HIDDEN FIGURES
Summary
Author's Note
Author Margot Lee Shetterly explains that language that used to refer to women and African
Americans in Hidden Figures reflects the time period in which events take place.
Prologue
Author Margot Lee Shetterly describes the 2010 visit to her hometown of Hampton, Virginia, that
inspired her to write Hidden Figures. While spending a few days with her mother and father, she
is awakened to the contributions black female mathematicians made to aeronautics and
aerospace research at Langley Research Center, located in Hampton. Her father had been an
engineer at this research arm of NASA for 40 years. Though he started at Langley in 1964, he
knew many of the African American women employed as human computers during and after
World War II.
Growing up, Shetterly was unaware of the social and economic challenges African Americans
had faced in the segregated South before federal law ended segregation and Jim Crow racist
policies. Her Southern hometown of Hampton was populated by successful black engineers,
mathematicians, technologists, professors, lawyers, dentists, and other professionals.
Shetterly's father retired from NASA "an internationally respected climate scientist." In her
experience pursuing careers in science, math, and engineering was "just what black folks did."
Her father's reminiscences and some initial interviews with other retired Langley employees
opened Shetterly's eyes, as an adult, to a different reality.
In the segregated South doors to professional careers were largely closed to blacks. When the
federal government opened the door to employment at Langley in the early 1940s, five
courageous and talented black female mathematicians took advantage of the opportunity. Their
work and success at Langley, which was still segregated, paved the way for the next wave of
black hires and their successors.
The black female mathematicians worked as human computers, processing test data for
Langley. Like their white female counterparts, they worked in the shadows, unrecognized for
their valuable contributions to aeronautics research. Having stumbled upon the hidden story of
these computers, Shetterly determined to bring it out into the light. Believing the existence and
talent of these women should "never again be lost to history," she resolved to add their stories
to "the grand, sweeping narrative" of the American epic. They are the women mathematicians
who happened to be black and the black mathematicians who happened to be women who
helped America "dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology."
Analysis
The author's note expresses Shetterly's sensitivity to the aversion readers may have to words
like Negro, colored, Indian, or girls used in Hidden Figures. Language changes over time,
reflecting shifting associations and sensitivities to certain words. A widely used term may
gradually take on a negative connotation and fall out of fashion. The new term in time may take
on the same negativity, primarily because the concept behind the word has not changed. It is
the concept to which the negativity is attached. On the other hand, changes in terms can reflect
progress as people strive to find words and phrases that describe others with respect,
impartiality, and acceptance. During the era in which the events in Hidden Figures take place,
the words Negro, girls, and such were in vogue and used by blacks and whites alike. While they
reflect certain attitudes, Shetterly does not reproduce them in the book to be disrespectful.
The prologue explains how Shetterly discovers the stories of black women's contributions to
aeronautic and aerospace research and development. She begins to see their lives and careers
as bright and significant threads integral to the tapestry of 20th-century American history.
Shetterly's ignorance of their stories is both disappointing and encouraging. It is disappointing
that the women's contributions have been largely unacknowledged and undocumented. It is
encouraging that the impact of their lives and careers did change the face of science—to the
point where it seemed to Shetterly growing up in Virginia that "the face of science was brown,"
like hers. As she experienced it, working in science, math, and engineering is "just what black
folks did." Through her research and her writing, she discovers and reproduces the world as it
was when the first black female mathematicians went to Langley. She reveals how those gifted,
determined women helped change that world
Summary
Chapter 1: A Door Opens
Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory is "the oldest outpost of the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)." It is a civilian agency tasked with "advancing the scientific
understanding of aeronautics" and distributing this information to the military and private
industry. Every experiment conducted by Langley's engineers has "real-world implications."
By May 1943 the United States is embroiled in World War II. Demand for personnel to handle
work at the lab has tripled. The operation at Langley now runs three shifts a day, six days a
week. Three years earlier, in a move to strengthen national defense, President Roosevelt called
for increased production of airplanes to 50,000 a year. By 1943 America's aircraft industry is
surpassing the president's mark.
Airplanes during World War II are used for transportation of troops and supplies, for aerial
pursuit of the enemy, and for launching ship-sinking bombs. The speed and safety of the
machines are in the hands of Langley's engineers, who tirelessly test and refine the design and
structure of planes. Wind-tunnel tests and test flights conducted at the agency reveal flaws. Test
results are captured in numbers that are then analyzed. Improvements are recommended.
Accurate processing of the numbers is critical to this process and requires mathematicians who
can interpret the flow of numerical data coming from wind-tunnel tests and other research.
Since 1935 mathematicians at Langley have been mostly women. Known as "computers," they
have proven better than engineers at computing. To keep pace with Langley's growing
involvement in national defense, more mathematicians are needed in the computer pool. With
America's involvement in World War II, men are fighting, and women have stepped in to take
their places. As a result, by 1943 the labor market is stretched thin.
Two years earlier an activist named Asa Philip Randolph created a path for labor that could
address the shortage of workers. Randolph headed the largest black labor union in America. He
used his influence to persuade Roosevelt to issue Executive Orders 8802 and 9346. The first
ordered the desegregation of the defense industry; the second created the Fair Employment
Practices Committee.
Consequently, in 1943 applications of qualified black female candidates begin to reach
Langley's personnel staff. The applicants are qualified, experienced, and hired. Yet, the head of
personnel, Melvin Butler, knows the women will need a segregated space to work.
Summary
Chapter 2: Mobilization
Dorothy Vaughan is among the Negro women who work in Camp Pickett's laundry boiler plant
during the summer of 1943. Camp Pickett, Virginia, is the basic training camp for soldiers. The
women process 18,000 bundles of laundry each week. Invisible yet invaluable, the women earn
$0.40 per hour—less than all other war workers.
That summer Vaughan is 32 years old, intelligent and well educated, a math teacher, and a wife
with four children. Her home is in Farmville, Virginia, where she teaches at Robert Russa
Moton, the Negro high school. Howard, her husband, is an itinerant bellman at luxury hotels.
While the school is closed for the summer, Vaughan willingly works the summer job at Camp
Pickett to earn extra money for her children's future education, which she knows they will need
as a bulwark against a world that will require more of them and attempt to give them less in
return because they are black.
When Vaughan had applied for this summer job in the spring, she also had applied for a war job
at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Black newspapers had been encouraging readers
to submit their applications for such jobs, touting President Roosevelt's executive orders
desegregating the defense industry and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee.
Vaughan recognizes that a job in the aeronautical laboratory means stepping out of the sphere
of work typically open to blacks and into a whole new world of opportunity.
Analysis
In Chapter 1 after explaining the genesis and purpose of NACA Langley Memorial Aeronautical
Laboratory, author Margot Lee Shetterly explains why black laborers, in particular women, were
added to the defense industry workforce in the 1940s. President Roosevelt's call for increased
airplane production, America's involvement in World War II, the shortage of men to fill jobs, the
thinning ranks of white women workers, and Asa Philip Randolph's influence in Washington,
D.C., all converge in 1943. The political, social, and practical needs of a nation at war open the
doors of the defense industry to anyone who can do the job. This is a crack in the wall of racial
discrimination and Jim Crow laws that have gripped the South since the 1870s and robbed the
country of a rich human resource: black Americans, who are waiting to fully participate in
American democracy. Within the wartime government and defense industry, segregation, with
its deep roots in the past, now must take a back seat to the urgent needs of the present.
At Langley employing Negroes presents some logistical problems for Melvin Butler. Despite
federal desegregation laws, Jim Crow laws still dictate the social separation of blacks and
whites in the workplace. Butler will need to establish separate workspaces for the new black
employees. Fortunately for Butler, segregation will prove less important than the needs of the
laboratory for most of its employees, black and white. And neither he nor the black female
mathematicians he hires have an inkling that this move will end at the Moon. No one predicts
the technological, social, and cultural transformations that the next few decades will bring.
Analysis
Chapter 2 introduces Dorothy Vaughan and how she is drawn into the work at Langley.
Intelligent, highly educated, a teacher, and concerned for her children, Vaughan is also
ambitious and ready for a challenge. Recognizing that the "Negro's ladder to the American
dream" is missing rungs, she values education above all else as a bulwark against economic
uncertainty. She is not too proud to work hard at a menial job if it means the future will be
securer.
Summary
Chapter 3: Past Is Prologue
The 1943 school year begins at Farmville's Robert Russa Moton High School. Dorothy Vaughan
and her 12 fellow teachers welcome 301 students to the overcrowded facility. Vaughan will be
teaching arithmetic and algebra in the auditorium alongside two other classes. In addition to
teaching, she will tutor struggling students after school, work with the school choir, and
participate in community support for the war effort.
Her life abruptly changes with an acceptance letter from Langley, where she has been
appointed mathematician, Grade P-1, at pay more than twice her current salary. While this is
what she hoped for, the civil-service appointment means relocating to Newport News, Virginia,
and leaving behind her home, her job, her extended family, and her children. She takes comfort
in the knowledge that her children will be surrounded by caring family and neighbors.
Dorothy's husband, Howard, travels a great deal in his career as an itinerant bellman. She is
unsure what affect her new job will have on the marriage. She has supported his unusual
career, even accompanying him in 1942 to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where he
worked at the Greenbrier. An enormous, white-columned resort in peacetime, Greenbrier
functioned as a prisoner-of-war camp for German and Japanese detainees.
During this time Vaughan and the children befriended Joshua and Joylette Coleman, residents
of White Sulphur Springs. Among their four children was a grown daughter named Katherine
(Katherine Johnson). In 1940 Johnson's superior intelligence and gift for mathematics had
earned her admission to a university to pursue a graduate degree. In summer 1940 she had
entered the newly integrated West Virginia University. However, she chose not to complete the
graduate program, choosing instead "a life as a full-time wife and mother."
Fifteen years earlier Vaughan had similarly set aside her own ambitions. Now, a second chance
is opening up for her—a chance "to unleash her professional potential." Eventually, Johnson will
follow the same path "down the road to Newport News" to meet her destiny at Langley.
Summary
Chapter 4: The Double V
Newport News is a city near the Hampton Roads harbor. Located near Hampton, Virginia, home
of Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, the city is where Dorothy Vaughan and thousands
of other war workers will be housed. It is a wartime boomtown; "a powerful military capital," in
which the war operates around the clock. To address the housing shortage caused by the
explosion in civilian population, the city features "the world's largest defense housing project,"
located in the East End of Newport News. The housing is segregated; Newsome Park houses
1,200 blacks, and Copeland Park houses 4,000 whites. Vaughan rents a room in a home on the
periphery of Newsome Park.
In Newport News, as in all other Southern cities, the lines of segregation separating whites from
blacks are everywhere. Problems arise most frequently on buses and trolleys, now overcrowded
with employees coming and going to their war jobs, 24 hours a day; 6 days a week. Necessity
often requires breaking rules that were designed to keep the races separate. This and the
general pressure of daily life in Newport News and other boomtowns across the country steadily
push racial tensions toward a breaking point.
In January 1941 President Roosevelt told the American people in his State of the Union
address, "Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world" are entitled to
freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear. The president then committed
the United States to defeating the dictators who would rob people of these freedoms. While
blacks agree with these sentiments and are horrified by the brutal treatment of Jews by Nazi
Germany, they cannot help comparing it to their own decades-long battle against
institutionalized discrimination. The contradiction between the American ideals driving the war
effort and the ongoing injustice of segregation in America cannot be ignored. Some blacks
wonder if they should fight for their country and, if so, what they will be fighting for.
Even so, the December 1941 attack on PearlHarbor was a rallying cry. Across the nation blacks
"geared up to fight, for their country's future and for their own." With optimism they looked for a
double victory: over America's enemies from without and over the enemies within: those "who
perpetrate these ugly prejudices" that will "destroy our democratic form of government."
Analysis
As the title "Past Is Prologue" suggests, the past was preparation for the opportunity that will
unleash Dorothy Vaughan's potential. She had assumed the die of her life had been cast when
she gave up a scholarship to study math at Howard University. Now, all that is about to change.
Also in keeping with the title, the chapter introduces Katherine Johnson, whose participation in
aeronautical research at Langley will not begin for many years. The pattern of her life mirrors
Vaughan's. She is gifted with numbers, achieves scholastic recognition, and sets aside her
ambitions to be a wife and raise children. The lives of the two women intersect briefly in 1942 in
White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. This is prologue for the time when Vaughan will welcome
Johnson to West Area Computing and, for a brief period, be her supervisor.
Chapter 3 also describes the substandard conditions of Farmville's Russa Moton High School,
where Vaughan works. As the school year begins, 301 students crowd into a school designed
for 180 students. There are only eight classrooms and no cafeteria, gymnasium, or student
lockers. The students and their parents are hungry for the education that can provide some
measure of security in the segregated South. Overcrowded, underfunded, segregated schools
like Russa Moton are emblematic of the inefficient system created by Jim Crow laws and the
"separate but equal" doctrine behind them. Often the result was inadequate funding for all
schools in a region.
Analysis
Chapter 4
Jim Crow laws and segregation are on full display in the Chapter 4 description of Newport News
and Hampton, Virginia, especially in transportation and housing. The segregated conditions
illustrate the dilemma facing black Americans: at a time when their country needs them and
calls upon their patriotism, it still insists on a dividing line that violates their basic rights to
freedom and equality—the ideals driving America's participation in World War II. Their answer to
the question "What are we fighting for?" is to turn their country's need into an opportunity to
wage war and win on two fronts: for their country and for their race.
Summary
Chapter 5: Manifest Destiny
On Dorothy Vaughan's first day at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, she boards the
Langley shuttle bus for the laboratory's West Area. The West Area occupies the grounds of
several old plantations now owned by the federal government. A forested back road connects
the area with the rest of Langley's campus. In addition to a collection of two-story brick
buildings, there is a 16-foot-high speed tunnel for research tests. Vaughan is assigned to the
Warehouse Building, where she will be "engaged in aeronautical research at its most granular
level," helping to answer the question, "What makes things fly?" All the human computers in the
Warehouse Building office where she works are female, and they are black. The white female
computers are assigned to the East Area.
Many of the women with whom Vaughan will work are graduates of Hampton Institute's
Engineering for Women training classes. Others come from farther afield, and like Vaughan,
many bring years of teaching to the job. The head of her section is Margery Hannah, formerly
an East Aria computer. Hannah reports to Virginia Tucker, the head computer in charge of
Langley's entire computer operation.
Langley is the NACA's flagship laboratory. Two additional research laboratories have been
established at Moffett Field, California, (1939) and Cleveland, Ohio (1940). Working together,
they scramble to keep up with America's rapidly expanding aircraft industry, which by 1943 is at
the top of the industry. The course of events has made it clear that the war is "being fought in
the laboratories as well as on the battlefields." Through research, military aircraft are becoming
"as powerful, safe, and efficient as possible." Good minds and highly specialized skills have
made this possible.
Langley employees are "a mélange of black and white, male and female, blue-collar and white-
collar workers." Yet racial divisions are clearly marked by the separated working spaces, the
"Colored girls" bathrooms, and signs in the cafeteria designating where "Colored Computers"
may sit. In an act of defiance Miriam Mann, a black computer, launches a private war with the
unseen hands that placed the sign on that table. She hides the first sign and thereafter hides its
replacements every time they appear.
There are whites among Langley's executives and employees—especially the engineers from
northern and western states—who defy Southern conventions and stand up to prejudice. Their
main concern is whether a person can do the job and do it well. The West computers
understand that these "were the ones who had the power to break down the barriers that
existed at Langley."
Summary
Chapter 6: War Birds
Around the country readers of black newspapers are following the heroic achievements of the
Tuskegee airmen. These outstanding black pilots embody the Double V objectives. Dubbed
"Tan Yanks" by the black press, airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group are eventually assigned P-
51 Mustang planes, considered "the best plane in the world." Assuring that these planes let the
men do their job and return safely home is now the full-time job of Dorothy Vaughan and the
other West Area computers. New aerodynamic concepts and their application are being
discovered and developed at a breathtaking pace. For their part the computers are being trained
in engineering physics, with courses in the fundamental theory of aerodynamics and hands-on
training in one of the lab's wind tunnels. Their teachers are the laboratory's most talented
physicists.
In the early days of flight, progress was slow and dangerous. It was built on "disciplined
experimentation, rigorous mathematics, insight, and luck." Planes were conceived of in theory,
built, and tested. If the inventor and researcher did not die in the process, what he learned was
applied to the next attempt. Out of this grew the professions of aeronautical engineer and test
pilot. Test pilots risked their lives pushing an airplane to its limits to identify how it could be
improved. Wind tunnels were a step forward in safety, providing "the research benefits of flight
tests but without the danger." They allowed researchers to closely observe how air flowed
around full-sized and scale-model planes. At Langley a variety of wind tunnels was constructed
to test different combinations of "pressure, velocity, and dimension.”
Computers like Dorothy Vaughan are expected to master the mathematics for figuring how
closely the performance of a wind tunnel comes to mimicking actual flight. These figures are
then used to build wind tunnels that simulate real-world conditions, which is key to the NACA's
success. Langley's talented engineers then gather raw data from wind-tunnel tests. This raw
data is sent to computers for analysis.
Among the planes the NACA develops and refines is the B-29 Superfortress, capable of "flying
farther, faster, and with a heavier bomb load than any plane in history." It delivers the atomic
bombs to Japan on August 6 and August 9, 1945.
Analysis
Chapter 5 provides an overview of Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory: its physical
organisation, workforce structure and hierarchy, and the campus and office culture, as well as
the importance of aeronautical research to the war effort and success. It also sketches out
Langley's specific contributions to advances in aeronautics that are helping win the war, like the
SBD Dauntless dive bomber that helped win the Battle of Midway in June 1942. As Dorothy
Vaughan soon learns through her work, an airplane is "a terrifically complex bundle of physics
that could be tweaked to serve the needs of different situations." Their designs can be refined
through research and testing, taking them from good to great. With research, engineers and
human computers have analysed, refined, and transformed the Dauntless—a previously
unreliable prototype—into a formidable weapon and decisive force at Midway, one of America's
most important naval victories in the Pacific. The effectiveness of NACA Langley's research
methods is further evidenced by the fact that, at the peak of World War II, "every single
American military airplane in production was based ... upon research results and
recommendations of the NACA." This is largely thanks to the unheralded human computers who
analysed the data, crunched the numbers, and plotted the results for engineers to utilise.
While advances in aeronautics leap ahead, race relations within Langley progress more slowly.
The door has opened on opportunities for black female mathematicians. Langley has invited
them into the workforce, selecting them for their intellectual talents. Nevertheless, the women
are reminded daily of their "otherness" by "Colored" signs marking bathrooms and tables in the
cafeteria. The signs are proof that federal laws paving the way for them to work at Langley still
defer to the state laws that keep them "in their separate place.”
Analysis
Chapter 6 traces the evolution of research at Langley from the early days of flight, when
researchers risked their lives to test their theories, through the era of aeronautical engineers
and test pilots and the use of wind tunnels. Author Shetterly stresses the critical nature of a
human computer's work in designing war planes that will let fighter pilots do their job and bring
them home safely. The women are immersed in engineering physics and the fundamental
theory of aerodynamics, as well as hands-on training in Langley's wind tunnels. They are part of
a larger team conducting disciplined experimentation. And their work is making a difference in
the outcome of the war. From this perspective they are participating fully in America's fight and
proving the time has come for blacks to receive full rights.
