Hidden Figures
This month, we’re looking at the stars, making this weeks book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. So let’s do this.
Now, a lot of people are broadly familiar with the story behind Hidden Figures thanks to the Hollywood movie starring Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan, and Janelle Monae as Mary Jackson. And I love the movie, the actresses are all powerful performers that have you cheering for them every step of the way, and they are brilliantly supported by Kevin Costner, Jim Parsons, Kirsten Dunst, Glen Powell….I mean the movie overall deserved the accolades and nominations that year…released in 2016 I believe was release year.
But….as is so frequently the case. Like, I can count on one hand the movies that were better than the book….The book was infinitely better. More on that in a bit.
So the story starts with Dorothy Vaughan and World War II. It actually starts a bit earlier than that with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, back in World War I, which evolved to deal with the lack of airplanes America had going into that first global conflict. But in the intervening decades, but especially as WWII ramped up, NACA found themselves with a severe lack of people who could crunch the numbers, as more and more men were shipping overseas to fight. So they turned to women, both black and white. And Dorothy Vaughan was one of these women, getting hired to NACA on December 1, 1943.
Dorothy was born Dorothy Jean Johnson September 20, 1910 in Kansas City, MO. When she was seven the family moved to Morgantown, West Virginia where she would be class valedictorian at Beechurst High School, before attending Wilberforce University in Wilberforce Ohio on full scholarship and graduating with a Bachelors degree in Mathematics. She married her husband Howard Vaughan in 1932 and they had six children together, staying at the Vaughan family residence with Howard’s parents in Newport News, VA. This was not unusual, especially in the Depression, when both parents had to work as much as they could, which meant the grandparents took care of the children. Dorothy worked as a teacher during the school year and in the summers would pick up whatever work she could. She was working in a I believe it was military laundry when she got word that NACA was looking to hire women to work as computers at Langley. With a significant pay raise from her usual teachers salary. So she applied, was quickly accepted, and made the move to Langley, eventually moving her children with her during the school year. She would buy a small house and barter room and board in exchange for child care while she was at work. She would eventually be made supervisor of the West Computers and would serve in that capacity I think for 8 years before the group was dissolved.
The reason for the dissolution was that NACA had purchased IBM computers. Which were ridiculously expensive and enormous, taking up entire rooms and/or buildings. But, Dorothy saw the writing on the wall and began studying FORTRAN, which was the programming language, becoming an early adapter for the new tech.
Now, all these women were eminently qualified, having college degrees in mathematics. But prior to WWII, the best job they could hope for was teacher. And a significant number of the West Group computers were teachers before being hired on with NACA. So Dorothy was first, and in Katherine Johnson’s opinion, the smartest of them all. Dorothy excelled not just at math, but at people, managing people, and taking care of her people. So much so that she was moved into management, from which position she was able to take better care of her girls. When Katherine Goble (later Johnson) was hired and the work group she was assigned to wanted to keep working with her, Dorothy approached the group manager and said either promote her per policy, or send her back to West computing for reassignment.
This move, incidentally, did not just benefit Katherine Goble. The white computer in the same group, who was also “temporary” but had been petitioning for a raise, was hired on permanently with the group and given the raise she deserved. Because Dorothy reminded the manager, Henry Pearson, that the rules are the rules.
Next hired on was Mary Jackson. Mary was born Mary Winston on April 9, 1921 in Hampton, VA, where she also graduated with honors before attending Hampton University where she earned dual degrees in Math and Physical Science in 1942. She also worked as a teacher before hearing about a job at NACA as a computer, where she applied and was hired to work in April 1951. She was assigned to work in one group, but after having to go for a hike to find the colored bathroom, she had a justifiable screaming fit about it, which was witnessed by engineer Kazimierz “Kaz” Czarnecki. Who immediately offered her a job with his group and became a lifelong mentor and friend, encouraging her to take the required courses to become an engineer and pushing through her grade promotions and pay raises.
And then of course there’s Katherine Johnson, who was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and was every bit as brilliant as she was portrayed in the movie, graduating high school at 14 before enrolling in college at West Virginia State College where she took every math class she possibly could. After that, she was briefly enrolled in a masters program and an early attempt at integration at West Virginia University. However, she soon after became pregnant with her first child from her first husband, James Goble, and no one was going to tell her forget motherhood, work on integration, so she ended up not completing the graduate program. She, like a lot of the computers, became a teacher, before finding her way to NACA, which would eventually rebrand to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and finding her life’s purpose calculating the incredibly complex math to ensure man could safely ascend to space and return, and calculating the trajectories and orbits for the first moon landing, which is not portrayed in the movie, but Katherine did the math for that too.
Now….there’s the brief outline, why is the book better? Well, somethings are not the fault of Hollywood. There were well over 100 West Group Computers, who were all brilliant and contributed in their own way to the advancement of mankind. But as is the case with any book adaptation, you HAVE To cut some of the story to allow for a central focus. So they cut out all the little things the women did to fight for justice. Like Miriam Mann who quietly took home with her the Colored Table sign from the cafeteria….again and again and again…until whoever kept putting it up gave up. Rather than giving Mary Jackson her justified rant about colored bathrooms, they made it this big thing in the film. Again, I get it. The medium of film is Show Don’t Tell.
But….well, when Katherine Goble, later Johnson, was given her first assignment, she just quietly used the unmarked bathroom, assuming if there was no sign, it was available for anyone to use. By the time anyone had figured out she was using the “white bathroom” her work had already become indispensable, resulting in no one caring which bathroom was being used. I think they tried ot make a thing out of it, but she chose to ignore it and kept peeing where it was convenient.
But I think the biggest thing that bugs me about the movie, having now read the book, is the absolute missed opportunity to show the mad progress in race relations that NASA contributed to. No joke, if you watch Hidden Figures on Amazon on a computer, it will include bits on the side you can mouse over that will include things like “X was a generic stand in figure used to show the dismissive attitudes of whites toward their black compatriots.” Paraphrasing, but that’s roughly it. Here’s the thing. According to the book, Nerds led the way into the future, not just in space flight, but in not giving a flying fuck about the color of someone’s skin. Could the person do the job they had been assigned? Did the math…MATH? That’s all they cared about. And so while the dismissive attitudes and segregation was absolutely an ongoing thing OUTSIDE of Langley, I mean to the point that Prince Edward County, VA closed ALL school for FIVE YEARS rather than integrate, Langley, friendships were born. Lifelong friendships.
In the movie, Mary Jackson’s mentor was Karl Zielinski, a Polish Jew. Kaz was Polish…Catholic. But Catholics are not the downtrodden like Jews were in the years following WWII, and so Hollywood could not possibly portray a White man doing anything so altruistic as supporting the ambitions and dreams of a black woman in 1950’s and 60’s America. And so they changed Kaz to a Jewish man.
On Katherine’s first day in her assigned group, she took a desk and yes, her cubicle mate immediately got up and left. She never found out why and it ended up not mattering. When he found out she was also from West Virginia, they became lifelong friends, bonding over the differences from the blue ridge mountains to the Virginia Delta.
Dorothy Vaughan’s speaking up for her girls, directly benefited the white computers too, and she formed friendships with the other supervisors, regardless of color.
They all saw each other as equals, and as equal contributors to the American Dream, applauding Mary Jackson when her son won the annual Soap Box Derby, thrilled when Katherine Johnson’s math proves the new computers were not a waste of government funding, and supporting Dorothy Vaughan when she hits 20 years of service with the agency.
But Hollywood could not possibly show that internal support that helped these women climb to the top, and then boost people even further, all the way to the stars, and landing on the damn moon. Because Hollywood can’t have us all knowing that not everything sucked in the 1960s.
I still love the movie. The acting is phenomenal and the story tells the broad scope of history. But the book was ever so much more hopeful. And includes the stories of the other computers, including the generation that came after, inspired by Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan, who are true role models of what it means to work towards a dream and to LIVE that dream, so that your children can do even better, and the generation after that, even better still.
