were all scientists, physicists and engineers at NASA. Shetterly grew up in the 1960s in Hampton, Va., not far from NASA's Langley Research Center. (The film rights were optioned just a couple of weeks after Shetterly got her book deal.) As mathematicians and engineers, these women made incalculable contributions to the space program - and the fact that they were African-Americans working in the segregated South makes their stories even more remarkable.Īuthor Interviews 'Hidden Figures': How Black Women Did The Math That Put Men On The Moon Now, just a few months after the book was published, a new movie is also telling that story. ![]() ![]() In her book Hidden Figures, author Margot Lee Shetterly gives name and voice to the African-American women who worked as human "computers" in the space program. Historical photos show them as white men in crisp white shirts and ties - but we now know there's more to that picture. Behind the scenes, thousands of engineers and mathematicians worked tirelessly to make NASA's Friendship 7 mission a success. 20, 1962, John Glenn blasted off into space and became the first American to orbit Earth. ![]() Singer and actress Janelle Monáe plays her in the film Hidden Figures. According to NASA, Mary Jackson "may have been the only black female aeronautical engineer in the field" in the 1950s.
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