Our next door neighbor was a physics professor. My father’s best friend was an aeronautical engineer. Five of my father’s seven siblings were engineers or technologists. My dad was a NASA lifer, a career Langley Research Center scientist who became an internationally respected climate expert. Just do an image search for the word “scientist”.įor me, growing up in Hampton, Virginia, the face of science was brown like mine. Even Google, our hive mind, confirms the prevailing view. We all know what a scientist looks like: a wild-eyed person in a white lab coat and utilitarian eyeglasses, wearing a pocket protector and holding a test tube. HIDDEN FIGURES: THE AMERICAN DREAM AND THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BLACK WOMEN MATHEMATICIANS WHO HELPED WIN THE SPACE RACE recovers the history of these pioneering women and situates it in the intersection of the defining movements of the American century: the Cold War, the Space Race, the Civil Rights movement and the quest for gender equality. What about Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, Kathryn Peddrew, Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith or Barbara Holley? Most Americans have no idea that from the 1940s through the 1960s, a cadre of African-American women formed part of the country’s space work force, or that this group-mathematical ground troops in the Cold War-helped provide NASA with the raw computing power it needed to dominate the heavens. (Sept.You've heard the names John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong. A star-studded feature film based on Shetterly's book is due out in late 2016. Exploring the intimate relationships among blackness, womanhood, and 20th-century American technological development, Shetterly crafts a narrative that is crucial to understanding subsequent movements for civil rights. Shetterly collects much of her material directly from those who were there, using personal anecdotes to illuminate the larger forces at play. She celebrates the skills of mathematicians such as Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Hoover, whose brilliant work eventually earned them slow advancement but never equal footing. Shetterly writes of these women as core contributors to American success in the midst of a cultural "collision between race, gender, science, and war," teasing out how the personal and professional are intimately related. The first women NACA brought on took advantage of a WWII opportunity to work in a segregated section of Langley, doing the calculations necessary to support the projects of white male engineers.
Shetterly, founder of the Human Computer Project, passionately brings to light the important and little-known story of the black women mathematicians hired to work as computers at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Va., part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA's precursor).
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