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Original version with English subtitles! ;-)

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Civil Rights and the 1950s: Crash Course US History #39

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The 1960s in America: Crash Course US History #40

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Blanche Sponsler is Margerey Hannah's assistant who takes over for Margery when Margery is promoted. She suffers a mental breakdown at work, and is taken to an asylum, where she passes away. When she dies, Dorothy Vaughan takes over the role of West Area computing's acting section head.

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Blanche Sponsler is Margerey Hannah's assistant who takes over for Margery when Margery is promoted. She suffers a mental breakdown at work, and is taken to an asylum, where she passes away. When she dies, Dorothy Vaughan takes over the role of West Area computing's acting section head.

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The '50s and '60s: Decades of Prosperity and Protest (DBQ) - AP U.S. History Sample Essays - Study Notes

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100% Free AP Test Prep website that offers study material to high school students seeking to prepare for AP exams. Enterprising students use this website to learn AP class material, study for class quizzes and tests, and to brush up on course material before the big exam day.

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Women's Rights Issues in the 50's and 60's It was a very hard for women directly after the end of WWII. This was because a lot of women had jobs while the men where at war, but when they came back, they wanted their jobs back. It was also hard because businesses such as child care weren't needed anymore, so, in the fifties, women were mostly housewives and they're position in society had gone back to what it was before war. the 1950's Betty Friedan Betty Friedan is known as a huge part of the women's rights issue in the 1960's. Betty wrote the book The Feminine Mystique in 1963, which reignited the women's right movement. She said that many women were secretly unhappy with their limited roles in society. Friedan's book inspired many women to seek careers out in the workforce. Friedan was also on of the founders of the National Organization for Women, also known as NOW. Now had many causes such as the ratification of an ERA (Equal Rights Ammendment). Unfortunately, the ERA was never ratified. The NOW did have successes, though. The first was President Kennedy signing the Equal Pay Act. The next was sex descrimination being included in the Civil Rights Act. The NOW continued to maked advances such as the election of African American woman Shirly Chisholm into Congress and the election of Ella Grasso as the first woman governor without succeeding her husband. NOW the 1960's 1941 A massive government and industry media campaign persuades women to take jobs during the war.

1945 Women industrial workers begin to lose their jobs in large numbers to returning service men.

1957 The number of women and men voting is approximately equal for the first time.

1960 Women now earn only 60 cents for every dollar earned by men, a decline since 1955. Women of color earn only 42 cents.

1963 The Equal Pay Act, proposed twenty years earlier, establishes equal pay for men and women performing the same job duties.

1963 Betty Friedan's best-seller, The Feminine Mystique, detailed the "problem that has no name."

1964 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars employment discrimination by private employers, employment agencies, and unions based on race, sex, and other grounds.

1966 NOW is founded

1968 New York Radical Women garner media attention to the women's movement when they protest the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City.

1968 The first national women's liberation conference is held in Chicago.

1968 Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) is first Black woman elected to the US Congress Timeline of Women's Right's Events

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Women's Rights Issues in the 50's and 60's

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Women's Rights Issues in the 50's and 60's It was a very hard for women directly after the end of WWII. This was because a lot of women had jobs while the men where at war, but when they came back, they wanted their jobs back.

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It was a decade of extremes, of transformational change and bizarre contrasts: flower children and assassins, idealism and alienation, rebellion and backlash. For many in the massive post-World War II baby boom generation, it was both the best of times and the worst of times.

There will be many 50-year anniversaries to mark significant events of the 1960s, and a big reason is that what happened in that remarkable era still resonates today. This is Part 3 of a four-part series. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

In the 1960s, deep cultural changes were altering the role of women in American society. More females than ever were entering the paid workforce, and this increased the dissatisfaction among women regarding huge gender disparities in pay and advancement and sexual harassment at the workplace. One of the most profound changes was happening in the bedroom. By the end of the Sixties, more than 80 percent of wives of childbearing age were using contraception after the federal government in 1960 approved a birth control pill. This freed many women from unwanted pregnancy and gave them many more choices, and freedom, in their personal lives.

Gradually, Americans came to accept some of the basic goals of the Sixties feminists: equal pay for equal work, an end to domestic violence, curtailment of severe limits on women in managerial jobs, an end to sexual harassment, and sharing of responsibility for housework and child rearing. .

"The Sixties were an edgy time of transition, change, and confusion, " observed journalist Kati Marton in Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History. "In 1963 Betty Friedan published her book The Feminine Mystique, in which she claimed that 'the problem that has no name burst like a boil through the image of the happy American housewife.' The same year, an American woman, the physicist Maria Goepper-Mayer, won a Nobel Prize for the first time. The civil rights and antiwar movements politicized and radicalized a growing number of women bombarded with contradictory expectations and images about work and family. While Lesley Gore's hit song 'You Don't Own Me' climbed the charts, Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best dominated television. One in 5 women with children under 6 and nearly one fourth of women whose children were over 16 held paid jobs in the Sixties. Their pay, however, was 60 percent of the male rate. Though equal pay legislation passed in 1963, that did not solve the problem of low pay in jobs that were classed as female."

In 1966, the National Organization for Women was formed. In 1968, feminists protested at the Miss America contest in Atlantic City, arguing that the pageant was sexist.

Over time, the feminist trends of the Sixties took hold and over the subsequent decades changed relationships between the genders. "Most young women, at least in the middle class, expected to have access to the same careers and to receive the same compensation as men," wrote historians Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin in America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. "It was no longer surprising to see women leaders in formerly 'men's' fields like television production (Oprah Winfrey), diplomacy (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright), or the Supreme Court (Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg). Even conservative Republicans recruited female candidates and urged them to be as aggressive on the stump as men."

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It was a decade of extremes, of transformational change and bizarre contrasts: flower children and assassins, idealism and alienation, rebellion and backlash. For many in the massive post-World War II baby boom generation, it was both the best of times and the worst of times.

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The new Oscar-nominated movie Hidden Figures is a true story about three African American women who worked as "human computers" at the NASA Research Center in Langley, Va. in the early '60s: programmer Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), math genius Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) and engineer Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae). At its core, the film is a powerful reminder of the destructive consequences of discrimination. But it also holds important career lessons about how to manage and excel at work, even under challenging circumstances.

Set in the Jim Crow South, the women are subjected to constant racial and gender discrimination. They are denied promotions, forced to use separate, distant bathrooms and are expected to never complain. But if not for the critical contributions of these three, NASA might never have successfully sent John Glenn into orbit.

Here are five key career lessons I gleaned from the film and ones I think could help women and men at work:

1. Be indispensable. At the start of Hidden Figures, the three women are assigned to a larger group of "human calculators" who toil away anonymously in a back room, far away from the more important male scientists. But thanks to their hard work, smarts, dogged determination and prowess, each of the women eventually finds her way to a promotion.

For example, after discovering NASA has installed a new "IBM machine" that can work far faster than humans, Vaughan decides to teach herself the FORTRAN programming language needed to operate it. This is a formidable challenge, but by being the first to master the new technology, Vaughan not only saves her job, she gets bumped up to supervisor of the new computing department.

The takeaway: Whether you want a raise, a promotion or a flexible work schedule, the single best thing you can do is find a way to make yourself indispensable. That means doing a great job and contributing to projects that are critical to your employer's success. In other words, make yourself so valuable, they can't afford to lose you.

2. Focus on what you can control, not what you can't. The working conditions at NASA for African American women at the time were discriminatory, degrading and demoralizing. In particularly disturbing moments in the film, Johnson is forced to use a colored-only bathroom a half-mile away from her desk and then gets reprimanded for "taking breaks."
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Rather than allow the negativity to defeat them, however, the women do what they can to lift themselves up: they work hard, bond together and find significant ways to contribute that others can't ignore.

The takeaway: Fortunately, few of us will ever face such extreme conditions at work. But no matter what frustrations you do face, you'll be happier when you focus on your work, your attitude and your professionalism. As Spencer explained to People and Entertainment Weekly editorial director Jess Cagle in an interview about the film, "No matter what is going on, you have power."

3. Cultivate a strong support group. One of the more uplifting themes in Hidden Figures is the power of sisterhood. The women depend upon each other for advice, laughter, support and a safe haven from the daily stresses of their lives and workplace.

The takeaway: As Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote in this essay, "Everyone needs this kind of connection. We need people who encourage us, believe in us, support us, and remind us that we are not alone. For women, this kind of support can be especially important - because, too often, the world tells women what we can't do."

4. Look for the greater meaning in your work. Despite all the injustices at their jobs, the women in the film clearly take tremendous pride from their association with NASA. One of my favorite scenes is when Glenn requests that Johnson be the one to double-check NASA's calculations before the final approval for his lift-off. (The look of surprise on Henson's face when Glenn asks for her input is priceless). Knowing that her work is vital to the outcome of such an important national mission clearly sustains Johnson, even though her colleagues are shamefully reticent to acknowledge her efforts.

The takeaway: Admittedly, it's unlikely that you'll find an employer with a mission quite as grand as NASA. But, meaning can be derived in any number of ways - by having a positive impact on customers; contributing to your community or by offering a much-needed product or service. When you connect with meaning at work, it inspires you to work harder. And that, in turn, leads to better outcomes for you and your employer.

5. Never leave a high-stakes career moment to chance. In one of the most riveting scenes of Hidden Figures, Jackson petitions the Virginia State Court for the right to enroll in engineering classes at the local segregated high school. She makes an impassioned plea to the judge for his help making her the first female engineer at NASA, reminding him that he was the first in his family to join the Armed Forces and to attend college.

"Your Honor," Jackson says, "Out of all the cases you're going to hear today, which one is going to matter one hundred years from now? Which one is going to make you the first?"

The judge is clearly swayed by Jackson's personal appeal and, to the amazement of everyone (including himself), agrees to her request - with the caveat that she only attend night classes.

The takeaway: There are high-stakes moments in every career - job interviews, performance reviews, making important presentations - when careful preparation is a must. So the next time you have a critical career moment like this, do your homework, refine your message and practice relentlessly before making your pitch.

Who knows? Done well, it just might lead to your own Oscar-worthy performance.

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The 5 Hidden Career Lessons In 'Hidden Figures'

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The new Oscar-nominated movie Hidden Figures is a true story about three African American women who worked as "human computers" at the NASA Research Center in Langley, Va. in the early '60s: programmer Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), math genius Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) and engineer Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae).

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postwar united states (1945 to early 1970s)

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making inferences and drawing conclusions

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representing ideas and information orally

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The Origins of the Cold War, 1945-1949 | EDSITEment

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Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Soviet leaders had been claiming that communism and capitalism could never peacefully coexist. Agreements regarding the postwar world were reached at Yalta and Potsdam, but the Soviets wasted no time in violating them.

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The critically acclaimed film about three black, female aerospace pioneers shows how hidden prejudice hurts all. And that should inspire us to break down barriers in our own lives.

Share story

Helping America live up to its promise for everyone usually involves difficult conversations and hard work, but it can be uplifting, too, with moments of joy.

I've been thinking about that since I saw the movie "Hidden Figures." It was entertaining, but also educational and done in a way that allowed just about everyone to leave the theater feeling good.

It's the true story of three mathematicians who triumph over barriers placed in their paths because they are women and because they are black, and who make significant contributions to the American space program in the 1960s.

The three are infinitely likable, but what caught my attention was that the movie's lessons about sexism and racism went deeper than pinning the problems on bad people. The villain was and is a system that all kinds of people go along with, that normalizes bias to the point that it becomes invisible to those who aren't constantly and directly harmed by it.

Ultimately, of course, we are all diminished when equality is denied to any group of people for the benefit of another. Or, as the story shows, we are made better as a nation when more people are free to develop and use their talents.

The three women were part of a group of mathematicians hired in a moment of desperation. The country was engaged in World War II, which meant a shortage of male workers at home and an increased need for people who could build the machines needed for war.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted aircraft production increased from 3,000 planes a year to 50,000 a year, and that required a lot of hiring, both of people to design the planes and of workers to build them. Industries and government agencies struggled to find enough workers and eventually turned to women to fill some of those positions, white women at first, but eventually black women, as well.

But it took more to open those doors than the obvious need for workers. The great labor leader A. Philip Randolph and other black leaders threatened a march on Washington, D.C., if black workers continued to be shut out of wartime jobs.

Roosevelt issued executive order 8802 in 1941, which ordered the desegregation of the defense industry. Here in Seattle, Boeing was slow to follow that order, but hired its first two black women in 1942. Times aerospace reporter Dominic Gates recently wrote about Boeing's history with racism.

The people in charge initially couldn't imagine women riveting or welding or working as engineers. It's easy to say that's just the way it was back then, but there were plenty of people who knew that was not the natural order of things. Most people just didn't listen. That should be a lesson for us today - to pay attention to people who challenge our ideas of just what normal is.

Women today have access to a broader range of jobs but are still paid less for doing the same work. Why is that normal? And black Americans are unemployed at twice the rate of white Americans. Why is that normal?

Maybe too few people question their assumptions.

The black women "computers," as they were called, got their start during World War II at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia. They were kept on afterward to work on the space program, which was fueled by fear of the Soviet Union's achievements in space. Desperation opened the doors and desperation kept them open.

In the movie, the black women work in a separate building because, well, that was normal. When one of them is relocated to the main building because the space program couldn't do without her calculations, she still had to run across the campus to use the colored women's restroom.

That was ridiculous. In the movie, when the head of the project realized that's why valuable time was being lost, he tore down the "colored" sign.

We don't have signs anymore, but we still have barriers. I hope people who leave the theater with a warm glow will also leave inspired to look for those barriers and tear them down, wherever they are.

That will feel even better than a movie.

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'Hidden Figures' might open your eyes to hidden biases

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The critically acclaimed film about three black, female aerospace pioneers shows how hidden prejudice hurts all. And that should inspire us to break down barriers in our own lives. Share story Helping America live up to its promise for everyone usually involves difficult conversations and hard work, but it can be uplifting, too, with moments of joy.

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For better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie. Timelines had to be conflated and [there were] composite characters. -Author Margot Lee Shetterly, December 2016, Space.com

Not exactly. In researching the Hidden Figures true story, we learned that Kevin Costner's character, Al Harrison, is based on three different directors at NASA Langley during Katherine Johnson's time at the research facility. The movie's director, Theodore Melfi, was unable to secure the rights to the guy he wanted, so he decided to make Costner's Al Harrison a composite character. -Today Show

Kevin Costner's character, Al Harrison, is a composite of three different directors at the NASA Langley Research Center.

What are some of Katherine Johnson's accomplishments at NASA?

Over the course of her three decades at NASA, Katherine Johnson's biography includes an impressive list of accomplishments. She calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard's groundbreaking 1961 spaceflight (America's first human in space), she verified the calculations for John Glenn's first American orbit of Earth, she computed the trajectory of Apollo 11's flight to the moon, and she worked on the plan that saved Apollo 13's crew and brought them safely back to Earth. For her accomplishments, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 24, 2015. -NASA Katherine Johnson Documentary

Did Katherine's father really move the family 120 miles each school year so that she and her siblings could continue their education?

Yes. Born in 1918, Katherine G. Johnson's impressive intellect was evident from the time she was a child. She was fascinated with numbers and became a high school freshman by age 10. In her hometown of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, school for African-Americans normally stopped at the eighth grade for those who could afford to attend. Katherine's father, Joshua, was determined to see his children reach their potential, so he drove the family 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia, where blacks could pursue an education past the eighth grade, through high school, and into college. He rented a house for the family to stay during the school year and journeyed back and forth to White Sulphur Springs for his job at a hotel. He did this for eight years, so that each of his four children could go to high school and college. Katherine proved to be so smart that she skipped several grades, graduating high school at age 14 and from West Virginia State College at 18. -NASA

During the school year, Katherine's parents, Joshua and Joylette Coleman (left), moved the family 120 miles so that their four children could receive a high school and college education. Actors Jaiden Kaine and Karan Kendrick portray the couple in the Hidden Figures movie (right).

Did black women have to abide by segregation laws when they first started working at Langley in the 1940s?

Yes. "At the time the black women came to work at Langley [in 1943], this was a time of segregation," says Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly. "Even though they were just starting these brand new, very interesting jobs as professional mathematicians, they nonetheless had to abide by the state law, which was that there were segregated work rooms for them, there were segregated bathrooms, and there were segregated cafeterias. On their table in the cafeteria was a sign that said 'colored computers,' which sort of sounds like an iMac or something, right, today? But this referred to the black women who were doing this mathematical work." They were essentially human computers. -Al Jazeera

Did Katherine Johnson feel the segregation of the outside world while working at NASA?

No. "I didn't feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research," says the real Katherine G. Johnson. "You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job...and play bridge at lunch. I didn't feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn't feel it." Even though much of the racism coming from Katherine's coworkers in the movie seems to be largely made up (in real life she claimed to be treated as a peer), the movie's depiction of state laws regarding the use of separate bathrooms, buses, etc. was very real. African-American computers had also been put in the segregated west section of the Langley campus and were dubbed the "West Computers." -WHROTV Interview

In Margot Lee Shetterly's book, Hidden Figures, she writes about a cardboard sign on one of the tables in the back of NASA Langley's cafeteria during the early 1940s that read, "COLORED COMPUTERS." This particularly struck a nerve with the women because it seemed especially ridiculous and demeaning in a place where research and intellectual ability was focused on much more than skin color. It was Miriam Mann, a member of the West Computers, who finally decided to remove the sign, and when an unknown hand would make a new sign a few days later, Miriam would shove that sign into her purse too. Eventually, the signs stopped reappearing at some point during the war.

Did they really think Katherine G. Johnson was the janitor there to empty the garbage can?

No. This does not appear in Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures book, on which the movie is based, and seems to be an element of fiction created by the filmmakers. It should be noted that the movie was actually based on just a 55-page proposal for the book, which might in part explain some of the movie's deviations. The book was released on September 9, 2016, long after production on the movie had wrapped. However, the filmmakers did have access to the author and her notes. -Space.com

Was Katherine Johnson hired directly into NASA's space program?

No. The Hidden Figures true story confirms that she was hired in 1953 at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia to work as part of a female team nicknamed "Computers Who Wear Skirts." She then began to assist the all-male flight research team, who eventually welcomed her on board. Like in the movie, she worked with airplanes in the Guidance and Navigation Department. In those days, NASA still went by the initials NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which in 1958 became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) thanks to the Space Act of 1958. -WHROTV

Is Jim Parsons' character, NASA engineer Paul Stafford, based on a real person?

No. In fact-checking the Hidden Figures movie, we learned that white collar statistician Paul Stafford, portrayed by Jim Parsons, is a fictional character. He was created to represent certain racist and sexist attitudes that existed during the 1950s. In the film, he thwarts every effort Katherine (Taraji P. Henson) makes to get ahead, including reducing her job qualifications to secretarial duty, omitting her byline on official reports, and telling her it's not appropriate for women to attend space program briefings. By the end of the movie, Stafford's fictional storyline includes the character having a change of heart, which is emphasized when he brings Katherine a cup of coffee.

Like Kevin Costner's character, Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons) and Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) are also fictional.

Is Kirsten Dunst's character, Vivian Mitchell, based on a real person?

No. Hard-nosed supervisor Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) is a fictional character created to represent some of the unconscious bias and prejudice of the era. She is at best a composite of some of the supervisors who worked at NASA Langley.

Were the women really known as "computers"?

Yes. Before the days of electronic computers that we're familiar with today, the women hired at NASA to calculate trajectories, the results of wind tunnel tests, etc. had the job title of "computer." In simple terms, these were mathematicians who performed computations. Even when electronic computers were first used at NASA, human computers like Katherine Johnson still often performed the calculations by hand to verify the results of their electronic counterparts. -NASA

When did women begin working as NASA "computers"?

NACA (the precursor to NASA) hired five women in 1935 to be part of their first computer pool at the Langley Research Center. NACA began recruiting African-American women shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which thrust the U.S. into the war and increased the demand for workers in the defense industry. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which prohibited "discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin." -PopularMechanics.com

Was Dorothy Vaughan NACA's first black supervisor?

Yes. As we explored the Hidden Figures true story, we discovered that Dorothy Vaughan became NACA's first black supervisor in 1948, five years before Katherine Johnson started working there. Vaughan was also an advocate and voice for the women in the "West Computers" pool. The movie shows her leading the women down the hall to their next assignment, an obvious nod to the team of astronauts walking down the hall in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff. -PopularMechanics.com

Like in the movie, the real Dorothy Vaughan (left) was a leader for the West Computers at Langley. Octavia Spencer (right) portrays Vaughan in the movie.

Was Katherine really told that women aren't usually included in the space program briefings?

Yes. "I asked permission to go," says Katherine, "and they said, 'Well, the girls don't usually go,' and I said, 'Well, is there a law?' They said, 'No.' Then my boss said, 'Let her go.' And I began attending the briefings." In the Hidden Figures movie ( watch the trailer), Jim Parsons' character, Paul Stafford, tells Katherine (Taraji P. Henson) that women don't go to the briefings. "There's no protocol for women attending," Stafford states. After she continues to question this unspoken rule, their boss, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), decides to let her attend the briefing.

Did Katherine have to run across the NASA Langley campus to use the bathroom?

Not exactly. In Margot Lee Shetterly's book, this is something that is experienced more by Mary Jackson (portrayed by Janelle Monáe) than Katherine Johnson. Mary went to work on a project on NASA Langley's East Side alongside several white computers. She was not familiar with those buildings and when she asked a group of white women where the bathroom was, they giggled at her and offered no help. The closest bathroom was for whites. Humiliated and angry, Mary set off on a time-consuming search for a colored bathroom. Unlike in the movie, there were colored bathrooms on the East Side but not in every building. The sprint across the campus in the movie might be somewhat of an exaggeration, but finding a bathroom was indeed a point of frustration.

As for Katherine Johnson herself, Shetterly writes that when Katherine started working there, she didn't even realize that the bathrooms at Langley were segregated. This is because the bathrooms for white employees were unmarked and there weren't many colored bathrooms to be seen. It took a couple years before she was confronted with her mistake, but she simply ignored the comment and continued to use the white restrooms. No one brought it up again and she refused to enter the colored bathrooms.

Was Mary Jackson really NASA's first African-American female engineer?

Yes. Mary Jackson, portrayed by Janelle Monáe in the movie, was hired to work at Langley in 1951. Like in the movie, she accepted an assignment assisting senior aeronautical research engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki (renamed Karl Zielinski in the movie), who encouraged her to pursue a degree in engineering, which required her to take after-work graduate courses. She petitioned the city of Hampton to be able to attend graduate classes alongside her white peers. She won, got her degree, and was promoted to engineer in 1958. -PopularMechanics.com

How did Katherine Johnson's first husband die?

Katherine Johnson's first husband, James Francis Goble, died in December 1956 from an inoperable tumor located at the base of his skull. His health had been slowly declining for a year and he had spent much of that time in the hospital. He had to quit his job as a painter at the Newport News shipyard (he had previously been a chemistry teacher but gave up the job in 1953 when the family moved so that Katherine could take the position at NASA). Before his death, Katherine had promised her husband that she would keep their three adolescent daughters on a path to college. She now had to play the role of both mother and sole breadwinner. Katherine established new rules around the house and assigned chores to the children, including having their mother's clothes ironed and ready in the morning and having dinner ready when she got home. -Hidden Figures book

Did the women mathematicians at NASA get to meet astronauts like John Glenn?

Yes. "We did get to meet the astronauts," says the real Katherine Johnson. "They weren't as excited as we were, and we just looked at them in awe." -WHROTV

Did Katherine Johnson really compute John Glenn's trajectory?

Yes. "When John Glenn was to be the first astronaut to go up into the atmosphere and come back, and they wanted him to come back in a special place, and that was what I did, I computed his trajectory," says Katherine Johnson. "From then on, any time they were going to compute trajectories, they were given mostly, all of them to my branch, and I did most of the work on those by hand." -WHROTV Katherine Johnson Interview

Did John Glenn really ask that Katherine double-check the electronic computer's calculations for his first Earth orbit?

Yes. Fact-checking the Hidden Figures movie confirmed that John Glenn personally requested that Katherine recheck the electronic computer's calculations for his February 1962 flight aboard the Mercury-Atlas 6 capsule Friendship 7-the NASA mission that concluded with him becoming the first American to orbit the Earth. The scene in the movie unfolded in almost exactly the same way it does in real life, with Glenn's request for Katherine taken nearly verbatim from the transcripts. He even refers to her as "the girl." "Get the girl to check the numbers... If she says the numbers are good... I'm ready to go." -NASA

Astronaut John Glenn (left), pilot of the Mercury-Atlas 6 spaceflight, call sign "Friendship 7," is pictured on February 20, 1962. Actor Glen Powell (right) portrays John Glenn in the movie.

When did Katherine Johnson retire from NASA?

In researching Katherine Johnson's biography, we learned that she was hired in 1953 and retired from NASA in 1986, for a career that spanned approximately 33 years. Prior to NASA, she had worked as a school teacher and a stay-at-home mom. -NASA

What is probably the biggest difference between the Hidden Figures movie and the true story?

"You might get the indication in the movie that these were the only people doing those jobs, when in reality we know they worked in teams, and those teams had other teams," author Margot Shetterly explained. "There were sections, branches, divisions, and they all went up to a director. There were so many people required to make this happen. ... But I understand you can't make a movie with 300 characters. It is simply not possible." -Space.com

What did the real Katherine Johnson think of the movie?

"Katherine Johnson saw the movie and she really liked it," said author Margot Shetterly ( Space.com). Katherine told the Daily Press, "It sounded good...It sounded very, very accurate."

Katherine Johnson Interview & Hidden Figures Videos

Broaden your knowledge of the Hidden Figures true story by viewing the Katherine G. Johnson interview and documentary below. Then watch an interview with Tracy Drain, a current NASA scientist who discusses her journey to NASA and the real-life women who inspired the movie.

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Hidden Figures Movie vs the True Story of Katherine Johnson, NASA

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For better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie. Timelines had to be conflated and [there were] composite characters. -Author Margot Lee Shetterly, December 2016, Space.com Not exactly.

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Real People Behind Hidden Figures, Stars Join NASA to Mark Anniversary

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NASA will kick off a yearlong centennial celebration for its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, with events Thursday, Dec. 1 highlighting the critical work done by the African American women of Langley's West Computing Unit, a story told in the book and upcoming movie Hidden Figures.

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Also check the articles on the right

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The basic virtue of "Hidden Figures" (which opens on December 25th), and it's a formidable one, is to proclaim with a clarion vibrancy that, were it not for the devoted, unique, and indispensable efforts of three black women scientists, the United States might not have successfully sent people into space or to the moon and back. The movie is set mainly in 1961 and 1962, in Virginia, where a key NASA research center was (and is) based, and the movie is aptly and thoroughly derisive toward the discriminatory laws and practices that prevailed at the time.

The insults and indignities that black residents of Virginia, and black employees of NASA, unremittingly endured are integral to the drama. Those segregationist rules and norms-and the personal attitudes and actions that sustained them-are unfolded with a clear, forceful, analytical, and unstinting specificity. The efforts of black Virginians to cope with relentless ambient racism and, where possible, to point it out, resist it, overcome it, and even defeat it are the focus of the drama. "Hidden Figures" is a film of calm and bright rage at the way things were-an exemplary reproach to the very notion of political nostalgia. It depicts repugnant attitudes and practices of white supremacy that poisoned earlier generations' achievements and that are inseparable from those achievements.

"Hidden Figures" is a subtle and powerful work of counter-history, or, rather, of a finally and long-deferred accurate history, that fills in the general outlines of these women's roles in the space program. Its redress of the record begins in West Virginia in 1926, where the sixth-grade math prodigy Katherine Coleman is given a scholarship to a school that one of her teachers refers to as the only one in the region for black children that goes beyond the eighth grade. She quickly displays her genius there-but the school's narrow horizons suggests the sharply limited opportunities for black people over all.

The nature of those limits is indicated in the very next scene, which cuts ahead to a lonely road in Virginia in 1961. There, a car is stalled, its hood open. Katherine is there with her two other African-American friends and colleagues. She's sitting pensively in the passenger seat; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is beneath the engine, trying to fix it; and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) is standing impatiently beside the car. A police cruiser approaches. They tense up; Dorothy says, "No crime in a broken-down car," and Mary responds, "No crime being Negro, neither." Their fearful interaction with the officer-a white man, of course, with a billy club in hand and a condescending bearing-is resolved with a comedic moment brought about by the women's deferential irony. What emerges, however, is nothing less than an instance in a reign of terror.

Dorothy is the manager and de-facto supervisor of a group of "computers"-about thirty black women, all skilled mathematicians-that includes Katherine and Mary. Dorothy is awaiting a formal promotion to supervisor, but a talk with a senior administrator makes clear that it's not to be; the clear but unspoken reason is her race. (Tellingly, Dorothy addresses that official, played by Kirsten Dunst, as "Mrs. Mitchell," who, in turn, calls her by her first name.) Mary, endowed with engineering skill, is summoned to a team led by an engineer named Zielinski (Olek Krupa), a Polish-Jewish émigré who escaped the Holocaust and who encourages her to seek formal certification as an engineer. To do so, Mary will have to take additional classes-but the only school that offers them is a segregated one, whites-only, from which she's barred.

When NASA astronauts ceremoniously arrive at the research center, the black women "computers" are forced to stand together as a separate group, conspicuously divided from the other scientists. (Only John Glenn, played by Glen Powell, greets them, and does so warmly, shaking their hands and lingering to chat with them about their work.)

As for Katherine-now Katherine Goble, the widowed mother of three young girls-she's plucked from the pool of mathematicians to join the main research group, headed by Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). There, she's the only black person and the only woman (other than the secretary, played by Kimberly Quinn). She once again rapidly displays her mathematical genius, but not before being taken for the department custodian; forced to drink from a coffeepot labelled "colored"; treated dismissively by the lead researcher, Paul Stafford (Jim Parsons); and compelled to walk a half-mile to her former office in order to use the "colored ladies' room." (Moreover, the contrast between that depleted and dilapidated facility and the well-appointed and welcoming white-women's bathroom proves the meaning of "separate but unequal.")

Each of the three women has a particular conflict to confront, a particular focus in the struggle for equality. Mary's struggle takes place in a public forum: she petitions a Virginia state court for permission to take the needed night classes in a segregated school. She's not represented by a lawyer, and speaks on her own behalf; but, rather than making her case in open court, she makes a personal plea to the judge that's as much about him and his outlook as it is about her, and her work and its usefulness. What her plea isn't about is law, rights, or justice.

The omission is no accident; it's set up by dramatic contrast with the angry insistence of Mary's husband, Levi (Aldis Hodge), a civil-rights activist, that she not bother pursuing a job as an engineer: "You can't apply for freedom. . . . It's got to be demanded, taken." Mary says that there's "more than one way" to get opportunities, but the deck of this debate is stacked by the terms in which Levi couches it, saying that there's no such thing as a woman engineer-at least, not a black one-and blaming her for not being home often enough to take proper care of their children.

Dorothy's pursuit of a formal promotion to supervisor also takes place against the backdrop of the civil-rights movement. She learns that her entire department of human "computers" will soon be replaced by an electronic computer-an enormous I.B.M. mainframe that's being installed. A gifted technician, Dorothy seeks out a book from the local library (a segregated library from which she's thrown out), in which she'll learn the programming language Fortran; she soon becomes NASA's resident expert. On that trip to the library, in the company of her two sons on the cusp of adolescence, they witness a protest by civil-rights activists chanting "segregation must go" and see police officers, with police dogs, approaching the protesters. Dorothy and her sons pause and look, until she tells them to "pay attention that we're not part of that trouble." But, sitting in the back of the bus with them, she emphasizes that "separate and equal aren't the same thing," and adds, "If you act right, you are right."

Katherine, too, fights for her dignity and for opportunities at work. Her calculations very soon prove indispensable to the effort to put the first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, into outer space. (The scene in which she displays her calculations to the entire office of scientists features a small but brilliant stroke of film editing, which suggests that she envisioned the effect of that bold step before she took it.) She's fighting prejudice against blacks, against women (none has ever been admitted to a Pentagon briefing, where she can get the information she needs for her analyses), and against bureaucracy itself. Paul, who has been the department's resident genius, and to whom she reports, is resentful of his subordinate-a black woman, for good measure-outshining him in mathematical talent and analytical insight.

Eventually, upbraided by the head of the department, Al, in the presence of the entire staff, Katherine explodes with rage, setting forth the full litany of indignities to which she's subjected because of her skin color, before storming out. But this sublimely righteous outburst is posed on a solid meritocratic basis. Katherine isn't the only black woman to have worked in the main research department under Al; there has been a veritable parade of black women "computers" stationed in that department, and each has been found wanting and has been sent back to the pool. As a result, none has effected any change in the status of black employees or of women at NASA. Katherine's outburst is effective because Katherine, unlike her predecessors, is indispensable. Taking her claims to heart, Al plays a heroic role, championing Katherine's work and treating her with due respect-but his heroism is a conditional and practical one, spurred by his single-minded devotion to the space program.

In "Hidden Figures," the civil-rights movement isn't just a barely sketched backdrop; it's in virtual competition with the efforts in personal advancement and achievement heroically made by the three women at the center of the film. In the movie, the three women never speak directly of civil rights. In the warmhearted romance at the center of the movie-Katherine's relationship with Col. Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali)-the subject never comes up. (Katherine Johnson is now ninety-eight; a title card at the end of the film declares that she and Johnson recently celebrated their fifty-sixth wedding anniversary.) The movie presents three women whose life experiences have been extraordinary; their work, their personal lives, and their struggle for justice are uncompromisingly heroic. What the movie is missing, above all, is their voices.

These women are not in any way submissive or passive. On the contrary, each one speaks up and takes action at great personal risk. (For instance, Dorothy steals a book that the library won't let her borrow and then speaks sharply to the guard who hustles her and her sons out.) The movie's emphasis on individual action and achievement in the face of vast obstacles is both beautiful and salutary, but its near-effacement of collective organization and political activity at a time when they were at their historical apogee-for that matter, its elision of politics as such-narrows the drama and, all the more grievously, the characters at its center.

What the women at the center of "Hidden Figures" lived through in their youth, in the deep age of Jim Crow, and, later, at a time of protest and of legal change, remains unspoken; their wisdom and insight remain unexpressed. For all the emotional power and historical redress of the movie-above all, in the simple recognition of the centrality of its three protagonists to the modern world-it pushes to the fore a moderation, based solely on personal accomplishment, in pursuit of justice. This is different from the civil-rights goal of a universal equality based on humanity alone, extended to the ordinary as well as to the exceptional. This is, by no means, a complaint about the real-life people on whom the movie is based; it's purely a matter of aesthetics, a result of decisions by the director and screenwriter, Theodore Melfi, and his co-writer, Allison Schroeder, about how they imagined and developed the characters. (I found myself thinking, by contrast, of recently published stories by the late filmmaker Kathleen Collins, with their incisive observations regarding participants and observers of civil-rights activism.)

Melfi and Schroeder are white; perhaps they conceived the film to be as nonthreatening to white viewers as possible, or perhaps they anticipated that it would be released at a time of promised progress. Instead, it's being released in a time of resurgent, unabashed racism. The time for protest has returned; for all the inspired celebration of hitherto unrecognized black heroes that "Hidden Figures" offers, and all the retrospective outrage that "Hidden Figures" sparks, I can only imagine the movie as it might have been made, much more amply, imaginatively, and resonantly, linking history and the present tense, by Ava DuVernay or Spike Lee, Julie Dash or Charles Burnett.

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"Hidden Figures" Is a Subtle and Powerful Work of Counter-History

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The basic virtue of "Hidden Figures" (which opens on December 25th), and it's a formidable one, is to proclaim with a clarion vibrancy that, were it not for the devoted, unique, and indispensable efforts of three black women scientists, the United States might not have successfully sent people into space or to the moon and back.

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HIDDEN FIGURES

SUBJECTS - U.S. 1940 - 1991, Diversity, and Virginia; Mathematics; Science-Technology;

SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING - Courage; Human Rights;

MORAL-ETHICAL EMPHASIS - Respect.

AGE : 13+; MPAA Rating PG for thematic elements and some language;

Drama; 2016, 127 minutes; Color. Available from Amazon.com .

From the 1930s to the advent of the digital computer in the early 1960s, several hundred female "human computers" were hired by the federal government. Their task was to calculate numbers and to manually solve the equations necessary for new generations of airplanes, the first American rockets, and the first U.S. manned space flights. They worked with pen, paper, and analog adding machines. The need for these workers was so great that even in those days of rampant racial discrimination, black women were hired as well as whites. The human computers reported to the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, operated by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) and its successor, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Hidden Figures is the story of three black women who made important contributions to the U.S. Space program before the "human computers" were replaced by digital computers. They are:

Dorothy Vaughan, who supervises the "colored computers." She sees that digital computers are the wave of the future and learns the prototype programming language FORTRAN, orients herself to a room-sized IBM computer, and encourages the women in her section to do the same.

Katherine Goble Johnson, a gifted mathematician, performs essential calculations and makes important theoretical contributions for determining the trajectories and orbits of America's first astronauts. Backing up a digital computer's early efforts, she confirms final calculations for John Glenn's history-making orbit of the Earth.

Mary Jackson takes on Virginia's stridently segregationist education system to attain the graduate qualifications that allow her to become NACA/NASA's first female African-American engineer.

The women face entrenched racist and sexist attitudes. However, their persistence and outstanding work boost the U.S. presence in space and blaze a path forward for achievement based on merit. The movie closely follows Margot Shetterly's meticulously researched historical work of the same name. See Bibliography.

Selected Awards:
2017 Academy Awards Nominations: Best Picture; Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Octavia Spencer); Best Adapted Screenplay; 2017 Golden Globe Nominations: Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture (Octavia Spencer); Best Original Score - Motion Picture; 2017 Screen Actors Guild Awards: Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
Featured Actors:
Taraji P. Henson as Katherine G. Johnson; Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan; Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson; Kevin Costner as Al Harrison; Kirsten Dunst as Vivian Mitchell; Jim Parsons as Paul Stafford; Mahershala Ali as Colonel Jim Johnson; Aldis Hodge as Levi Jackson; Glen Powell as John Glenn; Kimberly Quinn as Ruth; Olek Krupa as Karl Zielinski; Kurt Krause as Sam Turner; Ken Strunk as Jim Webb.
Director:
Theodore Melfi

Students will be introduced to (1) a unique and fascinating episode in American history; (2) the struggles of black women to reach racial and gender parity in the workplace; (3) the accomplishments of black women in technical fields and their contributions to America's efforts in aeronautics and the space race; (4) the disruptive influence of WWII and the Cold War on patterns of employment and discrimination, disruptions which helped lay the groundwork for the rise of feminism and contributed to the Civil Rights Movement; and (5) some of the effects of Jim Crow.

None.

Watch the film with your children and tell them while the movie is fictional, the three ladies shown actually lived and worked at NASA, and that the movie give us some idea of their experiences. Also, be sure to put the film in perspective. It doesn't show the full extent of the daily humiliation endured by black citizens of the United States during the period of the film, the beatings, the lynchings, and more. Hidden Figures doesn't show the millions of people denied jobs due only to the color of their skin.

The US National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) was the forerunner of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NACA was established at the end of the First World War in 1917 on the campus of Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia. It was part of the effort to power America's fledgling aeronautical sector. In the mid-1930s, Langley began hiring female, or "girl," mathematicians to compute numbers using adding machines and to solve equations using pencil and paper. The women were called "computers."

By the 1930s it was clear to American leaders that the next war would have a different tactical lynchpin than WWI: much of the war would be fought in the air. It was essential to transform America's unimpressive aircraft arsenal into a powerful aerial armada. This opened the door a crack for women at Langley, as it did in many other fields. During WWII, when many of the men were needed to soldier in Europe and the Pacific, the need for manpower to fuel the American war materials machine became a need for woman power as well. Thus, the door for women in these fields opened a little further.

Melvin Butler, the man responsible for filling the burgeoning job positions at Langley, devised recruitment tools guaranteed to appeal to housewives looking for more fulfilling work: His want ads exhorted female citizens to "Reduce your household duties . . .," spelling out the need for "women who are not afraid to roll up their sleeves . . . ." Shetterly 5

While increasing numbers of women were being integrated into the workforce, another social change was underway. In 1941, as American industry geared up to produce the weapons to fight WWII, a group of civil rights activists led by A. Philip Randolph, head of the union for black men working as sleeping car attendants on America's railroads, formed the "March on Washington Movement." They demanded that President Roosevelt end racial discrimination in hiring for the defense industry and threatened a massive march on Washington, D.C., to protest racial segregation in employment and in the military. Randolph is credited with forcing FDR to issue Executive Order 8802 which prohibited racial discrimination in hiring for national defense industries and established the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). While Executive Order 8802 didn't end discrimination against African Americans in defense industries, it did lead to some job gains for black workers.

In 1943, employment applications began arriving at Langley from black women. For example, Dorothy Vaughan, one of the three main characters in the film, came to NASA when she saw a federal civil service bulletin intended to recruit white women. Even though there was still discrimination against "Negroes," the relentless Mr. Butler began hiring well-qualified black women to work as human computers. He got around the scandalous implications of racial equality by setting up a segregated work area for the smaller number of "colored" computers. It was called West Computing because it was located in a building at Langley's Western end. White females worked at East Computing. Shetterly 8.

Propelled by the Civil Rights movement, opportunities for blacks to work in the aeronautics and space industries opened up a little more during the 1950s and 1960s. Spurred by Russia's Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the earth, the U. S. recognized the need to provide technical and scientific training to students and to move them into positions that could benefit America's reach for the heavens. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by increasing the resources that went into scientific research and training. Additionally, U. S. leaders were engaged in selling the American way of life to non-aligned nations during the Cold War. They worried that Jim Crow segregation and the second-class citizen status of American "Negroes" would not play well in the court of international opinion. Shetterly 104.

Jim Crow Laws and Customs

In the American South after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the white (formerly slave-owning) power structure in the South reasserted itself and imposed a racist system through "Jim Crow" laws and customs. These were designed to denigrate and suppress African Americans. One of the pillars of Jim Crow was separate sanitary facilities. Restrooms and drinking fountains were designated "White Only" or "Colored." There were many fewer restrooms and drinking fountains for blacks than there were for whites. Every day in cities, towns, and villages across the South, African Americans faced personal emergencies when the only restroom available for what could quickly became urgent needs was forbidden. A black person in that situation had to find some alternative or run the substantial risk of arrest or a beating for using a "Whites Only" restroom. This disgraceful practice is treated semi-humorously in the film - cinematically, there was no other way to present it. However, the unavailability of restrooms was no laughing matter for African Americans who had to live under Jim Crow.

(The white husband of this writer was once detained by police for defacing a "White Only" sign on a laundromat in Tallahassee, Florida. It was Halloween night in 1963. Hard at work on his task, he heard a sound behind him, looked over his shoulder, and saw a police cruiser come to a stop. Fifteen at the time, he was released after a few hours on the condition that he clean up the sign. An African-American teenager would probably not have been treated in such a lenient fashion.)

Housing

Ms. Shetterly's book describes the proliferation of black middle-class neighborhoods around the Langley campus in the middle of the 20th Century. Despite economic and professional gains by African Americans since that time, segregation in housing hasn't changed much.
... As John Logan and Brian Stults of Brown University's US2010 Project have shown, in 1940, the average black lived in a neighborhood that was 40 percent white. In 1950 it fell to 35 percent - where it remains today. This average, of course, aggregates data from many neighborhoods where blacks have virtually no exposure to whites, and others where integration is advanced. Nonetheless, by this measure there has been no progress in reducing segregation [in housing] for the last 60 years. How integrated is your neighborhood? by Denise Oliver Velez, Daily Kos, Sunday Feb. 19, 2012.

The Impact of the Black Press and the "Double V" Campaign

African-American newspapers, journals, and magazines of the 1940s and 1950s were inspiring and influential in the segregated lives of America's black citizens. They contributed to initiatives to integrate society and achieve economic and social justice. In WWII these publications promoted the "Double V Campaign:" Victory overseas in the war and victory over discrimination at home. This campaign intentionally echoed the concept of the double consciousness of blacks in a racist society, a concept articulated by the African-American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, and analyzed in his signature book, The Souls of black Folk. Dubois wrote that blacks faced a nearly impossible task in constructing internally positive personal identities because they were forced to act in ways that were acceptable to an oppressive white society. To do this they had to see themselves through its eyes: devalued and negatively stereotyped. Shetterly 33. This psychological conundrum confronts every oppressed group.

Euler's Method

Euler's Method, employed by Katherine Johnson in her breakthrough calculations for John Glenn's Friendship Seven orbit, was devised in the 18th century. It provides an approximation for the solution of a differential equation. The idea behind Euler's Method is to approximate a curve using the concept of local linearity to join multiple small line segments of the curve. Mathscoop.com. The method was one of many mathematical innovations developed by Leonhard Euler of Switzerland, one of the great mathematicians of his time. Euler lived from 1707 to 1783, dying just seven years after the U.S. declared independence from Great Britain.

Unless the class has already studied American history of the 20th century, set the scene before for showing the film with direct instruction covering the following points:

This movie takes place during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, 1947 - 1991. In 1957 most Americans thought of the U.S. as the undisputed technological leader of the world. Then, on October 4, 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik, the first man-made object to orbit the earth. Sputnik was followed by additional Russian successes in space: the first animal in orbit (1957, the dog Laika); the first animals and plants returned alive from space (1961); the first human in orbit (1961) etc. From 1957 to 1961 the Russians led the space race as the early U.S. space program was plagued by failures. Americans looked up at the sky and wondered what the Russians had up there and, Americans of all races, classes, and backgrounds were united in their desire for the country to put a man into orbit and bring him home safely.

At the same time, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Civil Rights movement was gathering force. However, most of the Southern U.S., including Virginia, was still in the grip of laws and customs designed to denigrate and oppress African Americans. These were referred to as "Jim Crow." In addition, black people and women of all races suffered from discrimination in employment.

In the early 1960s, electronic computers were in their infancy. The people designing airplanes and rockets used analog adding machines. An ingenious analog device called a slide rule assisted engineers and scientists with multiplication, division, and finding exponents, roots, and logarithms.

After Watching the Movie

Tell the class that Hidden Figures does not claim to describe the full effects of racism or the broad scope of the Civil Rights movement. It shows an episode in the ongoing process of eliminating discrimination against blacks and women in employment in the U.S.

After watching the movie, students will be interested in reading the Helpful Background section. Click here for a version in Microsoft Word, suitable to be printed and distributed to the class. Teachers should feel free to modify or add to the handout as may be appropriate for their classes.

What is Real, What is Dramatic License, and a Few Interesting Anecdotes

The author of Hidden Figures, Margot Shetterly, estimates that she has identified almost 50 black women who were working at Langley - NACA/NASA as computers, mathematicians, engineers, and researchers. She surmises that about "70 more can be shaken loose." Approximately 400 white women were working in the same capacity.

Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson worked for Dorothy Vaughan in West Computing, but the three were not close friends.

The character of Al Harrison, Katherine's boss at the Space Task Group, is a composite. NASA says he is largely based on Robert C. Gilruth, who became the director of the Space Task Group in 1958. Shetterly nominates engineer John Stack as a model for Harrison.

John Glenn really did request that Katherine Johnson double check the computer calculations. Glenn said, ". . . [G]et the girl. . . . If she says the numbers are good, then I'm ready to go." NASA Biography of Catherine Johnson, accessed April 22, 2017 . Ms. Johnson did the computations in the days leading up to the launch, not when Glenn was about to climb into the spacecraft and blast off.

The characters who exhibit the most adherence to Jim Crow attitudes, the initially hostile police officer, the condescending white engineer in the Space Task Group, Paul Stafford, and Mrs. Mitchell, the white supervisor, all change their behavior. The policeman escorts the three protagonists to work. Mrs. Mitchell indicates her growing respect for Dorothy by addressing her as "Mrs. Vaughan" at the film's end. And Paul Stafford reverses his resistance to Katherine's presence and status, bringing her a cup of coffee. Coffee serves as a symbol for acceptance onto the NASA team.

Mrs. Mitchell's real-life counterpart was Margery Hannah, who behaved differently than the character in the film. She "went out of her way to treat the West Area women as equals, and had even invited some of them to work-related social affairs at her apartment." Shetterly 47.

It was actually Mary Jackson who lost her cool about the segregated bathrooms. Dorothy Vaughan had sent her on a special assignment to East Computing. Mary "blew her top" to wind tunnel engineer Kazimierz "Kaz" Czarnecki (Karl Zielinski in the movie) about the egregious situation. He listened, then invited her to come work for him. He became her mentor, and she eventually organized his retirement party. Shetterly 254. Katherine Johnson simply ignored the "White Women" (only) bathroom signs at Langley, but the filmmakers scripted the scenes of her racing across the campus and her (Mary Jackson's) explosion to demonstrate what other black women had to endure.

The seating at the cafeteria at Langley was segregated. A West Computer named Miriam Mann found the "Colored Computers" table sign to be especially loathsome. She would periodically remove it, and it would reappear on the table some days later. Eventually, it wasn't replaced. Shetterly 44. This could have been the inspiration for Katherine's humiliating coffee pot encounters.

Dorothy's visit to the segregated library with her children depicts another obstacle to equality in the Jim Crow South. Separate and unequal schools were not the only barriers to learning and advancement that confronted African Americans. The photo below tells it all.

1. Who or what is the antagonist in this story? What defeats the antagonist? Explain whether or not you believe that this shows a process that works in reality.

Suggested Response:

2. What or who are the "Hidden Figures" referred to in the title to this movie?

Shetterly cites two possibilities in her book Hidden Figures: One is the women, and especially the black women, whose contributions to America's space effort went largely unrecognized until the movie was released. Another possibility is that the "Hidden Figures" are the mathematical figures that had to be uncovered in calculating trajectories and orbits for the astronauts.

3. Does this movie paint an accurate picture of racism in the Southern United States under Jim Crow? [or] What are some of the things about racism in the Southern U.S. under Jim Crow that this movie doesn't show?

It doesn't show most of the terrible things that racists did to black people: the daily humiliation, the beatings, the lynchings, etc. It doesn't tell the story of the millions of people denied education and jobs because of the color of their skin.

4. What role does the scene with the policeman and the three protagonists play in the story? What does this tell you about the position of the black women in Virginia society in the late 1950s?

This scene foreshadows what happens in the film in terms of the attitude of whites at NASA toward the black women with whom they work. It also serves as a reminder of the ever-present threat of force against black Americans inherent in Jim Crow.

5. One view of human relations is that in our lives we choose to associate ourselves with different groups (called "tribes" in this formulation) and that we develop allegiances to these voluntary tribes that are as important as our allegiance to the groups into which we are born or to which traditions assign to us. For example, Katherine Johnson could be said to belong to the following "tribes:" mathematicians, the human computers, the NASA Space Task Group, mothers, members of her church, etc. Analyze the story told by this film in terms of this view of human relations.

Racism broke down because the voluntary "tribe" of the NASA workforce became more important than the assigned "tribe" of race. Note, that the concept of race is a societal construct.

Note: It's a great exercise to ask students to identify the tribes to which they belong, both traditional (including family) and voluntary.

6. Three characters in the film exhibit racist tendencies. Identify one of them, describe how their racism is shown, and what happens to their attitudes by the end of the film.

The characters who exhibit the most adherence to Jim Crow attitudes are the police officer shown at the beginning of the movie; Paul Stafford, the condescending white engineer in the Space Task Group, and Mrs. Mitchell, the Female Computers' white supervisor. By the end of the film, all of them change their attitudes: the policeman escorts the three protagonists to work; Mrs. Mitchell indicates her growing respect for Dorothy by addressing her as "Mrs. Vaughan," and Paul Stafford reverses his resistance to Katherine's presence and status, bringing her a cup of coffee.

7. Coffee serves as a symbol in this movie. What does it symbolize?

Professional respect and acceptance as a member of the NASA team.

8. What is the role of the romance between Katherine Johnson and the Army officer that she married in the story? [We have no idea if there is any truth in this episode.]

Suggested Response:

It shows that feminism is not just work related and that a man with the strength of character can appreciate and love a strong woman if he abandons stereotyped ways of viewing women.

HUMAN RIGHTS

See Discussion Questions numbered 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

COURAGE

1. Describe three acts of courage by the heroines in the film. Why are these actions particularly courageous?

There are several possibilities: Dorothy Vaughan: repeatedly asking to be promoted to supervisor and walking into the IBM room to work with the new machine; Katherine Johnson: entering the Space Task Group; and Mary Jackson: bringing her case to court and speaking up to the judge. These actions are particularly courageous because they involve challenging the color bar, something that had been enforced in the South for four centuries through intimidation and violence. (For an example, see the picture above of the police forcibly removing a black woman from a library.)

RESPECT

(Treat others with respect; follow the Golden Rule; Be tolerant of differences; Use good manners, not bad language; Be considerate of the feelings of others; Don't threaten, hit or hurt anyone; Deal peacefully with anger, insults, and disagreements)

1. What is the basic moral failing of racism?

Suggested Response:

There are many valid responses. Examples include racists do not treat others with respect; they do not follow the Golden Rule, and they are not tolerant of differences.

Each of the discussion questions can serve as quick write or essay prompts.

1. The following are research topics for essays by students. Length of essay and extent of research depend upon the capabilities of the class.
Describe the origin and history of Jim Crow.

Define "de facto" and "de jure" and describe how they relate to Jim Crow.

Compare and contrast racial discrimination in the North and in the South during the period 1950 - 1965. Use at least four examples.

Describe the changes in American attitudes towards race and racism (both North and South) from before Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1954) to Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1964).

Describe the history of Jim Crow laws or customs in your state/city.

2. Write an essay evaluating whether the U.S. should pay reparations to its African-American citizens in light of the following:

National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates has written that the practice of "redlining," or denying mortgage and financial services to blacks, has prevented the intergenerational transfer of wealth in families that is a mainstay of middle-class financial security in the U.S. The Case for Reparations - Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal.Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, June 2014 Issue.

3. Some people feel that ethnic or racially segregated neighborhoods afford groups of people a sense of belonging and an opportunity to "be themselves" and feel at home. Others believe that racially segregated neighborhoods are not only illegal but un-American. Write an essay answering the following question, "When do neighborhoods divided along racial or ethnic lines become ghettos?"

4. Research and present information on the STEM or STEAM program at your school. Describe any outreach efforts to enroll students of color or girls in these programs.

5. Research and present information on engineering, computer, mathematics, or robotics programs at three of your top choice colleges/universities.

6. Write a persuasive job notice intended to recruit female students and students of color to the fields of math, computing, and sciences.

7. Conduct interviews (in person or via video conference) with math/science/engineering professionals of color/female professors about their career paths and the obstacles they have had to overcome.

Multimedia:
Anchor Standard #7 for Reading (for both ELA classes and for History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Classes). (The three Anchor Standards read: "Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media, including visually and quantitatively as well as in words.") CCSS pp. 35 & 60. See also Anchor Standard # 2 for ELA Speaking and Listening, CCSS pg. 48.
Reading: Writing: Speaking and Listening:
Not all assignments reach all Anchor Standards. Teachers are encouraged to review the specific standards to make sure that over the term all standards are met.

Shetterly, Margot Lee, Hidden Figures, New York, William Morrow, 2016, Print;

This Learning Guide was written by Deborah Elliott and was published on May 9, 2017.

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SUBJECTS - U.S. 1940 - 1991, Diversity, and Virginia; Mathematics; Science-Technology; SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING - Courage; Human Rights; MORAL-ETHICAL EMPHASIS - Respect. AGE : 13+; MPAA Rating PG for thematic elements and some language; Drama; 2016, 127 minutes; Color. Available from Amazon.com .

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What Sets the Smart Heroines of ‘Hidden Figures’ Apart

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Movies about brilliant scientific or mathematical minds often focus on their subject’s ego—not so with a new film about three African American women who worked at NASA in the ’60s.

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At a pre-SAG Awards celebration for "Hidden Figures," actor Aldis Hodge told The Cut that the film seems to have already gotten more young girls interested in pursuing careers in STEM fields.

"We've already seen that effect happen nationally," he said, at a brunch on Sunday. "We're constantly doing panels for STEM and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art & Design, and Mathematics) all over." He also said that he's currently working on Image of STEM, an initiative that started in the White House during the Obama Administration that seeks to expand STEM education to students of all backgrounds.

Hodge also worked with the Girls Build LA program to screen "Hidden Figures for 2,000 young women in the Los Angeles area. "I love the fact that a lot of these girls are now getting support for their interest. It's fantastic," he said. "I hope that it just keeps going."

Women ― particularly women of color ― are seriously underrepresented in STEM careers. But Hodge hopes that "Hidden Figures," which tells the story of three black women who worked for NASA in the 1960s, will help pave the way for a more diverse workplace.

BEFORE YOU GO

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'Hidden Figures' Is Already Inspiring More Girls To Go Into STEM

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At a pre-SAG Awards celebration for "Hidden Figures," actor Aldis Hodge told The Cut that the film seems to have already gotten more young girls interested in pursuing careers in STEM fields. "We've already seen that effect happen nationally," he said, at a brunch on Sunday.

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Hidden Figures by: Kaisa Tsuruta and Kenzie Holden Stage 6 - Universal Principle (They know that their talents equal the white people's and they go out and fight for justice) Solution The women's talents are finally recognized. The mission to space was successfully completed. References: Melfi, T.

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Sure, it's a Hollywood film and yes it's loaded with star power - three emotive and imitable female leads, Taraji Henson, Janelle Monáe and Octavia Spencer along with the iconic Kevin Costner and straight funny man Jim Parsons -- but the real stars of the film are math, determination and space.

Hidden Figures is based on the real life experiences of three mathameticans at NASA who worked on Project Mercury, the first human suborbital space flights from 1961 to 1963; and the Apollo 11 flight to the moon. These were the missions that helped America win the space race against Russia.

It wasn't extraordinary to have a bevy of mathameticans at NASA in the 1960s, but what makes these three particular mathematicians unique is they were female and African-American.

were collectively mathematicians, programmers and engineers. Dorothy Vaughan played by Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson Octavia Spencer, specialized in flight paths and Fortran programming. She went on to become one of the leading Fortran programmers of her time. Mary Jackson, played by Janelle Monáe, was one of the first African-American female aerospace engineers. Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji Henson, was a mathematician and phycisist. Known for her celestial navigation talents, she worked on the trajectory analysis for John Glen's Project Mercury orbital spaceflight. In 2015, she was named a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient.

The two main male characters in the film, Al Harrison (played by Kevin Costner), who was the Director of the Space Task Group and head engineer, Paul Stafford (played by Jim Parsons) added balance and humor to the story.

Hidden Figures tells the story of not only the pressure the Space Task Group was under to catch up with Russians, but also the societal stereotypes and racial biases that confined these women at the time. Confinement in terms of where they could use the bathroom, eat their lunch to the roles expected of them as women. Despite Jim Crow laws, civil rights, motherhood and marriage, the film depicts the determination these women had to do their part and put man into space.

Here are the three things you can learn from the film Hidden Figures.

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Three Things You Can Learn From The Film 'Hidden Figures'

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Share to email Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Share to google Sure, it's a Hollywood film and yes it's loaded with star power - three emotive and imitable female leads, Taraji Henson, Janelle Monáe and Octavia Spencer along with the iconic Kevin Costner and straight funny man Jim Parsons -- but the real stars of the film are math, determination and space.

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Nelson Mandela's death was announced at the London premiere of biopic Long Walk to Freedom. That film under-performed critically, at the box office and when it came to awards. The producers of Hidden Figures will be hoping it's not second time unlucky. Their movie about how three black female Nasa scientists helped send John Glenn into space premiered a couple of days after the death of the astronaut, aged 95.

But while the reignition of interest in Mandela did not lead to a dividend of tickets, that film was hobbled from the off - by lukewarm reviews, a formidable running time and Idris Elba's striking lack of physical resemblance to the great man. Hidden Figures benefits from a tale few know, with a trio of leading characters almost nobody has heard of and - unlike the Mandela film - a total absence of solemnity.

This is something of a surprise: Hidden Figures's other great asset is that although it looks like a movie machine-tooled to ride the wave of #OscarsSoWhite backlash, its actual ambitions seem far more modest: to entertain a lot, to educate a bit and to cheerlead pretty much constantly.

Taraji P Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe star as our boffins: Henson is Katherine Johnson, a brilliant "computer" (now 98 years old) promoted to a role in the Space Task Group that was responsible for sending Glenn into orbit. Spencer is Dorothy Vaughan, who supervises a team over at the West Computing Building, but is denied the title and pay packet to match by condescending colleague Kirsten Dunst.

Monáe, meanwhile, is Mary Jackson, who must lobby a local judge to allow her access to a local segregated school so she can take night classes that will enable her to train as Nasa's first female black engineer. The arcs of their stories - as well as Henson's romance with army man Jim (Mahershala Ali, who, like Monáe, turns in a strong turn following an indelible one in Moonlight) - intersect with fibonacci precision and convenience, yet for all its formula there's something irresistible about Hidden Figures.

It's semi-soap: the supporting characters at least are fleshed out to a barely skeletal extent. Dunst is dealt a harsh hand, but Jim Parsons fares even worse with his role as a snippy, racist colleague to Henson, forever rolling his eyes in unprogressive protest. Kevin Costner rides the waves of cliche with slightly more dignity as their superior: a man who cares only for the numbers, not the colour of those totting them up.

An extended riff depicting Katherine's bladder trials as she must make the 40 minute round trip from her desk to the only loos on the campus designated for black women (often, horrifically, to the soundtrack of a new Pharrell Williams track called Runnin') are among the most tonally askew in the movie. Yet Costner somehow manages to salvage some audience satisfaction from the affair, when he finally smashes down a segregated bathroom sign and declares: "At Nasa, we all pee the same colour."

Glenn, too, is a clean-cut good guy: a trouper when he first meets the girls, distinguishing himself by coming over to shake their hands and gloriously vindicated in the final reel by his endorsement of Katherine's addition assets.

The second film from Theodore Melfi, whose sole other credit, Bill Murray vehicle St Vincent, should have tipped us off sooner to the likely prevailing mood, Hidden Figures is a bouncy, almost garish feelgood girl pic. A movie that knows right from wrong and doesn't see any use in complicating matters.

The performances are uniformly winning when they need to be and hissable when they don't. There are scenes in which kids say the funniest things, bullies receive their comeuppance, hunky men propose in the cutest ways and we get impassioned monologues happy to sacrifice plausibility for whoopability.

Sometimes, it seems, agenda is better off taking second place to the pure pleasure of seeing just how fast a stacked deck can be demolished.

* Hidden Figures will be released in the US on Christmas Day 2016, in Australia on 16 February 2017, and in the UK on 17 February 2017

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Hidden Figures review - black women Nasa boffin pic defies its formula

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Nelson Mandela's death was announced at the London premiere of biopic Long Walk to Freedom. That film under-performed critically, at the box office and when it came to awards. The producers of Hidden Figures will be hoping it's not second time unlucky.

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In the opening scenes of Hidden Figures, released in the UK on Friday, we are introduced to Dorothy Vaughan - played with verve and wit by Octavia Spencer - as a pair of legs sticking out from under the bonnet of a broken-down car. One detail immediately stands out: Vaughan's legs are light beige and shiny. She is wearing stockings that don't match her skin tone, presumably because that was all that was available to her.

Although the scene goes on to establish the deep racism of the time in more direct ways, the small detail of the stockings tries to put viewers in the shoes of someone like Vaughan. It reminds us how these women were made to feel like outsiders in their own country in small and large ways, even as they helped the nation succeed on the global stage.

In writing history, the devil is always in the details. Margot Shetterly's groundbreaking book, Hidden Figures, reorients our view of the space race by telling the stories of Nasa's black women mathematicians. It casts them as protagonists in the grand drama of American technological history rather than mere details. But the film based on Shetterly's book straddles the line between allowing these women to be the protagonists of their story and crowding them out of the spotlight. The bravura performances of Taraji P. Henson (who plays Katherine Johnson), Janelle Monáe (who plays Mary Jackson), and Octavia Spencer are hindered by the film's framing.

The film follows Vaughan, Johnson, and Jackson as they work feverishly on the calculations for the launch and re-entry of John Glenn's 1962 mission as the first American to orbit the Earth. In the early 1960s, the US was falling behind the Soviets in the space race: already the USSR had launched the first satellite and put the first person into orbit. By the time of Glenn's orbit, the US was desperate for a win in the space race, and - by extension - the Cold War.

As the women race to complete the needed calculations, Johnson is promoted, owing to her exceptional mathematical talent. While this makes her into the film's hero, it also puts her into direct contact with many of the white, male Nasa engineers who see her as a black woman first and only secondarily as a person and coworker. At this point, Nasa manager Al Harrison, played by Kevin Costner, comes into the frame.

Despite being an amalgam of three different Nasa employees, Harrison somehow seems to do no actual work. Perhaps this is a subtle satire of the management class, but it also means his character simply takes up space in someone else's story. Costner is shoehorned into the story as the white male hero who lifts the women up. The role is problematic, uncritically centring an unremarkable white man in a story about three brilliant black women, and the decision to cast a well-known star steals focus from the female leads. Other men in the film manage to support the main characters without stealing the limelight, like the Jewish émigré who supports Jackson's attempts to get the certification she needed to become the first black woman at Nasa to hold the title of engineer. Harrison's character, meanwhile, is an unfortunate meta-commentary on Hollywood's continued reliance on racist and sexist storytelling tropes that weakens the film and its message.

Henson, Monáe, and Spencer shine in their roles when given the space to do so. Spencer's Vaughan engages with the most important of technological advances in a way that shows her brilliance and foresight. That technology is not the space capsule, but Nasa's new IBM computer. Vaughan sees the writing on the wall for her section of women "computers" with the arrival of a machine designed to make their jobs unnecessary. Instead of fighting the change she immediately warms to the new machine, learning to program in FORTRAN without being asked and getting the women she supervises to make themselves indispensable to the coming technological regime by becoming early computer experts.

In the end, Hidden Figures is an often uplifting film with problematic elements and myopic framing. None of those problems are present in Shetterly's book, which deftly moves between talking about people and institutions in ways that make the book both a joy to read and an instruction manual for other historians writing the history of technology. Unlike the book, the film tells a straightforward, simplistic story, and does so with rather plodding pacing and humdrum cinematography.

It also leaves unresolved the tension between what the women are doing and the reasons they're doing it. In the film, there's no discussion of the problematic fact that these talented women are submerged in the process of helping the US fight a Cold War designed to extend American political hegemony - the same structure that has subjugated them and their loved ones. As Shetterly puts it in her book:

So much money spent so that ... a dozen white men could take the express train to a lifeless world? Negro women and men could barely go to the next state without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, and service stations that wouldn't let them buy gas or use the bathroom.

Though the film inserts a few scenes that hint at the indignity and terror of living as a black woman in the Jim Crow South, it oddly keeps racism at arms length from a narrative that, without it, would never have existed.

Overall, Hidden Figures is an enjoyable but limited film, despite excellent performances from its female leads. Shetterly's book focuses on the lives of remarkable people who, up to now, have been ignored because they were women and because they were black. It shows why they were important while allowing them to remain human. The film takes the stories of three of these women and gives them the Hollywood treatment. It tries to be a feel-good movie about a historical period in which black people were often brutally denied their civil rights, and it lionizes a problematic technological proxy war. Disappointingly, the film hides the details that are most meaningful and instructive as we face an era of renewed international turmoil, misguided technological utopianism, and resurgent racism.
Marie Hicks's book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, looks at how gendered labour discrimination caused the decline of British computing. She can be found on Twitter as @histoftech. Topics

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Hidden Figures is a groundbreaking book. But the film? Not so much

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In the opening scenes of Hidden Figures, released in the UK on Friday, we are introduced to Dorothy Vaughan - played with verve and wit by Octavia Spencer - as a pair of legs sticking out from under the bonnet of a broken-down car. One detail immediately stands out: Vaughan's legs are light beige and shiny.

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The Story of NASA’s Real “Hidden Figures”

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African-American women working behind the scenes as “human computers” were vital to the Space Race

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As America stood on the brink of a Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater, spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians. Women were the solution. Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. Sharp and successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed.

Many of these "computers" are finally getting their due, but conspicuously missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by courageous, African-American women. Called the West Computers, after the area to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and engineers of all races and genders to follow.

"These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary," says Margot Lee Shetterly. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women's lives and accomplishments. The book's film adaptation, starring Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Henson, is now open in theaters.

"We've had astronauts, we've had engineers- John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft," she says. "Those guys have all told their stories." Now it's the women's turn.

Hidden Figures | Official Trailer [HD] | 20th Century FOX

Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. Built in 1917, this research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day into war machines. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as the space race gained speed.

The West Computers were at the heart of the center's advancements. They worked through equations that described every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the greater mission of the project. They contributed to the ever-changing design of a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more aerodynamic. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing pool for specific projects- Christine Darden worked to advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. NASA dissolved the remaining few human computers in the 1970s as the technological advances made their roles obsolete.

The first black computers didn't set foot at Langley until the 1940s. Though the pressing needs of war were great, racial discrimination remained strong and few jobs existed for African-Americans, regardless of gender. That was until 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights activist, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the continued injustices of racial discrimination. With the threat of 100,000 people swarming to the Capitol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, preventing racial discrimination in hiring for federal and war-related work. This order also cleared the way for the black computers, slide rule in hand, to make their way into NACA history.

Exactly how many women computers worked at NACA (and later NASA) over the years is still unknown. One 1992 study estimated the total topped several hundred but other estimates, including Shetterly's own intuition, says that number is in the thousands.

As a child, Shetterly knew these brilliant mathematicians as her girl scout troop leaders, Sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors and as parents of schoolmates. Her father worked at Langley as well, starting in 1964 as an engineering intern and becoming a well-respected climate scientist. "They were just part of a vibrant community of people, and everybody had their jobs," she says. "And those were their jobs. Working at NASA Langley."

Surrounded by the West Computers and other academics, it took decades for Shetterly to realize the magnitude of the women's work. "It wasn't until my husband, who was not from Hampton, was listening to my dad talk about some of these women and the things that they have done that I realized," she says. "That way is not necessarily the norm"

The spark of curiosity ignited, Shetterly began researching these women. Unlike the male engineers, few of these women were acknowledged in academic publications or for their work on various projects. Even more problematic was that the careers of the West Computers were often more fleeting than those of the white men. Social customs of the era dictated that as soon as marriage or children arrived, these women would retire to become full-time homemakers, Shetterly explains. Many only remained at Langley for a few years.

But the more Shetterly dug, the more computers she discovered. "My investigation became more like an obsession," she writes in the book. "I would walk any trail if it meant finding a trace of one of the computers at its end."

She scoured telephone directories, local newspapers, employee newsletters and the NASA archives to add to her growing list of names. She also chased down stray memos, obituaries, wedding announcements and more for any hint at the richness of these women's lives. "It was a lot of connecting the dots," she says.

"I get emails all the time from people whose grandmothers or mothers worked there," she says. "Just today I got an email from a woman asking if I was still searching for computers. [She] had worked at Langley from July 1951 through August 1957."

Langley was not just a laboratory of science and engineering; "in many ways, it was a racial relations laboratory, a gender relations laboratory," Shetterly says. The researchers came from across America. Many came from parts of the country sympathetic to the nascent Civil Rights Movement, says Shetterly, and backed the progressive ideals of expanded freedoms for black citizens and women.

But life at Langley wasn't just the churn of greased gears. Not only were the women rarely provided the same opportunities and titles as their male counterparts, but the West Computers lived with constant reminders that they were second-class citizens. In the book, Shetterly highlights one particular incident involving an offensive sign in the dining room bearing the designation: Colored Computers.

One particularly brazen computer, Miriam Mann, took responding to the affront on as a her own personal vendetta. She plucked the sign from the table, tucking it away in her purse. When the sign returned, she removed it again. "That was incredible courage," says Shetterly. "This was still a time when people are lynched, when you could be pulled off the bus for sitting in the wrong seat. [There were] very, very high stakes."

But eventually Mann won. The sign disappeared.

The women fought many more of these seemingly small battles, against separate bathrooms and restricted access to meetings. It was these small battles and daily minutiae that Shetterly strove to capture in her book. And outside of the workplace, they faced many more problems, including segregated busses and dilapidated schools. Many struggled to find housing in Hampton. The white computers could live in Anne Wythe Hall, a dormitory that helped alleviate the shortage of housing, but the black computers were left to their own devices.

"History is the sum total of what all of us do on a daily basis," says Shetterly. "We think of capital "H" history as being these huge figures-George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King." Even so, she explains, "you go to bed at night, you wake up the next morning, and then yesterday is history. These small actions in some ways are more important or certainly as important as the individual actions by these towering figures."

The book and movie don't mark the end of Shetterly's work She continues to collect these names, hoping to eventually make the list available online. She hopes to find the many names that have been sifted out over the years and document their respective life's work.

The few West Computers whose names have been remembered, have become nearly mythical figures-a side-effect of the few African-American names celebrated in mainstream history, Shetterly argues. She hopes her work pays tribute to these women by bringing details of their life's work to light. "Not just mythology but the actual facts," she says. "Because the facts are truly spectacular."

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The True Story of "Hidden Figures," the Forgotten Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

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A new book and movie document the accomplishments of NASA's black "human computers" whose work was at the heart of the country's greatest battles

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Lessons from the hit film "Hidden Figures" are coming to the classroom.

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment announced Monday that it's partnering with nonprofit Journeys in Film and the USC Rossier School of Education to offer a curriculum guide with lesson plans based on the film.

"Hidden Figures" is based on the true ― yet previously little-known ― story of three of the first black "human computers" (Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson) at NASA, who helped send the first American into orbit. The film, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, earned more money in the country than any other movie nominated for Best Picture at the time of the 2017 Academy Awards.

Hidden Figures is ideally suited for use in the classroom, but teachers want students to do more with a film than passively view it," the press release reads. "Journeys in Film has prepared eight comprehensive, standards-aligned lesson plans for secondary students. These interdisciplinary lessons can be used independently or through a team approach that gives students multiple lenses through which to consider the relevant historical and contemporary issues raised by the film."

The first few lessons explore the context surrounding the events in the film, including the Cold War, the pressure women faced at the center in Langley, Virginia, the vital role "human computers" played, segregation and the dawning of the civil rights movement. The curriculum also includes math and science lessons exploring scientific notation, conic sections, orbits and programming. There are additional lessons for students to analyze the film's theme and style.

Since the film premiered nationwide in January, more girls appear to be inspired to pursue careers in STEM ― an industry in which women, especially women of color, are still underrepresented ― according to Aldis Hodge, who has a role in the film.

Teachers are able to download the curriculum for free from Journeys in Film's website. Fox is also giving complimentary copies of "Hidden Figures" on DVD to eligible high schools.

BEFORE YOU GO

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'Hidden Figures' Curriculum Brings Film's Lessons To The Classroom

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Lessons from the hit film "Hidden Figures" are coming to the classroom. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment announced Monday that it's partnering with nonprofit Journeys in Film and the USC Rossier School of Education to offer a curriculum guide with lesson plans based on the film.

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Hidden Figures is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by Theodore Melfi and written by Melfi and Allison Schroeder. It is loosely based on the 2016 non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly about three female African-American mathematicians: Katherine Goble Johnson ( Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan ( Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson ( Janelle Monáe), who worked at NASA during the Space Race. Other stars include Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Mahershala Ali, Aldis Hodge, and Glen Powell.

Principal photography began in March 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia and wrapped up in May 2016. Other filming locations included several other locations in Georgia, including East Point, Canton, Monroe, Columbus, and Madison.

Hidden Figures had a limited release on December 25, 2016, by 20th Century Fox, before going wide in North America on January 6, 2017. The film received critical acclaim, with praise for the performances (particularly Henson, Spencer and Monáe), the writing, direction, cinematography, emotional tone, and historical accuracy, although some argued it featured a white savior narrative. The film was a commercial success, grossing $236 million worldwide against its $25 million production budget. Deadline Hollywood noted it as one of the most profitable releases of 2016, and estimated that it made a net profit of $95.5 million.

The film was chosen by the National Board of Review as one of the top ten films of 2016 and received various awards and nominations, including three nominations at the 89th Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.

Katherine Johnson works at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in 1961, alongside her colleagues Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, as lowly " computers", performing math calculations without being told what they are for. All of them are African-American women; the unit is segregated by race and sex. White supervisor Vivian Mitchell assigns Katherine to assist Al Harrison's Space Task Group, given her skills in analytic geometry. She becomes the first Black woman on the team; head engineer Paul Stafford is especially dismissive.

Mary is assigned to the space capsule heat shield team, where she immediately identifies a design flaw. Encouraged by her team leader Karl Zielinski, a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, Mary applies for a NASA engineer position. She is told by Mitchell that, regardless of her mathematics and physical science degree, the position requires additional courses. Mary files a petition for permission to attend all-white Hampton High School, despite her husband's opposition. Pleading her case in court, she wins over the local judge by appealing to his sense of history, allowing her to attend night classes.

Katherine meets African-American National Guard Lt. Col. Jim Johnson, who voices skepticism about women's mathematical abilities. He later apologizes and begins spending time with Katherine and her three daughters. The Mercury 7 astronauts visit Langley, and astronaut John Glenn goes out of his way to greet the West Area women. Katherine impresses Harrison by solving a complex mathematical equation from redacted documents, as the Soviet Union's successful launch of Yuri Gagarin increases pressure to send American astronauts into space.

Harrison confronts Katherine about her "breaks," unaware that she is forced to walk half a mile (800 meters) to use the nearest bathroom assigned to "Colored" people. She angrily explains the discrimination she faces at work, which leads Harrison to knock down the "Colored Bathroom" sign and abolish bathroom segregation. He allows Katherine to be included in high-level meetings to calculate the space capsule's re-entry point. Stafford makes Katherine remove her name from reports, insisting that " computers" cannot author them, and her work is credited solely to Stafford.

Informed by Mitchell that there are no plans to assign a "permanent supervisor for the colored group," Dorothy learns NASA has installed an IBM 7090 electronic computer that threatens to replace human computers. When a librarian scolds her for visiting the whites-only section, Dorothy takes a book about Fortran and teaches herself and her West Area co-workers programming. She visits the computer room, successfully starts the machine, and is promoted to supervise the Programming Department; she agrees to do so if thirty of her co-workers are transferred as well. Mitchell finally addresses her as "Mrs. Vaughan".

Making final arrangements for John Glenn's launch, the department no longer needs human computers; Katherine is reassigned to the West Area and marries Jim. On the day of the launch, discrepancies are found in the IBM 7090 calculations, and Katherine is asked to check the capsule's landing coordinates. She delivers the results to the control room, and Harrison allows her inside. After a successful launch and orbit, a warning indicates the capsule's heat shield may be loose. Mission Control decides to land Glenn after three orbits instead of seven, and Katherine supports Harrison's suggestion to leave the retro-rocket attached to help keep the heat shield in place. Friendship 7 lands successfully.

Though the mathematicians are ultimately replaced by electronic computers, a textual epilogue reveals Mary obtained her engineering degree and became NASA's first female African American engineer; Dorothy continued as NASA's first African American supervisor; and Katherine, accepted by Stafford as a report coauthor, went on to calculate the trajectories for the Apollo 11 and Space Shuttle missions. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, NASA dedicated the Langley Research Center's Katherine Johnson Computational Building in her honor.

Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Goble Johnson, mathematician

Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan, mathematician and supervisor

Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson, mathematician and engineer

Kevin Costner as Al Harrison, director of the Space Task Group (STG)

Kirsten Dunst as Vivian Mitchell, supervisor

Jim Parsons as Paul Stafford, head engineer in STG

Mahershala Ali as Jim Johnson, military officer who romances and eventually marries Katherine

Aldis Hodge as Levi Jackson

Glen Powell as John Glenn, astronaut

Kimberly Quinn as Ruth

Olek Krupa as Karl Zielinski, engineer (a fictionalized version of Kazimierz Czarnecki, who encourages Mary Jackson)

Saniyya Sidney as Constance Johnson

In 2015, producer Donna Gigliotti acquired Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book Hidden Figures, about a group of Black female mathematicians that helped NASA win the Space Race. Allison Schroeder wrote the script, which was developed by Gigliotti through Levantine Films. Schroeder grew up by Cape Canaveral and her grandparents worked at NASA, where she also interned as a teenager, and as a result saw the project as a perfect fit for herself. Levantine Films produced the film with Peter Chernin's Chernin Entertainment. Fox 2000 Pictures acquired the film rights, and Theodore Melfi signed on to direct. After coming aboard, Melfi revised Schroeder's script, and in particular focused on balancing the home lives of the three protagonists with their careers at NASA. After the film's development was announced, actresses considered to play the lead roles included Oprah Winfrey, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, and Taraji P. Henson.

Chernin and Jenno Topping produced, along with Gigliotti and Melfi. Fox cast Henson to play the lead role of mathematician Katherine Goble Johnson. Spencer was selected to play Dorothy Vaughan, one of the three lead mathematicians at NASA. Kevin Costner was cast in the film to play the fictional head of the space program. Singer Janelle Monáe signed on to play the third lead mathematician, Mary Jackson. Kirsten Dunst, Glen Powell, and Mahershala Ali were cast in the film: Powell to play astronaut John Glenn, and Ali as Johnson's love interest.

Principal photography began in March 2016 on the campus of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Filming also took place at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics at Dobbins Air Reserve Base. Jim Parsons was cast in the film to play the head engineer of the Space Task Group at NASA, Paul Stafford. Pharrell Williams (a native of Virginia Beach, near Langley Research Center) came on board as a producer on the film. He also wrote original songs and handled the music department and soundtrack of the film, with Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch. Morehouse College mathematics professor Rudy L. Horne was brought in to be the on-set mathematician.

The film, set at NASA Langley Research Center in 1961, depicts segregated facilities such as the West Area Computing unit, where an all-Black group of female mathematicians were originally required to use separate dining and bathroom facilities. However, in reality, Dorothy Vaughan was promoted to supervisor of West Computing much earlier, in 1949, becoming the first Black supervisor at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and one of its few female supervisors. In 1958, when NACA became NASA, segregated facilities, including the West Computing office, were abolished. Vaughan and many of the former West computers transferred to the new Analysis and Computation Division (ACD), a racially and gender-integrated group.

It was Mary Jackson, not Katherine Johnson, who had difficulty finding a colored bathroom - in a 1953 incident she experienced while on temporary assignment in the East Area, a region of Langley unfamiliar to her and where few Blacks worked. Katherine Johnson, for her part, was initially unaware that the bathrooms at Langley were segregated (in both its East and West areas during the NACA era), and used the "whites-only" bathrooms (many were not explicitly labeled as such) for years before anyone complained. She ignored the complaint, and the issue was dropped.

In an interview with WHRO-TV, Johnson denied the feelings of segregation. "I didn't feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research. You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job ... and play bridge at lunch. I didn't feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn't feel it."

Mary Jackson did not have to get a court order to attend night classes at the whites-only high school. She asked the city of Hampton for an exception, and it was granted. The school turned out to be run down and dilapidated, a hidden cost of running two parallel school systems. She completed her engineering courses and earned a promotion to engineer in 1958.

Katherine Johnson worked mostly in Langley's West Area, not the East Area - working mainly in Building 1244 starting in mid-1953, and remaining in 1244 even after joining the Space Task Group, through at least the early 1960s and John Glenn's historic flight.

The scene where a coffeepot labeled "colored" appears in Katherine Johnson's workplace did not happen in real life, and the book on which the film is based mentions no such incident.

Katherine Johnson carpooled with Eunice Smith, a nine-year West Area computer veteran at the time Johnson joined NACA. Smith was her neighbor and friend from her sorority and church choir. The three Goble children were teenagers at the time of Katherine's marriage to Jim Johnson.

Katherine Johnson was assigned to the Flight Research Division in 1953, a move that soon became permanent. When the Space Task Group was created in 1958, engineers from the Flight Research Division formed the core of the group, and Johnson was included. She coauthored a research report published by NASA in 1960, the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report. Johnson gained access to editorial meetings as of 1958 simply through persistence, not because one particular meeting was critical.

The Space Task Group was led by Robert Gilruth, not the fictional character Al Harrison, who was created to simplify a more complex management structure. The scene where Harrison smashes the Colored Ladies Room sign never happened, as in real life Johnson refused to walk the extra distance to use the colored bathroom and, in her words, "just went to the white one." Harrison also lets her into Mission Control to witness the launch. Neither scene happened in real life, and screenwriter Theodore Melfi said he saw no problem with adding the scenes, saying, "There needs to be white people who do the right thing, there needs to be Black people who do the right thing, and someone does the right thing. And so who cares who does the right thing, as long as the right thing is achieved?"

Dexter Thomas of criticized Melfi's additions as creating the white savior trope: "In this case, it means that a white person doesn't have to think about the possibility that, were they around back in the 1960s South, they might have been one of the bad ones." The Atlantic's Megan Garber said that the film's "narrative trajectory" involved "thematic elements of the white savior". Melfi said he found "hurtful" the "accusations of a 'white savior' storyline", saying:

It was very upsetting to me because I am at a place where I've lived my life colorless and I grew up in Brooklyn. I walked to school with people of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and that's how I've lived my life. So it's very upsetting that we still have to have this conversation. I get upset when I hear 'Black film,' and so does Taraji P. Henson ... It's just a film. And if we keep labeling something 'a Black film,' or 'a white film'- basically it's modern day segregation. We're all humans. Any human can tell any human's story. I don't want to have this conversation about Black film or white film anymore. I wanna have conversations about film.

The Huffington Post's Zeba Blay said of Melfi's frustration:

His frustration is also a perfect example of how, when it comes to open dialogue about depictions of people of color on screen, it behooves white people (especially those who position themselves as 'allies') to listen ... the inclusion of the bathroom scene doesn't make Melfi a bad filmmaker, or a bad person, or a racist. But his suggestion that a feel-good scene like that was needed for the marketability and overall appeal of the film speaks to the fact that Hollywood at large still has a long way to go in telling Black stories, no matter how many strides have been made.

The fictional characters Vivian Mitchell and Paul Stafford are composites of several team members and reflect common social views and attitudes of the time. Karl Zielinski is based on Mary Jackson's mentor, Kazimierz "Kaz" Czarnecki.

John Glenn, who was about a decade older than depicted at the time of launch, did ask specifically for Johnson to verify the IBM calculations, although she had several days before the launch date to complete the process.

Author Margot Lee Shetterly has agreed that there are differences between her book and the movie, but found that to be understandable.

For better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie. Timelines had to be conflated and [there were] composite characters, and for most people [who have seen the movie] have already taken that as the literal fact. ... You might get the indication in the movie that these were the only people doing those jobs, when in reality we know they worked in teams, and those teams had other teams. There were sections, branches, divisions, and they all went up to a director. There were so many people required to make this happen. ... It would be great for people to understand that there were so many more people. Even though Katherine Johnson, in this role, was a hero, there were so many others that were required to do other kinds of tests and checks to make [Glenn's] mission come to fruition. But I understand you can't make a movie with 300 characters. It is simply not possible.

John Glenn's flight was not terminated early as stated in the movie's closing subtitles. The MA-6 mission was planned for three orbits and landed at the expected time. The press kit published before launch states that "The Mercury Operations Director may elect a one, two or three orbit mission." The post-mission report also shows that retrofire was scheduled to occur on the third orbit. Scott Carpenter's subsequent flight in May was also scheduled and flew for three orbits, and Wally Schirra's planned six-orbit flight in October required extensive modifications to the Mercury capsule's life-support system to allow him to fly a nine-hour mission. The phrase "go for at least seven orbits" that is in the mission transcript refers to the fact that the Atlas booster had placed Glenn's capsule into an orbit that would be stable for at least seven orbits, not that he had permission to stay up that long.

The Mercury Control Center was located at Cape Canaveral in Florida, not at the Langley Research Center in Virginia. The orbit plots displayed in the front of the room incorrectly show a six-orbit mission, which did not happen until Wally Schirra's MA-8 mission in October 1962. The movie also incorrectly shows NASA flight controllers monitoring live telemetry from the Soviet Vostok launch, which the Soviet Union would not have been sharing with NASA in 1961.

Katherine Johnson's Technical Note D-233, co-written with T.H. Skopinski, can be found on the NASA Technical Reports Server.

The movie depicts the IBM 7090 as the first computer at Langley, but there were actually earlier computers there, and Dorothy Vaughan had previously been programming for the IBM 704 in FORTRAN.

Actual IBM 7090 console

IBM 7094 operator's console shown in the movie, with additional index register displays in a distinctive extra box on top. Note "Multiple Tag Mode" light in the top center.

The movie refers to an IBM 7090, but the console shown is for an IBM 7094, which came later.

US President Barack Obama greeting Kevin Costner, Octavia Spencer, and Taraji P. Henson on December 15, 2016

The film began a limited release on December 25, 2016, before a wide release on January 6, 2017.

After Hidden Figures was released on December 25, 2016, certain charities, institutions and independent businesses who regard the film as relevant to the cause of improving youth awareness in education and careers in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, organized free screenings of the film in order to spread the message of the film's subject matter. A collaborative effort between Western New York STEM Hub, AT&T and the Girl Scouts of the USA allowed more than 200 Buffalo Public School students, Girl Scouts and teachers to see the film. WBFO's Senior Reporter Eileen Buckley stated the event was designed to help encourage a new generation of women to consider STEM careers. Research indicates that by 2020, there will be 2.4 million unfilled STEM jobs. Aspiring astronaut Naia Butler-Craig wrote of the film: "I can't imagine what that would have been like: 16-year-old, impressionable, curious and space-obsessed Naia finding out that Black women had something to do with getting Americans on the moon."

Also, the film's principal actors (Henson, Spencer, Monáe and Parsons), director (Melfi), producer/musical creator (Williams), and other non-profit outside groups have offered free screenings to Hidden Figures at several cinema locations around the world. Some of the screenings were open to all-comers, while others were arranged to benefit girls, women and the underprivileged. The campaign began as individual activism by Spencer, and made a total of more than 1,500 seats for Hidden Figures available, free of charge, to poor individuals and families. The result was seven more screenings for people who otherwise might not have been able to afford to see the film - in Atlanta (sponsored by Monáe), in Washington, D.C. (sponsored by Henson), in Chicago (also Henson), in Houston (by Parsons), in Hazelwood, Missouri (by Melfi and actress/co-producer Kimberly Quinn), and in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia (both sponsored by Williams).

In February 2017, AMC Theatres and 21st Century Fox announced that free screenings of Hidden Figures would take place in celebration of Black History Month in up to 14 select U.S. cities (including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Miami). The statement described the February charity screenings as building broader awareness of the film's true story of Black women mathematicians who worked at NASA during the Space Race. 21st Century Fox and AMC Theatres also invited schools, community groups and non-profit organizations to apply for additional special screenings to be held in their towns. "As we celebrate Black History Month and look ahead to Women's History Month in March, this story of empowerment and perseverance is more relevant than ever," said Liba Rubenstein, 21st Century Fox's Senior Vice President of Social Impact, "We at 21CF were inspired by the grassroots movement to bring this film to audiences that wouldn't otherwise be able to see it - audiences that might include future innovators and barrier-breakers - and we wanted to support and extend that movement".

Philanthropic non-profit outside groups and other local efforts by individuals have offered free screenings of Hidden Figures by using crowdfunding platforms on the Internet, that allow people to raise money for free film screening events. Dozens of other GoFundMe free screening campaigns have appeared since the film's general release, all by people wanting to raise money to pay for students to see the film.

In 2019, The Walt Disney Company partnered with the U.S. Department of State on the third annual "Hidden No More" exchange program, which was inspired by the film and brings to the United States 50 women from around the world who have excelled in STEM careers such as spacecraft engineering, data solutions and data privacy, and STEM-related education. The exchange program began in 2017 after local US embassies screened the film to their local communities. The support for the screenings was so positive that 48 countries decided to each nominate one women in STEM to represent their country on a three-week IVLP exchange program in the United States.

Following the 2017 Lego Ideas Contest, Denmark-based toy maker The Lego Group announced plans to manufacture a fan-designed Women of NASA figurine set of five female scientists, engineers and astronauts, as based on real women who have worked for NASA. The minifigures planned for inclusion in the set were Katherine Johnson, computer scientist Margaret Hamilton; astronaut, physicist and educator Sally Ride; astronomer Nancy Grace Roman; and astronaut and physician Mae Jemison (who is also African American). The finished set did not include Johnson. The Women of NASA set was released November 1, 2017.

The Miracles' 1961 chart hit, " Mighty Good Lovin'", written by lead singer Smokey Robinson, is played in the film during the house party dance scene, and was also heard in the closing credits.

Hidden Figures was released on Digital HD on March 28, 2017, and Blu-ray, 4K Ultra HD, and DVD on April 11, 2017. The film debuted at No. 3 on the home video sales chart.

Hidden Figures grossed $169.6 million in the United States and Canada, and $66.3 million in other territories, for a worldwide gross of $236 million, against a production budget of $25 million. Domestically, Hidden Figures was the highest-grossing Best Picture nominee at the 89th Academy Awards. Deadline Hollywood calculated the net profit of the film to be $95.55 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues for the film, making it one of the top twenty most profitable release of 2016.

During its limited release in 25 theaters from December 25, 2016, to January 5, 2017, the film grossed $3 million. In North America, Hidden Figures had its expansion alongside the opening of Underworld: Blood Wars and the wide expansions of and A Monster Calls. It was expected to gross around $20 million from 2,471 theaters in its opening weekend, with the studio projecting a more conservative $15-17 million debut. It made $1.2 million from Thursday night previews and $7.6 million on its first day. Initially, projections had the film grossing $21.8 million in its opening weekend, finishing second behind Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ($22 million). However the next day, final figures revealed the film tallied a weekend total of $22.8 million, beating Rogue One's $21.9 million. In its second weekend, the film grossed $20.5 million (for a four-day MLK Weekend total of $27.5 million), again topping the box office.

Octavia Spencer's performance as Dorothy Vaughan garnered critical acclaim, prompting her second Academy Award & Golden Globe nomination and her third SAG nomination.

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 93% based on 314 reviews, with an average rating of 7.64/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "In heartwarming, crowd-pleasing fashion, Hidden Figures celebrates overlooked-and crucial-contributions from a pivotal moment in American history." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 74 out of 100, based on 47 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A+" on an A+ to F scale, one of fewer than 90 films in the history of the service to receive such a score.

Simon Thompson of IGN gave the film a rating of nine out of ten, writing, " Hidden Figures fills in an all too forgotten, or simply too widely unknown, blank in US history in a classy, engaging, entertaining and hugely fulfilling way. Superb performances across the board and a fascinating story alone make Hidden Figures a solid, an accomplished and deftly executed movie that entertains, engages and earns your time, money and attention." Ty Burr of The Boston Globe wrote, "the film's made with more heart than art and more skill than subtlety, and it works primarily because of the women that it portrays and the actresses who portray them. Best of all, you come out of the movie knowing who Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson are, and so do your daughters and sons."

Clayton Davis of Awards Circuit gave the film three and a half stars, saying "Precisely marketed as terrific adult entertainment for the Christmas season, Hidden Figures is a faithful and truly beautiful portrait of our country's consistent gloss over the racial tensions that have divided and continue to plague the fabric of our existence. Lavishly engaging from start to finish, Hidden Figures may be able to catch the most inopportune movie-goer off guard and cause them to fall for its undeniable and classic storytelling. The film is not to be missed."

Other reviews criticized the film for its fictional embellishments and conventional, feel-good style. Tim Grierson, writing for Screen International, states that "Hidden Figures is almost patronisingly earnest in its depiction of sexism and racism. An air of do-gooder self-satisfaction hovers over the proceedings", while Jesse Hassenger at comments that "lack of surprise is in this movie's bones." Eric Kohn of IndieWire argues that the film "trivializes history; as a hagiographic tribute to its brilliant protagonists, it doesn't dig into the essence of their struggles" and similarly, Paul Byrnes concludes that "When a film purports to be selling history, we're entitled to ask where the history went, even if it offers a good time instead."

Among its many achievements, Octavia Spencer was particularly lauded for her portrayal of Dorothy Vaughan and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role. The film's ensemble cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. The film itself garnered a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture and several nominations its screenplay (including for the Oscar and BAFTA), soundtrack and score.

Overall, the film received three nominations for the 89th Academy Awards in 2017, winning none:

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Hidden Figures is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by Theodore Melfi and written by Melfi and Allison Schroeder. It is loosely based on the 2016 non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly about three female African-American mathematicians: Katherine Goble Johnson ( Taraji P.