Saddled with a stack of calculations, we watch her hunched over on the toilet seat, pen in hand, as she tries not to waste even a second away from her desk. Each day, stack of papers in hand, high heels wobbling, Katherine must belt half a mile across Langley to use the dilapidated “colored bathroom” on west campus (often to the soundtrack of Pharrell’s “Runnin’”). The woman chides: “I have no idea where your bathroom is.” Thus commences Katherine’s humiliating daily cardio routine. When Katherine is assigned to help calculate launch and landing trajectories at NASA’s Space Task Group on east campus, she asks her white female colleague (and the only other woman working there) where the bathroom is located. (Her narrative is intercut with the amazing stories of her colleagues: Dorothy Vaughan became NASA’s first black supervisor and an expert programmer in the early days of computers, while Mary Jackson would go on to become NASA’s first African-American female engineer.) But it’s not an easy road. Our protagonist is Katherine, a numerical genius who hand-calculated the spacecraft trajectories that helped astronaut John Glenn become the first American to orbit the Earth. Confined to a cramped basement office on Langley’s west campus (the white computers worked on the east campus), these women used their intellect and ingenuity to go where no women of color had ever gone before, while being routinely denied opportunities for advancement and confined to segregated dining areas and bathrooms. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson ( Janelle Monáe) - who worked as “human computers” in the all-black “West Computing” group of NASA’s Langley research lab in Hampton, Virginia, in the late 1950s and ’60s. Hidden Figures, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, tells the story of three brilliant mathematicians - Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. It says something that the most memorable scenes in Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures, the new biopic about the black women of NASA’s Langley Research Center, take place not in the starry reaches of outer space, but in and around a women’s bathroom. Henson, and Octavia Spencer in Hidden Figures.
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