Film Analysis: The Black Women Hidden Figures

During the era of US racial segregation, a handful of black female mathematicians managed to break social barriers and propel the US space agency to new heights. The heroines of the story are Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson. The US involvement in World War II in 1941 opened the door to them. The country needed engineers and scientists to come up with new technologies to help planes fly higher and faster. But segregation was still a reality. There were dozens of African-Americans, both male and female, working as mathematicians and physicists for the US space program, even as they were forced to use separate bathrooms from whites, and were barred from the same restaurants and schools frequented by whites. The black women
mathematicians at the center of "Hidden Figures" were nicknamed "colored computers," working apart from the rest of the math unit in the west wing of the Langley Research Center. By the end of the war, there were around 25 black women and two white managers in the unit. Soon however there was a new war, as the Cold War broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union.The USSR launched its first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, raising the stakes for the United States in the space race.
By 1958 NASA was formed, gathering all the nation's space activities, and the Langley Research Center was in charge of the Mercury project, the first US manned space program. It was then that the black mathematicians were integrated with the rest of NASA and tasked with making complex calculations about rocket launches. In 1959, Katherine Johnson—played in the movie by Henson—and a white colleague were the first to calculate the parameters of the first suborbital flight in 1961 of astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space. In November 2015, US President Barack Obama gave Johnson, who is now 98, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. Dorothy Vaughan, played in the movie by Octavia Spencer, died in 2008. Mary Jackson, who died in 2005, was an aeronautical engineer and is played by Janelle Monae. "Talent is distributed among all populations, whatever the color of their skin," said Shetterly. "Given a chance, people can excel in these fields." She described the story of these women as "powerful source of inspiration" that "we can learn from the past, in terms of opening the doors for people to excel today." Hidden Figures is not that kind of film: It’s a story of brilliance, but not of ego.
It’s a story of struggle and willpower, but not of individual glory. Set in 1960s Virginia, the film centers on three pioneering African American women whose calculations for NASA were integral to several historic space missions, including John Glenn’s successful orbit of the Earth. These women—Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan—were superlative mathematicians and engineers despite starting their careers in segregation-era America and facing discrimination at home, at school, and at work. And yet Hidden Figures pays tribute to its subjects by doing the opposite of what many biopics have done in the past—it looks closely at the remarkable person in the context of a community. Directed by Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent) and based on the nonfiction book of the same title by Margot Lee Shetterly, the film celebrates individual mettle, but also the way its characters consistently try to lift others up. They’re phenomenal at what they do, but they’re also generous with their time, their energy, and their patience in a way that feels humane, not saintly. By refracting the overlooked lives and accomplishments of Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson through this lens, Hidden Figures manages to be more than an inspiring history lesson with wonderful
performances. Hidden figures teaches women to follow their dreams that anyone can be anything. That mankind can get to anywhere in space. Exploration in space is the main thing that man has to figure out. The next step is to start new civilizations on other planets. Research says that it is possible in a 1000 years.