She mined NASA’s thick files and oral histories.
For those who were deceased, Shetterly interviewed their children and grandchildren to learn details.
Several of the women were in their 70s, 80s and 90s. He and his wife gave the names of human computers they knew to their daughter. “A lot of times we didn’t know what the other person was doing. “There were so many African Americans around me, and I just thought of it as we were doing our jobs,” Lee says. He was in the midst of pioneers but didn’t see it as historic. He retired from NASA in 2004 as a climate scientist who had lectured around the world. Her father had joined NASA in 1966 as a co-op college student from Norfolk State University and worked with several of these women over the years. Margot Lee Shetterly, on researching Hidden Figures … It’s one thing to realize that, but it’s another thing to say, ‘I am an agent for change.’” “When you grow up in the ’70s and ’80s, you get black history as slavery. Hundreds of women worked as computers, but the Jim Crow culture kept the black women segregated into their own West Area Computing group, housing and bathrooms. He rattled off the names of other women, African-American and white, who, beginning in the 1930s, used their acute math skills, slide rules and adding machines to do what no one had done before. Her father, Robert Lee III, mentioned that her former Sunday school teacher had been a human computer at NASA. Shetterly got the idea for her book when she and her husband were visiting her parents in Hampton in 2010. “It’s a history that isn’t complete, and I’m looking in the mirror and not seeing myself. “When you grow up in the ’70s and ’80s, you get black history as slavery,” Shetterly said in a phone interview from her home in Charlottesville.
She didn’t realize how historic these women were until she started doing the research in 2010. Shetterly (Com ’91) had grown up with scientists, technologists and physicists at church and family gatherings. A movie based on the book, starring Oscar winners Octavia Spencer and Kevin Costner, will be released in December. It follows the paths of female African-American mathematicians and computer programmers who furthered the space program and calculated the launch windows for NASA’s first flights in 1961.
Those pieces finally coalesced into her recently released book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, which debuted in the top 10 of the New York Times’ bestseller list on Sept. They were in her church, in her mother’s sorority and with her father in the National Technical Association, the country’s oldest African-American technical organization. Margot Lee Shetterly (Com ’91) at her home in Charlottesville
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