As we left, with my mouth a little open, my question was "Why had we never heard of these women?" This movie was beautiful and had everything that makes a movie worthwhile. I think it is an important movie, I have always considered the work done by NASA as one of America's greatest achievements. There is nothing that shows how smart we monkeys are as figuring out how to break free of this round cage and exploring the mysteries of the dark sky. I always assumed it was a bunch of white guys in white shirts who did all the work to get those space cowboys up into the stratosphere and back, not from racism, but it is just the way it seemed.
The story follows three African American women who are part of the NASA team charged with getting us to catch up and beat the Russians into space and beyond. According to the movie, there were about twenty "colored" girls and they would be used sporadically as fill-ins in any department as needed. Katherine G. Johnson is born with a mathematical mind, they show her as a small child where the parents are told that she needs to go to Institute, since where they live, blacks are offered public schooling only into 8th grade. She manages to graduate from high school at 14, and enrolls into West Virginia State College. She is one of the first to desegregate a graduate school but leaves after a year to get married and start a family. Dorothy Vaughn is a little older than the other two girls and has been playing supervisor to the group of "colored girls", but because of the way things were, they refuse to promote her. She notices new IBM mainframe computers being brought in, and starts self teaching herself Fortran, an early computer programming language. Eventually, she figures out some things and makes herself necessary for the computers to be more efficient. She even manages to teach the rest of the pool of girls she supervises Fortran and at least in the movie, we see her being promoted and moving over to the section with the IBM computers. The third lady, Mary Jackson, becomes NASA's first black female engineer, also has many challenges.
In one scene that we really feel is when Katherine just runs back into the room, is soaking wet and the Director played by Kevin Costner comes down hard on her asking where she disappears to for 40 minutes every day. She has a bit of a breakdown as she explains that there are no "colored" bathrooms anywhere in the west side of the campus, so she has to run all the way across campus. And then she continues on how she is told to dress a certain way and the only jewelry she can wear is a simple strand of pearls, which she explains she is paid so poorly, there is no way she could ever afford a strand of pearls. Then to top it off, she has to drink substandard coffee from an old coffee maker because some of the other white engineers don't want to share the coffeemaker with a black girl. The Kevin Costner character very boldly goes and destroys a "colored" sign over a bathroom. He states NASA is no longer segregated, after all "we all pee the same color."
I couldn't help but think as they showed JFK the difference between a great president daring us to explore the unknown and daring us to beat our competition to the frontiers of space, compared to the fool we have today whose lasting legacy might be isolating us from the rest of the world, and a wall.
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