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Speaker 1: Major funding for Backstory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

Speaker 2: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities this is Backstory with the American history guys.

Brian: Hey, Backstory listeners. 'Tis the season for going to the movies. There are a lot of great films coming out this time of year, but one film in particular caught our eye. Hidden Figures, which is playing in theaters this holiday season.

Speaker 4: You have identification on you?

Speaker 5: We're just on our way to work at NASA, sir.

Speaker 4: I had no idea they hired.

Speaker 6: There are quite a few women working in the space program.

Brian: It's a story of black women mathematicians who played a critical role at NASA at the height of the space race, and it's based on a book written by a friend mine Margot Lee Shetterly.

Margot welcome to Backstory.

Margot Lee S.: Hey, Brian. It's awesome to be here on Backstory with you.

Brian: Before we dive into this story that your book tells I want you to give us a quick version of what we'll see in the movie.

Margot Lee S.: You know, the people of the movie, who produced the movie, came up with a tagline. Something like this: The people behind the story you know. That's really what it is. So, everybody has seen the story of the space program. We've seen the white shirted, black tied, white guys in mission control, and we've seen the heroic astronauts like John Glenn, who recently passed away. But what we haven't seen are all of the people, the thousands of people, involved in making all of those big moments a reality.

So, Hidden Figures is about a particular group of those people, African-American Women, working as professional mathematicians, or human computers, as they were once known, who did a lot of the necessary math behind those successful space launches.

Brian: When I think of computers I think of pushing a button and stuff gets done. What did these human computers do at NASA?

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Margot Lee S.: You know, Brian, not that long ago computer was simply a job title that meant someone who computed, or somebody who spent all of their day processing numbers. So, think of this room full of women as a living Microsoft Excel spreadsheet-

Brian: Wow.

Margot Lee S.: Yeah. Sitting at a desk, let's say, five by five, 20 women in a room sitting at a desk with a mechanical desktop calculator. At its simplest form these women were taking the numbers that were generated either through wind tunnel testing, or through flying planes with instruments and getting reading, and then putting them through equations so that you could then come up with some understanding of how to make a plane, let's say, faster. How changing the shape of a wing would make it fly through the air more efficiently.

And, of course, then in the 1960s these women worked on Project Mercury, which was America's first manned space flight program. They worked on Project Apollo, which got us to the moon. So, these women, one number at a time, they had an impact on so much of the 20th century.

Brian: Your book goes well back into the 1930s. And why don't you set the scene for us as some of these African-American computers, or colored computers, as they were called, started working for NACA, the forerunner to NASA in the 1940s?

Margot Lee S.: Sure. So, I just want to say that one of the reasons for the title Hidden Figures is because behind the things that we see there's so many things and people we don't see. Behind the spectacular space launches were decades of work on airplanes. Behind Martin Luther King was a gentleman named A. Phillip Randolph, and he's really a key to this story. He's an early civil rights leader, labor leader, who during World War II pressured then President Roosevelt to integrate the civil service, the defense industry, make sure that these great new war jobs, that were bringing America out of the depression, that African- Americans ... And not only African-Americans, but Jews and Poles and Mexican, basically those jobs were open to all.

So, about two years after A. Phillip Randolph pressured Roosevelt into signing an executive order opening those jobs the first five black women walked through the door-

Brian: What year is that? Is that 1943?

Margot Lee S.: That's 1943. And it was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. They worked on airplanes-

Brian: NACA.

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Margot Lee S.: At NACA, exactly. And these black women, like their white counterparts, many of them started their careers as math teachers. If you're a woman and you were good at math, well, most likely you were going to be a math teacher. But when World War II happened the demand for aeronautical research was skyrocketing-

Brian: So to speak.

Margot Lee S.: Exactly. So to speak literally. They started searching for all of the talented math minds they could get, and that meant women, and that meant black women. And that's where our story begins.

Brian: Well, Margot you grew up in Hampton, Virginia as the daughter of somebody who worked at NASA. And I want to know how your research, and the book you wrote changed how you think about this period of American history.

Margot Lee S.: Yes. That is true. I grew up in Hampton, Virginia. My dad, who is now retired, spent his entire career at NASA Langley Research Center, where the story takes place. He was an atmosphere scientist, research scientist, and he knew and worked with many of the women that I write about. So, I had the very good fortune of growing up and seeing these women. They were people who got up and went to work every day, they were people who, some of them, I went to school with their kids, or grandkids, or see them in the grocery store. So, it was a really wonderful thing to see that there was no conflict between being black or woman and a scientist.

Brian: Yet there was a lot of conflict being African-American in a Jim Crow society. Tell me about the working environment. These women worked in a separate building, as I understand it.

Margot Lee S.: That is correct. So, we have to remember that all of this is happening in Virginia, a Jim Crow state, that by law required racial segregation. So, these women worked in a separate room, they were actually in a building that had other work groups, white work groups.

Brian: So, separate room.

Margot Lee S.: Yep. They had a separate bathroom, and they had a separate table in the lunch room for colored computers, which sounds like an iMac or something. There was a sign on the lunch table clearly indicating that that's where they were to sit. And a computer named Miriam Mann every day she took the colored computer sign off the table, put it in her purse, and took it home.

Brian: And what happened the next day?

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Margot Lee S.: Well, the next day the sign came back. This battle went on for a while. The sign went away, she took it and put in her purse, and then finally the sign didn't come back.

Brian: Wow.

Margot Lee S.: We think of the big victories, these great sweeping civil rights victories. Well, you know what? That was a real victory as well giving those women, who had come there and had been hired for their intellect, and who did the same work as their white counterparts, it allowed them just a little bit more dignity that they should have based on the work they were doing. And based on the fact that they were humans, and we believe in human rights and equality.

So, in 1943, when those women started at the NACA, they had the segregated facilities. In 1957 when the NACA converted into NASA, the space agency which we know very well, NASA started life without those segregated facilities. So, the changes in society toward work place equality toward greater integration and greater opportunities for African-Americans, greater advancement opportunities for women. And we see this having real concrete effects on the prospects and the lives of the women that I wrote about.

Brian: Well, now that you've taken us through this story I want to return to your own roots in the Hampton area. You grew up with the women that you write about, you saw them in the grocery store, at bake sales. Did that familiarity kind of blind you to just how exceptional they had been?

Margot Lee S.: Yes. I mean, I think the good part about it is I got to grow up with these women, and to see them as normal people. And when you see someone as normal, even if they're very good at their job, it really doesn't feel out of reach. It really expands the idea of what you might do. But I do think that's the reason why it took so long for this story to come to light in this way. We, in Hampton, Virginia, so many of us knew this story. Or I should say we knew the women, but it took us a long time to discover this story. And really writing this story was a way for me to write my own origin story. As someone who figured that I'd go to school wherever I wanted to go to school, find a job that would equal my abilities and my ambition. None of that could be taken for granted by these women.

They came from all over the region to my home town of Hampton, Virginia not knowing what to expect, very much like immigrants from another country. Leaving an all black world to integrate into a white world with all of the anxieties that attended that. And with all of the ambitions, the hopes for their family, and the hopes for people who looked like them, the understanding that everything that they did had the implication for other African-Americans and other women.

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So, that all of that happened in my home town that they were able to provide their shoulders for my father, a black man, to come into NASA Langley in the 1960s. The fruits of it, which were my life, I took for granted. But going back and digging into those roots it took me most of my adult life to leave Hampton and to realize that the most interesting work that I'd ever do was actually there all the time.

Brian: Margot thank you for revealing some of the people and the stories behind Hidden Figures, and joining us on Backstory today.

Margot Lee S.: Brian it was my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.

Brian: Margot Lee Shetterly is the author of Hidden Figures the American and dream and the untold story of the black women mathematicians who helped win the space race.

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