Adapted for film even before Shetterly finished her writing, 20th Century Fox will release in January, "Hidden Figures," a movie starring actors Taraji P. (William Morrow)Īnd now that history is not just being revealed in the book. "Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly. The history that has come together in these pages wasn't so much hidden as unseen - fragments patiently biding their time in footnotes and family anecdotes and musty folders before returning to view," she explains. "The title of this book is something of a misnomer.
Or, as Shetterly writes in the book, not hidden but waiting to be found.
These women, including Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson, were hidden from that history until recently. Rather it's their story, now documented within the pages of journalist and researcher Margot Lee Shetterly's " Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race" (William Morrow), that helps re-integrate the history of the women's rights and civil rights movements within the history of the space program. The women, themselves, would be the first to ensure that was clear. Nor were they more important to the program's early success than the teams who staffed Mission Control or, for that matter, the astronauts rode their work into orbit. It is not that the women of West Computing at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, were more crucial than their white woman counterparts in East Computing, or even the largely white and almost entirely male engineers who both divisions of women mathematicians supported at Langley. space program.īut there was at least one history remaining to be written: that of the women, and in particular the African-American women, who worked as the "human computers" at NASA's original research laboratory, who provided the calculations necessary for sending American spacecraft and astronauts into space and to the moon. More than a half century after the first NASA astronauts launched into space, one might think that there are no sweeping narratives left untold about the early years of the U.S.
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