'Hidden Figures' author shares story of the black women behind the space race

Women and people of color have been key contributors to American innovation, but their stories are often untold.

Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the book and soon-to-be movie “Hidden Figures,” discussed these stories and other topics concerning race, gender, science and the history of technology at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center on Thursday.

Shetterly said her book documents the story of four black female mathematicians and the role they played in helping NASA and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. catch up in the space race against Russia.

Shetterly said when she speaks about the book, people ask why they hadn’t heard this story before.

“Despite the fact that these bits of documentary evidence have been around, one of the things that is really true is that it’s hard to see what you don’t expect to see,” Shetterly said.

Shetterly said black women worked in a secluded part of the lab and the work they were doing was often classified. This, combined with Jim Crow laws, contributed to their work not being recognized.

Jennifer Weinberg-Wolf, a lecturer in the physics and astronomy department, said she was fascinated to learn more about this part of science and engineering history that she had never heard.

“The sheer number of people and their individual stories — I knew that women were computers and crunching the numbers, but I didn’t know how many worked in research, how many were helping engineers,” Weinberg-Wolf said.

Callie Hood, a senior physics major, said she saw the movie trailers and decided to attend the event.

“Part of the thing that stood out to me was when she was talking about how all of this breaking down of barriers and ingenuity happened in a southern town,” Hood said.

“We tend to think of the South, somewhat rightfully, as more segregated or a harder place to be a person of color and I think that’s totally true. It’s just really interesting that this whole story took place in a town in Virginia.”

Shetterly read two excerpts from the book and took questions, then signed books at the end of the event.

“Our job, your job, my job is to open our eyes and recognize the power of the extraordinary ordinary people that we come into contact with every day,” Shetterly said.

“Once we’ve trained ourselves to see people like the ones I wrote about, like Dorothy Vaughan and these other women, to see them and to value what they’ve accomplished, our next obligation is to tell their story.”

“Hidden Figures” is being adapted into a movie and will premiere in theatres in early 2017.

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