Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

 Hidden Figures by Margo Lee Shetterly - 349 pages, 10 hour 47 minute Audiobook

⭐⭐⭐✰✰

Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program. Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’ calculating the flight paths that would enable space travel. A group of talented ‘colored computers’ who were segregated from their white counterparts, used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets and astronauts into space. This true story moves from World War II, when an executive order signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt made it possible for women and African-Americans to work in professional positions in government workplaces, through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War and the women’s rights movement. This book tells the story of courageous women whose work forever changed the world.

At times, it was difficult to keep track of all the names, events and dates in this book as she tended to throw out one fact after another. I feel like I learned facts about some people's lives, but I didn't get to know Dorothy Vaughan or Katherine Johnson on a personal level. I did find all the information about the discrimination and segregation African-Americans, especially those in Viriginia during the 1940's through 1960's, faced on a daily basis. I enjoyed the movie "Hidden Figures" much more than the book even though the screen adaptation portrayed NASA as a segregated workplace in 1961 even though they ended the practice when NACA became NASA in 1958. The movie told the story of the three main characters, instead of mostly stating facts about them, and helped you get to know them on a much more personal level.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

 Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly-346 pages

This is the previously untold story of the women, specifically African-American women, who were computers for NACA (later NASA) at Langley in Hampton, Virginia. Dorothy Vaughan was one of the first to be offered and accept a position as a computer. Later, Mary Jackson and Katherine Goble (later Johnson) accepted a computer position at Langley. The women were part of West Computing which was the wing for the African-American women. They had to endure segregation and racism, especially in the early years of their employment. Mary Jackson would later become an engineer at Langley, leaving computing behind. All 3 of these women and many others would help send John Glenn into space in 1962. Katherine Goble Johnson also had a big hand in sending Apollo 11 to the moon and some of her calculations helped John Lovell and the other astronauts of Apollo 13 return home safely. This book is the inspiration for the 2017 film of the same name. I enjoyed reading this book, although it does lack a bit in the narrative department and gets bogged down in details occasionally. The epilogue is the best chapter, as far as narrative. It's almost as if she wrote it for those familiar with many of the people and the organizations and mathematics involved in these stories. I would rate it 3 out of 5 stars because of the importance of its story. It is an important history of many important, previously unseen contributions by African-American women at a time when segregation was the norm. This book does reinforce and extend my previous knowledge and studies of the Jim Crow era. The fact that African-Americans (and women) were not afforded the same rights and luxuries as their white (male, especially) counterparts time and time again until quite recently in the big picture is appalling. The fact that hotels and restaurants could and did deny service to someone based solely on their skin color is abhorrent. Separate but equal was never equal. It was really separate and unequal. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision set a horrible precedent for the following several decades of segregation. The women in this story overcame that segregation and constant reminders of its existence to make important contributions to United States history. 

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly - 543 pages

The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space—a powerful, revelatory contribution that is as essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America as Between the World and Me and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner.

Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.

Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.