We all know that behind every great man is a great woman, but do we know who the great women are behind the great men like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong?
That’s the subject of the new book "Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race." The film adaptation of "Hidden Figures"—starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Butler, and Janelle Monae—will hit theaters in January. Author Margot Lee Shetterly joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan to talk about the book, the film, and the remarkable women behind them both.
MARGERY EAGAN: Tell us about these 'hidden figures.' Who are we talking about?
MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: What we're talking about are women, professional mathematicians, African Americans, who started working in my hometown of Hampton, Virginia during World War Two at a place called the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, in a place that was really the kernel of what we now know as NASA. What they were doing was they were making the airplanes we take for granted today as being safe and efficient and getting us from place to place on time the way we want, and they were doing the hard work to make it come about. Even though we think of NASA as a space agency, really NASA started out with airplanes. These women were doing what we rely on electronic calculators to do today: processing tons and tons of information so engineers can make decisions about how to develop better airplanes.
JIM BRAUDE: They were called "computers" before there were computers. Correct?
SHETTERLY: Correct! We think of these objects on our desktops today as "computers." But a "computer" was a job category. It was somebody whose job it was to compute or do math. That's what they were.
EAGAN: What's surprising to me about this was not just the sexism and that they were all women, but the racism. Jim Crow laws were still there. How did it come about that African American women were getting these jobs?
SHETTERLY: The answer to that, like the answer to so many things we take for granted today, was World War Two. The men were off to fight. A lot of those men were mathematicians. At the same time, there's an escalating demand for better aircraft and the research that makes that. So they were hiring all the women they could find, essentially, to do this work. They're in Hampton, Virginia. Really, it was thanks to a gentleman whose name a lot of people have forgotten. His name was A. Philip Randolph. He was a pioneering civil rights leader, labor leader, and he was the one who really challenged then-President Roosevelt and forced him to open, to integrate the federal workforce, the civil service, and the defense industry. It was for African Americans, but it was also for Mexican Americans, for Jews, for many people who found it hard to find those war jobs, which were—for these women—the kind of jobs that changed your life and changed your prospects.
BRAUDE: I don't want people to leave with the notion that outside was Jim Crow and inside was purity. While they were allowed to do this incredibly important work, they were not treated in the way equals and incredibly competent people deserve to be treated.
SHETTERLY: They were not. They did the same work as their white counterparts, but they were in a separate office, which was called the "West Area Computing Office," though people knew them as the "Colored Computers," which sounds like, you know, an iMac, right? They had segregated bathrooms and a segregated lunchroom.
BRAUDE: Talk about how John Glenn describes the importance of these women.
SHETTERLY: John Glenn went down in history as an American hero for taking the first orbital flight into space. This was a moment that really changed the balance of the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and a huge amount of work went into that. It was orders of magnitude more difficult than the first two flights for Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard, which were suborbital flights: you shoot the man up, and he comes down in a big parabola. This was someone going all the way around the Earth and then coming back.
Katherine Johnson—an African-American woman born in rural, white Silver Springs, West Virginia, working there at the Langley Laboratory—she had co-authored the report that laid out the math for that. Then, in the lead up to this big moment that was approaching in 1962, and this was really the big moment in the movie—the movie "Hidden Figures" really focuses on that—John Glenn said, "listen, among these many pre-check lists and tests and verifications we have, what I want is I want the girl to check the numbers." He said, "listen, we've got this computer, the computer is doing all these equations and coming up with outputs. I want Katherine Johnson, the girl, to run these equations by hand. if she gets what the computer gets, I'm ready to go."
To hear more from Margot Lee Shetterly, tune in to Boston Public Radio above. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
