Late last year, a movie opened called “Hidden Figures” that piqued my interest. I had not heard of the story portrayed in the movie before, but the more I found out about it, the more I became convinced that this was an amazing story that needed to be told. I say this not just because I am into space and NASA and the space program, not just because it’s about smart people doing smart things, and not just because it’s about minorities and the underdogs who persevered and triumphed, but because it’s about all of these things at once.
I have not yet watched the movie, but it just recently (as of this writing) won the Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, and it’s up for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. However, I am, coincidentally enough, in the middle of reading the book that the film is based on. Yes, the movie is actually based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly. It’s an amazing book and although I haven’t finished it yet (I’m close!), I thought that their stories should be mentioned here and seeing as how timely it is, I wanted to use this tale to kick off this blog..
Before the creation of the electronic computer and certainly before computing power went mainstream and affordable, the term “computers” referred to humans who sat through calculating equations and developing tables of figures used in industry and science. One area where this was important was the creation of ballistic trajectory tables and other mathematical calculations related for aeronautical research during World War 2. Most of the time, the work these human computers did was tedious and repetitive – despite being very difficult and intellectually challenging – and mostly women and minorities were employed to chug away in anonymity.
Women had been used as “computers” in industry and government before, but minorities (e.g. African-Americans) had few if any opportunities in this field until WW2 started. It wasn’t until in 1941 when FDR pushed through Executive Order 8802 that prevented racial discrimination in hiring for federal and war-related work that they began to make their way into NASA history. Now NASA was called NACA in the old days – National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Their mandate was to turn the various flying vehicles of the day into flying war machines for the new war effort and they needed all hands on deck, no matter the color and gender of that hand. This allowed talented individuals such as Dorothy Vaughn to get hired by NACA in 1943 and sets the stage of the story that Hidden Figures tells.
The movie primarily tells the story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson, while the book also tells the stories of others such as Christine Darden and Miriam Mann. In the early years of NACA, during the 1940s, the black women who were hired to work at the Langley Research Center were segregated to a separate building on the west side with separate dining and bathroom facilities. They became known as the West Computers and were instrumental in doing the trailblazing work that made the later NASA’s success possible. Here are some highlights of these remarkable women:
- Katherine Johnson was a child prodigy, a mathematical genius. She graduated high school at age 14 and college at 18 with degrees in math and French, becoming the first Africa-American woman to integrate the West Virginia University graduate school.
- She calculated the trajectory of Alan Shephard’s flight into space, and her mathematical prowess so strong that when John Glenn went up into orbit on his flight, he didn’t feel satisfied until Katherine checked the output of the newfangled electronic computers. He is said to have stated “Get the girl to check the numbers… If she says the numbers are good, I’m ready to go”.
- Dorothy Vaughn was NASA’s first black manager. Never mind that she was a black female, she was simply the first black manager ever at NASA, period. This is because she was so skilled as a computer that we was promoted in 1949 to manage the women of the West Computers group. At the time, it was difficult for a woman to be a manager of anything, but for a black woman, this was practically unheard of. She managed the group for almost 10 years until the segregation was eliminated, a testament to her as an individual contributor as well as a manager.
- When the segregation ended and Dorothy Vaughn no longer had a West Computers group to lead, she didn’t just sit on her laurels. She proved her smarts again by becoming the lead expert in programming in the FORTRAN language at Langley, the premiere computer programming language of the time that was used in science and industry.
- Mary Jackson started out as a computer, but when an opportunity arose to work with Kazimierz Czarnecki, a prominent aeronautical engineer at NASA, she took it. With his support, she studied to become an engineer herself. To accomplish this, she petitioned the City of Hampton where she lived to allow her to learn next to her white peers and take after-work graduate courses held at the segregated Hampton High School. She succeeded and was promoted to an engineer in 1958, becoming NASA’s first Africa-American female engineer. And until more recent times, she may have been NASA’s only female black engineer for much of her career.
Eventually the work and achievements of these women would earn them various accolades, like the Presidential Medal of Freedom that President Obama gave to Katherine Johnson and the naming of the NASA computational research facility in Hampton, VA in her honor. They blazed a trail for others like them to follow such that now, it’s no longer unthinkable or so shocking to think of African-Americans, women, or Africa-American women to pursue careers in STEM fields.
So why am I making this the story the inaugural story of Tales of Awesomeness? For a couple of reasons. The first is that this tale is one of struggle, struggle against some formidable odds and the intestinal fortitude to overcome those odds. Any tale that showcases such struggle is always one that is awesome and one that can teach us to be awesome.
The other is that as I write this, it’s February of 2017 and American society is reaching an inflection point. As the tale of the Hidden Figures show, we started out as a society where racism, sexism, and all kinds of bigotry was a norm but we evolved and progressed into one where the norm changed, so that the new society became one where anyone of talent and gumption regardless of their gender, creed, race, skin tone could *in theory* avail themselves to equal opportunities and contribute to society.
Now, it’s not always been perfect and this progression has had various stop-and-goes, but progress was being made and this was Awesome.
Or so we thought.
Now in February 2017 we are suddenly at an point again where much of this progress may be lost, where the norms of society may change back 60, 70 years to one where bigotry and prejudice rules. This is NOT awesome. I think we sometimes need to be reminded of both how far we came and what things were like back then, as well as what may lose if the NOT awesome direction continues.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures