Under pressure from African-American civil rights leaders, the Roosevelt Administration took steps to desegregate the industry and open up defense jobs to black female applicants as well. And that meant hiring an army of number-crunchers (“computers” as they were known at the time). Aeronautics was an intensely quantitative field: designing and testing combat planes produced a deluge of numerical data that needed to be processed and analyzed. This was especially true of the aeronautics and defense industry, which was crucial to the American war effort.įacilities like Langley began to hire qualified women in large numbers to work as mathematicians and number-crunchers. World War Twoĭuring World War Two, the gradual dismantling of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation began, as the demands of the war economy brought African-Americans and women into jobs and industries from which they had previously been excluded. It was here, in the heartland of American segregation, that a group of extraordinary women, including Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson, helped their country break through the color barrier and leap into the great unknown. The scene of their success was the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. Overcoming racist and sexist discrimination, these women established themselves as brilliant mathematicians and engineers and helped lead the United States to victory in some of the pivotal moments of the Cold War-era space race-including John Glenn’s 1962 orbit of the Earth and the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race tells the story of a group of African-American women who, over a period of over 25 years, made major contributions to the US space program during its golden age. 1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Hidden Figures
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