Hidden Figures: Young Readers' Edition of Hidden Figures―Celebrating African American Women Pioneers at NASA

I was telling my husband about the book I was reading, and he said he saw some videos on YouTube that resembled the plot I was describing. I checked my Kindle and found out that, indeed, there was a mention of the film on the cover. The book was published, and the movie was released in 2016. I guess it illustrates how disconnected I am from current trends perfectly. I was glad, though, to see that the actress whom I liked at the time when I was still watching movies and tv series on a regular basis played one of the leading roles. Both my husband and I loved Joss, played by Taraji P. Henson in ‘Person of Interest,’ and yes, we haven’t overcome the trauma. No spoilers! “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” by Margot Lee Shetterly was an eye-opening reading experience. I love nonfiction that teaches rather than preaches. And this story was right up my alley. Before computers had become what we know them to be – machines that control all aspects of our lives (sorry, a bad joke) – they were…people. It was a huge revelation that a ‘computer’ used to be a person, a mathematician, who performed calculations ‘by hand.’ “Hidden Figures” tells the story of a group of human computers who, in a way, have changed history. World War II had a vast impact on everything. Apart from the obvious – a lot of people losing their lives – it had changed the basis of economics around the globe. Even before the United States sent soldiers to fight, the country had entered the war in other ways. Demand and supply had changed drastically. Suddenly, the world needed planes. Lots and lots of them. And since those planes weren’t needed to spray the fields with fertilizers but to participate in battles, they had to be effective, fast, and reliable. People’s lives depended on their performance. This change of demand led to the increased importance of the government agency called NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), the one that would in a while become the legendary NASA. To satisfy the rapidly growing military needs, NACA had to expand. And expand it did, both physically by constructing new buildings for research and testing and by hiring new personnel. They quickly realised that to ensure the latter, they had to become more flexible. Thus, the ‘for whites only’ policy was put aside, and the first African-American women mathematicians signed their contracts with NACA. For them, who knew that becoming a school teacher was the only way they could apply their mathematical skills, it was an opportunity of a lifetime. And they had done everything to use it to the fullest. Another revelation was to learn that it was one of those African American women mathematicians who performed the calculations for the legendary landing on the Moon mission in 1969. Katherine Johnson’s job was to check and re-check the computer-generated calculations so that the astronauts wouldn’t die because of the mistakes made by machines. Reading about that was especially touching. Sometimes the book was challenging to read because of the abundance of details, and also, after new characters were introduced. I admit, I mixed people and timelines, and as to technical issues, alas, it was hopeless to hope that I might understand them. Still, I guess that it’s a curse, for the lack of a better word, of good nonfiction. You cannot expect it to be solid while lacking details. “Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterly is an exceptionally well-researched and adequately presented account of a fascinating page in history. I recommend it to all those interested in lesser-known facts, which, although not advertised, made a significant impact.

Over a month ago, I heard about the movie Hidden Figures coming out and wanted to know more about it. Once I found out there was a book that the movie is based on, I purchased it in case I get the chance to see it in the theaters (I haven't seen it yet). My personal rule of thumb is that I need to read the book before I see the movie because there are so many more details in books that movies aren't able to cover. Personally, I feel I get more out of the movie if I've read the book first. I didn't know much more about "Hidden Figures" other than the fact that it's about African American women mathematicians who played big roles in the "space race" but that was enough to intrigue me. "Hidden Figures" is considered a biography about the many African American women mathematicians who worked for NACA, NASA's predecessor, and did the work of computers before they were developed. These women were educated and striving to succeed in the 1940s and later during a time when most of the engineering and mathematician jobs were held by white men. "Hidden Figures" covers the unique stories of four women, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, who were instrumental in figuring out complex equations to successfully land John Glenn and company on the moon, as well as other major endeavors. The main thing I would like to make known for anyone considering purchasing this book is that the book is not considered historical fiction or fiction of any kind. It's considered a biography and covers areas of science and math as well. There are a lot of facts and interesting descriptions and I learned a lot about a subject I knew next to nothing. That being said, I'll be honest and admit I had a hard time reading this book. It isn't because of how it is written because it is very well-written. Margot Lee Shetterly did an outstanding job writing, researching, and painting a picture of history which opened my eyes and helped me learn more about this subject. The reason I had a hard time reading it is because I generally read fiction and there are so many facts in this book that I had a hard time digesting all of them. I really could only read a chapter or two each day so this book took me about two weeks to read. Again, I'd like to reiterate that it's not as much about the book but about how my interests and reading preferences mixed with the book's subjects. It's obvious the book is very well-researched and I was able to imagine myself during the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. I wasn't born until the early 80s and it was nice to hear how the parts of history I knew about intertwined with what I was learning to create a bigger picture of everything that happened. I'd say the book is a good mixture of NACA/NASA history and how the women fit into the big picture. The book doesn't solely focus on the women and it helps to describe a big part of history that is good to know. Overall, I liked this book and learned a lot from it but I had a hard time reading it only because I don't typically read a lot of nonfiction. I'm still happy I read it and would still have read it, regardless of how the content is presented, but I would've probably been better prepared if I had known more about how the book is written. The actual book itself is 265 pages, followed by acknowledgements, notes for further information (divided up by chapter and page number), an extensive bibliography, index, and reading group guide. If you are interested in reading this book, just know that it isn't historical fiction, but it's very well-written and you will learn a lot from it. I recommend reading this book and hope to see the movie soon!

Superficially, this book covers the same territory as The Rise of the Rocket Girls, published earlier the same year. Although the books both tell the story of women breaking into mathematics, engineering, and the space program, starting int the early 20th century, via the originally rather mundane role of "computers," in reality there's a very important difference. The Rocket Girls at what became NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were overwhelmingly white. Shetterly follows black women charting the same course at Langley, in Virginia, where in addition to facing the obstacles women faced simply for being women, the black women were also challenging institutionalized racism in one of the states where it was most entrenched. They had an opening because the demand for mathematicians who could do the work was so high that white men, especially in the WWII years, weren't available in the numbers needed. Holding on and moving ahead depended on their own talent and hard work, plus the persistence and resilience to overcome the discrimination. The women, both black and white, started out when the word "computer" meant a person doing the calculations by hand that were needed for astronomy, engineering, and other areas that needed high-level math in quantity and at speed. As it became one of the few jobs other than nursing or teaching that a woman of education could pursue, it attracted women of the same education and ability as many of the men who were being hired as engineers. That set up a dynamic that would play out over the years, as blacks both male and female, and women both black and white, began insisting on being recognized for their real contributions, and a percentage of it. Virginia law required that workplaces be segregated, so the black women hired as computers worked in a separate building that came to be known as West Computing. The white women were in East Computing. This book follows the stories of the women of West Computing, including Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, and West Computing itself from its earliest days with just twenty women, through the expansion during the war years and the space program. the women worked initially isolated at West Computing, but gradually began to work closely with various engineering groups, on airplane design, missiles, and eventually spacecraft and their guidance systems. Though it's now said they were known as "human computers," that's not quite right. The machines we now call early computers were late arrivals, here and everywhere else that the women known as computers worked. These women became the programmers of those machine computers, as the machines became reliable enough and powerful enough, and the engineers considered it beneath them. The women of West Computing struggled with both racism and sexism, but they were tough, smart, and persistent. As they more and more proved their value, increasing numbers of them became recognized as--and accorded the employment status of--mathematicians and engineers. In the 1950s and 1960s, Virginia resisted integration more than some other states, and even this federal facility had to work around that, but as time passed, individual computers and mathematicians became assigned permanently to the engineering groups they were working with most closely. When these women were from West Computing, that created a de facto integrated work group. It was a slow eating away at segregation, but it happened, whittling down the separate and segregated West Computing over years. Finally, when the Langley facility became part of NASA, segregation at all NASA facilities, and therefore West Computing, was abolished. We follow the personal lives of these women as well as their professional lives. The two interacted, as each was affected by World War II, the post-war years and the rising tension with the Soviet Union, and the growth of the space program and the space race. These women, along with their white counterparts at East Computing, and at JPL and elsewhere, were crucial to the success of the space program. It's a fascinating look at a corner of history that's generally overlooked, and it held my interest all the way through. Highly recommended. I bought this audiobook.

I am so glad that I read this after seeing the movie. I loved the movie, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the lifetime of achievement of the women featured in the movie plus there are more women mentioned in the book whose accomplishments aren't evident in the film. It's an amazing story and Shetterly relays it beautifully. I loved every minute of reading this book and it needs to be in all school libraries. I get that schools don't have the time to devote to each historical topic, but having something like this (there is a Young Readers version available here) for them to read would be great. I wish I had spent more time in the non-fiction section back when I was in school but I'm trying to make up for it now. I love the stories of women throughout history, seeing that we've been contributing to the world in more than 2 ways, and promoting those stories when I see them. Fortunately, this one doesn't exactly need my help. It's been great to see all the notoriety this story has gotten, it's well deserved. Shetterly goes a long way to giving the reader an understanding of not only the important nature of these women's work, but the sacrifices they made to do the work and the pressures they were under from several sources. The difference in the way they were treated at work and at home, by coworkers and by passersby on the sidewalk, is well delineated and it paints a good picture of what it must have meant to be there, to be breaking down barriers and to be given credit for their incredible intelligence. I appreciate that they all say they were just doing their jobs, which I'm sure is true, but there's always more to it than that. I've known people who "just" do their jobs and there's a difference between them and people who love the work. It's this difference that breaks down the barriers that these women took on, purposefully or not. I appreciated Shetterly's inclusion of the timeline with the Civil Rights movement. I am familiar with the events from school and other reading, but it helped me out to have it overlaid on the timeline of the events at NACA and NASA, to understand the shifting sands the women found themselves on. She did a great job too of delineating the cultural and workplaces differences with being African American, a woman, or an African American and a woman. The African American men got to come in as engineers and the women had to fight for that too. White women were also given advantages over African American women, which caused the women featured here to deal with twice the problems the others had. This is a book that everyone should read, but especially if you watched the movie, which really only covers half. The book carries the story of the three central women all the way to the moon landing, while the movie stops at John Glenn's orbit. Shetterly's writing style is impeccable and the story itself is astounding.

I find the concept of rating non-fiction books to be very difficult for me because the review is no longer about the story, characters and plot, but about how the information is presented to the reader. Shetterly's material is fresh; it's raw, and at least for me, untouched on. There are so many things in her book I was surprised by. Never in my wildest mind could I begin to imagine the scope of black history as it relates to the all American dream of space flight and even before that to the fields of science and math. I like that Shetterly chose a subject that deals not with a single person but with a collective group and how each person's strides, their small battles with segregation, work place inequality, and sexism helped pave the way for future generations. That this isn't just a story about these hidden black women and men, but about white women who had their own struggles as well as white men who were forced to tackle and come to grips with the fact that gender and color don't define intelligence. For this and this alone I feel that this subject matter is something that all people should become acquainted with. Having said that I found my actual reading of this book to be less fun that I originally thought it would be. The book starts out strong, introducing us to the early life of Dorothy Vaughn, how she struggled with employment even with the level of intelligence she had. I was fully invested at that point, about learning what constitutes as a "good black job" and a "very good black job". The problem for me is that as Shetterly adds more characters, I begin to loose track of the original characters. Some people such as Christine Darden are mentioned in passing in the very beginning and we don't learn of their importance or their stories until hundred's of pages later (or in her case, the epilogue.) And because of the age differences between the women Shetterly staggers them into her plot, but in doing so it leaves some women missing from the book for many chapters and upon their return leaves me wondering what woman did what when. I think that the information would have been more interestingly presented if each chapter showed the women and what they were doing relative to each other based on the timeline. Another thing I felt Shetterly struggled with was focus. Having read her prologue I can understand that she has close ties to this topic and that it's very near and dear to her heart. As such I felt like she had a hard time separating out Langley from the world around it. She wanted us to know everything that fascinated her through her entire life but as such makes it harder to her readers to follow along. All of the history is important to tell but there is a time and place for it. Sometimes I felt I had a better understanding of what A. Randolph Philips and M.L.K were doing than what Mary Houston was accomplishing. Also I wanted her to focus of the specifics of what these women were accomplishing. Later in the book when it mentions Katherine Johnson's paper on "what if the computers fail" the book focuses more on the training of astronaut Jim Lovell to guide Apollo 13 home than the effects her paper had on the field of science. For these figures who have spent so much time hidden in the annals of history, I want to know about their accomplishments. How did Johnson calculate using the stars as guidance in lieu of a computer? How was this theory actually tested correctly during the Apollo 8 mission? In essence I wanted more minute history mixed with their over reaching accomplishments and less world history which was so present that at some points almost felt as if Shetterly was trying to marry two books into one. Having said this, by the time I reached the end of this short history I was more than happy to be done reading it. It's lack of focus kept me from focusing as I tried to digest these important stories. I found myself zoning out at points and having to reread. When I set out to read this book I had no thoughts as to whether I would watch the movie, preferring to have the unadulterated truth as opposed to the Hollywood spin, but having finished I actually want to watch the movie just to see if the information is better organized and if the visual will help me digest better the remarkable accomplishments of these women. **2.5 stars **

As a white woman born in the 1950s, who’d lived through the tumultuous 1960s, I thought I knew all about the civil rights movement. It turns out I knew very little. I thank Margot Lee Shetterly for educating me. For example, I didn’t know that long before I was born, thousands of African Americans graduated from traditionally Black colleges. They were every bit as highly educated as white college graduates, but had trouble finding employment in their fields. Many entered the teaching profession, working in Black schools, offering hope to the next generation. Kaz Czarnecki, a supervisor at Langley Research Center, recognized that Mary Jackson, a “computer” with a degree in math and science, had innate abilities in engineering. He recommended she take some core courses which were offered at night school in the local high school—a whites-only school. She had to apply for a special dispensation just to enter the building. Quote from the book: Nothing, however, could have prepared her for the shock that awaited her when she walked through the long-closed door. Hamilton High School was a dilapidated, musty old building. A stunned Mary Jackson wondered: was this what she and the rest of the black children in the city had been denied all these years? This rundown, antiquated place? She had just assumed that if whites had worked so hard to deny her admission to the school, it must have been a wonderland. But this? Why not combine the resources to build a beautiful school for both black and white students? (End of the quote.) When integrated schools became mandatory, many Southerners resisted feverishly, even saying, “I’d rather my children grow up ignorant than share a classroom with a Negro.” And that’s exactly what happened in places. Quote from the book: In Prince Edward County, [Virginia,] . . . segregationists would not be moved: they defunded the entire county school system . . . rather than integrate . . . Prince Edward’s schools would remain closed from 1959 through 1964, five long and bitter years. Many of the affected children, known as “The Lost Generation,” never made up the missing grades of education. Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth. (End of the quote.) In the midst of this era, a large number of Black women labored for the United States government beside the engineers advancing first aeronautical research and then the space program. The computers’ job was to work out the math. They collected data and determined tolerances and trajectories and launch windows. Shetterly acknowledges them for their accuracy, their work ethic, and their enormous contribution to technology. The book is very well-written. It reads like a novel, though it is history and scrupulously annotated. I am humbled to learn about the Langley Research Center computers, and I believe Hidden Figures should be required reading for everyone in the United States, especially white people like me.

Hidden Figures was truly a heroic novel about the women of NASA who went unrecognized for their tremendous efforts towards air exploration and travel. I have mixed views on this novel, but I think it should be read widely amongst African American children, teens, and young adults as it is an inspiring story about hardworking people who sought to become more than what society duped them to be because of their race. This novel is empowering and is a good read in my eyes. The way Shetterly can educate the reader on the social issues during the 20th century and display its impact on African Americans through specific characters is very impressive, yet trivial. As it is a groundbreaking novel, it does have some cons. The piece was a bit too heavy to read because the author tries to focus on so many aspects during this period. She makes so many references towards history, the book starts to become a history book in a sense, but it is essentially a book about history. That was a difficult concept for me to grasp as I read and wrote an assignment on it. Shetterly, unfortunately, bites off more than can chew as she switches from characters while trying to include historical events. Her constant back-and-forth methods made it difficult for me to interpret what was happening at some moments. She did pull it off, but the transitions made be harder for others. I feel like she tried to fit too much information into a small frame. She elaborated on Jim Crow, Brown vs. The Board of Education, World War 2, the space race, and many other events in only 265 pages, so the plot had some holes and was convoluted. Some characters like young Christine were irrelevant to the plot and I saw no significance in those people. Another reference was the woman from Star Trek and her story, which I thought was not important to the plot. Shetterly’s depiction of African American men and women in racist America was so puissant, I do not think she needed to include some small pieces like the ones I mentioned. On the other hand, her ability to captivate the character’s emotions through text was incredible. An example would be Mary Jackson’s predicament with the bathroom and her journey to become an engineer at NASA. She moves the audience through her distressful tone as she illustrates the struggle the women at NASA and African Americans faced while trying to avoid being devoured by the country that prayed on their downfall as racism still lingered. African Americans often felt “angry and humiliated” because of the treatment they faced as “negotiating racial boundaries had become a daily fact of negro life.” (Shetterly 108) Shetterly’s novel gave an insider’s look at the status of African Americans in America during the 20th century. They were caught in a crossfire as the country relied on them to fight in WW2, which was a war against racism, but wouldn’t call it upon themselves to solve the racial problems in their own country. “America’s inadequacy” and hypocrisy came to the forefront with the lives of Dorothy, Katherine, and Mary being emphasized. (Shetterly, 152) These individuals were part of a black movement of individuals who sacrificed everything they had to become more than their color. America asked so much of these people but gave them nothing. Shetterly beautifully elicits the power that African Americans had in the workforce that America bothers to show or care about and this is why I believe this piece is worth reading. This book was different because it displayed success in many different ways instead of one. This is what demonstrates black excellence at its finest. Given that this book was a little too heavy and convoluted in the plot, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars. It goes to show that black voices can be heard no matter the predicaments we face. In a stagnant country, we will prosper. These successful women “mirrored the aspirations and philosophy of the surrounding black community” and that is why this novel should be read by others seeking to become pioneers of a new age of black progression. (Shetterly,95)

The women of this book, black and white, were never actually ‘hidden.’ There was no conspiracy to cover up the fact that they had worked at the laboratory or the other entities that it morphed into over the years. But as is the case with lower level employees of almost any organization, no great fanfare was made about them either. So, we owe Margot Lee Shetterly for unearthing their story and sharing it with us. In 1943 the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory was suffering from a shortage of qualified personnel to fill such positions as Junior Physicist, Mathematician, and Assistant Computer. The demands of the military for young men for World War II took up so many young men that the people in charge of the laboratory found themselves looking for women – even black women – who could do these jobs. In those days a ‘computer’ was a person who operated a calculating machine (an older, clunkier and mostly mechanical version of a calculator) to perform the calculations needed to make sense of the research being done at the laboratory. In 1943 they began to hire some exceptionally talented and mathematically inclined black women. Many of these women had been teaching school. Some had been teaching at the college level. The mission of the laboratory at that time was to study things like airflow over the bodies of different types of airplanes trying to discover how to increase the efficiency of different parts of the plane. The engineers studied these problems in wind tunnels and sent the data they collected to the computers for analysis. Throughout the war, these women helped to provide the solutions that allowed for the creation of ever more efficient airplanes, and in the process proved their worth to the laboratory. At the end of the war, there was a change in the mission of the laboratory, and some of the people who had started there during the war left for various reasons, but there was still plenty to do. Now the focus was on designing and testing improved airplanes and airplane parts for civilian use. The move from propeller planes to jets and the quest for supersonic flight was assisted by these same women. Sometime in the late ‘fifties, the mission began to change again, and so did the way computers did their work. The focus now began to be on winning the space race, and the Russian launch of their satellite, Sputnik, inspired a big push to build rockets and send a man into space, with the ultimate goal being to put a man on the moon. Electronic computers began to replace the human computers, but they needed somebody to program them, and at that time there were no schools already set up to train computer programmers. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was rapidly becoming the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) set up classes for their own people to train them on how to use the new electronic computers, and many of the women computers signed up to take the classes so they could continue to do their jobs. Meanwhile, some of the women had already made the transition to becoming Mathematicians and Engineers and kept right on solving the problems and checking the data that allowed for the success of the Mercury and Gemini missions, and finally sent several Apollo missions to the moon. While all this was going on, changes were also happening in the world outside the laboratory. When the women first came to Langley, segregation was still in full swing in Virginia. When they rode the bus to work, they had to ride in the back of the bus. There were separate restrooms for black women. The schools their children went to were still segregated. Whole housing areas had to be built for them alongside the housing areas being built for whites. The military and the federal government were some of the earliest workplaces to become integrated. By small steps (like removing the sign in the lunchroom designating the separate table for them) and larger steps (finally getting rid of the separate restrooms), they gradually made the workplace more hospitable. Much was owed to the fact that many of the people they worked with were from places outside the South and were less hostile to black people. Much was also due to the fact that the women did their jobs well and respected and were respected by their coworkers. In the outside world, things went more slowly. Eventually, the segregated schools and buses became things of the past. It became possible to move into areas that had not been built specifically for blacks.