Exploring the intimate relationships among blackness, womanhood, and 20th-century American technological development, Shetterly crafts a narrative that is crucial to understanding subsequent movements for civil rights. Shetterly collects much of her material directly from those who were there, using personal anecdotes to illuminate the larger forces at play. She celebrates the skills of mathematicians such as Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Hoover, whose brilliant work eventually earned them slow advancement but never equal footing.
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Shetterly writes of these women as core contributors to American success in the midst of a cultural "collision between race, gender, science, and war," teasing out how the personal and professional are intimately related. The first women NACA brought on took advantage of a WWII opportunity to work in a segregated section of Langley, doing the calculations necessary to support the projects of white male engineers. It became a focal point of the black community in Hampton Roads. The community was built during the Depression, a subdivision designed and built for blacks, by blacks.
The new black economic migrants to the region, like Dorothy, settled in a neighborhood called Newsome Park.
Today we think of computers as machines, but in the 1940s, computers were. Hidden Figures Discrimination Example 2: Newsome Park. It tells the inspirational story of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden who worked as computers. Shetterly, founder of the Human Computer Project, passionately brings to light the important and little-known story of the black women mathematicians hired to work as computers at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Va., part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA's precursor). Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly is a powerful picture book that promotes gender roles, tolerance, inquirers and perseverance.
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