Queue my inner black girl nerd who also loves movies!
“Hidden Figures” is a movie set for release in January 2017 about the (finally getting its DUE) history on the black women “computers” at NASA. Black women who contributed to the space race using their expertise in math and science to help Americans launch into space, orbit the earth and eventually get to the moon.
Taraji P. Henson (of Empire), Octavia Spencer (Academy Award Winner from The Help) and the amazingly musically talented Janelle Monáe, play the important figures in the story.
Henson plays Katherine Johnson, the woman at the center of Hidden Figures. Katherine Johnson was a physicist, space scientist, and mathematician who contributed to the United States’ aeronautics and space programs. She was a math genius who calculated the trajectories for Project Mercury (the space program before Apollo)and the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon.
Her calculations were so reliable, that even once NASA had moved to actual computers, Astronaut John Glenn, who was the among the first American men to go into orbit (and later became a US Senator) insisted they check the computer’s math against Katherine’s because if the computer matched Katherine’s math work, then the computer was right.
The debut of such a movie whose story has long been hidden in the history of NASA is amazing, especially to tell the story of black woman’s genius in a subject where people of color of any race are still few today.
Katherine Johnson was so gifted she skipped several grades starting high school at age 10 and graduated from West Virginia State College at age 18.
Johnson and her colleagues came of age and received their educations at the height of segregation. There only options at the time with the schooling they had as Johnson has said in an interview was to be a “nurse or a teacher”. Their story is extraordinary for the time considering the limitations placed on black people in the US and particularly black women.
For Johnson’s contributions to America’s efforts to get to space she was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom award on November 24, 2015, cited as a pioneering example of African American women in STEM.
If you can’t wait until January to see more of this story come to life, check out Katherine Johnson’s interview with MAKERS, a site that aims to collect women’s stories in the nation.
http://www.makers.com/katherine-g-johnson
feministnoir 