The West Computers were at the heart of the center’s advancements. The agency was dissolved in 1958, to be replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as the space race gained speed. Built in 1917, this research complex was the headquarters for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was intended to turn the floundering flying gadgets of the day into war machines. Growing up in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1970s, Shetterly lived just miles away from Langley. “Those guys have all told their stories.” Now it’s the women’s turn. “We've had astronauts, we’ve had engineers- John Glenn, Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft,” she says. The book's film adaptation, starring Octavia Spencer and Taraji P. Her new book Hidden Figures shines light on the inner details of these women’s lives and accomplishments. “These women were both ordinary and they were extraordinary,” says Margot Lee Shetterly. Called the West Computers, after the area to which they were relegated, they helped blaze a trail for mathematicians and engineers of all races and genders to follow. Many of these “computers” are finally getting their due, but conspicuously missing from this story of female achievement are the efforts contributed by courageous, African-American women. Sharp and successful, the female population at Langley skyrocketed. Ushered into the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1935 to shoulder the burden of number crunching, they acted as human computers, freeing the engineers of hand calculations in the decades before the digital age. The real Katherine Johnson, still alive and vibrant at age 98 and a recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, couldn’t have done it any better.As America stood on the brink of a Second World War, the push for aeronautical advancement grew ever greater, spurring an insatiable demand for mathematicians. She has a showstopping speech (hint: it involves those bathrooms) and the actress’ ability to put enormously complex equations on a huge chalkboard is impressive because the numbers and symbols had to be faultlessly memorized. Understandably excited to be playing significant women, the trio of lead actresses are uniformly excellent, but the film’s script is structured to make Henson the first among equals, and she takes advantage of her opportunities. Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali, a star, like Monáe, of “Moonlight”), a good man who discovers that she is more impressive than he realized. Johnson, for her part, a widow raising three daughters, catches the eye of Col. Mary, for instance, is married to the civil rights firebrand Levi (Aldis Hodge), who initially does not see her struggles as significant. “Hidden Figures” also provides glimpses of the personal lives of its characters. Out of desperation as much as anything else, Johnson is given a shot at a place on his staff, and though we know that she is as much of a wizard as Albus Dumbledore, “Hidden Figures” milks the situation for all its worth. NASA is in a dog-eat-dog race with the Soviets to put people into space, and the man in charge of the Space Task Group, crusty Al Harrison (a composite figure deftly played by Kevin Costner), is a tough nut known to eat computers for lunch. The most interesting trajectory, so to speak, turns out to be Johnson’s. Jackson wants to become an engineer, and despite how bleak her chances are (no African American woman has achieved that title to date) she is determined to make the attempt. Super-capable Vaughan, for instance, wants to be made a supervisor, but NASA is dragging its feet and her white boss Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) is not going out of her way to help. Though they all work at Langley, each of the three has a different job challenge and a different way they have to contend with the inescapable racism of the time and place. These women could not eat in the same restaurants, drink from the same water fountains or even, as brazenly becomes a major plot point, use the same restrooms as their white colleagues. As Jeff Nichols’ film “Loving” made clear this year, Virginia in 1961 was as segregated as any state in the Deep South. These three are part of what is known at Langley as the West Computing section, a group of some 20 mathematicians who were all African American women.
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