Uncovering the Real-Life Women Behind Hidden Figures With Author Margot Lee Shetterly
The upcoming film Hidden Figures focuses on the lives of three black female NASA employees whose work was integral to astronaut John Glenn’s orbit around Earth in 1962. It’s also just one part of of a larger story. Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson in the movie), Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) were—are—exceptional figures, but they were hardly anomalies. In Margot Lee Shetterly’s book upon which the movie was based, she chronicles the way these three were part of a wave of black women who worked as computers and mathematicians during the Space Race, and whose contributions history has largely swept aside.