1962 is remembered for many events, The Cuban Missile Crisis, Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point game and President John F. Kennedy’s speech at Rice University, boldly laying down the Gauntlet that the U.S. will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
His confidence and our eventual success at the Apollo 11 lunar landing is directly linked to the work of three brilliant African-American women working at NASA nicknamed “The West Computers” on segregated Langley Va, campus, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history:Project Mercury & the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit in 1962.
20th Century Fox debuted the first trailer for its upcoming movie Hidden Figures during coverage of the Rio Summer Olympics.
The film centers on the untold story of Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) — and chronicles the true story of how the trio battled stereotypes and defied expectations even as they made history.
The cast also includes Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Mahershala Ali, Aldis Hodge and Glen Powell.
Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi wrote the screenplay, with Melfi directing. The movie hits theaters Jan. 13.
The film is based upon HIDDEN FIGURES: THE AMERICAN DREAM AND THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BLACK WOMEN MATHEMATICIANS WHO HELPED WIN THE SPACE RACE by Margot Lee Shetterly (William Morrow/HarperCollins) it goes on sale September 6, but you can pre-order a copy through your preferred retailer.
Ms. Shetterly’s Blog is live and I recommend anyone interested in the background of these remarkable women and thier story read it, I have a post from the blog that captures her motivation for telling this important story for everyone, little black girls like my own budding mathematician and inventor in particular (who is both in the R&D stages of a Snow powered-Snowblower and in training to become the first girl on Mars.) following excerpt is from http://www.hiddenfigures.com/
“You’ve heard the names John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong. 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.
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.I’m 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. Mostly male. Usually white. Even Google, our hive mind, confirms the prevailing view. Just do an image search for the word “scientist”.
For me, growing up in Hampton, Virginia, the face of science was brown like mine. My dad was a NASA lifer, a career Langley Research Center scientist who became an internationally respected climate expert. Five of my father’s seven siblings were engineers or technologists. My father’s best friend was an aeronautical engineer. Our next door neighbor was a physics professor. There were mathematicians at our church, sonic boom experts in my mother’s sorority and electrical engineers in my parents’ college alumni associations. There were also black English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors and contractors, black shoe repair owners, wedding planners, real estate agents and undertakers, the occasional black lawyer and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so many African-Americans working in science, math and engineering that I thought that’s just what black folks did.After the start of World War II, Federal agencies and defense contractors across the country coped with a shortage of male number crunchers by hiring women with math skills. America’s aeronautical think tank, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the “NACA”), headquartered at Langley Research Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, created a pool of female mathematicians who analyzed endless arrays of data from wind tunnel tests of airplane prototypes. Women were thought to be more detail-oriented, their smaller hands better suited for repetitive tasks on the Friden manual adding machines.A “girl” could be paid significantly less than a man for doing the same job. And male engineers, once freed from laborious math work, could focus on more “serious” conceptual and analytical projects.
The war also opened doors for African-Americans.
In 1941, under pressure from labor and civil rights leaders such as A. Phillip Randolph, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which created the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and prohibited race-based discrimination in the country’s defense industry. Shortly thereafter, help wanted notices began appearing in Negro newspapers around the country, looking for blacks to fill positions at Federal agencies and defense contractors. Langley advertised in Norfolk, VA’s Journal and Guide,seeking machine shop workers, laborers, janitors—and African-American women with math degrees.
These women were nearly all top graduates of historically black colleges such as Hampton Institute, Virginia State and Wilberforce University. Though they did the same work as the white women hired at the time, they were cloistered away in their own segregated office in the West Area of the Langley campus– thus the moniker, the West Computers. But despite the hardships of working under Virginia’s Jim Crow laws, these women went on to make significant contributions to aeronautics, astronautics, and America’s victory over the Soviet Union in the Space Race.”
Art Credit- hiddenfigures.com/20thCenturyFox/Wiki