Shining a light on black space heroes
Hidden Figures tells the story of three black women whose contribution to space travel was never acknowledged
THE date is 20 February 1962; the mission: to send astronaut John Glenn into space to orbit Earth, observe how his body reacts and bring him home safely. It’s a spectacular success: Glenn orbits Earth three times and returns home a national hero, a celebrated symbol of American ambition and accomplishment.
Yet what many people didn’t know was that behind the scenes three women worked tirelessly to ensure his safe journey and return – a trio of AfricanAmericans known as the “human computers” who were the brains behind the mission despite having to deal with the soul-crushing segregation laws of the time.
Their story is now the subject of the movie Hidden Figures, the dark horse to emerge from the shadows at the recent Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards and snatch away best ensemble cast from frontrunner Manchester By The Sea.
Oscar glory is now touted for the film, which is being described as the breakout movie of the year.
It stars Octavia Spencer, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in the 2011 film The Help; singersongwriter Janelle Monáe, who gives a stellar performance in only her second acting role; and Taraji P Henson, best known as the brash Cookie Lyon in the hit TV series Empire.
“This film is about unity,” Taraji said in her SAG acceptance speech, in which she praised her co-stars and the reallife American heroes they portray in the film – physicist and mathematician Katherine Johnson (who she plays), mathematician Dorothy Vaughan (played by Octavia) and mathematician and aerospace engineer Mary Jackson (played by Janelle).
“Without them we wouldn’t know how to reach for the stars.”
But it was her conclusion uttered in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s controversial immigration ban that moved her co-stars and the audience to tears.
“This story is about what happens when we put our differences aside and we come together as a human race. We win. Love wins. Every time.”
THE movie is based on the 2016 book by Margot Lee Shetterly, a writer, researcher and entrepreneur who knew about Mary, Katherine and Dorothy through her father who also worked for Nasa. “While I knew about the women I didn’t know their story and how they got there. It was really my husband, Aran, who helped spark the idea. He said, ‘Hey, I’ve never heard this before,’ when he was talking to my dad at Christmas
six years ago. That was the beginning of me saying, ‘Okay, I need to know this story.’ Six years later here we are.”
Film producer Donna Gigliotti, whose producing credits include the Oscar winner Silver Linings Playbook, approached Shetterly (48) about turning her book into a movie. “I’d like to prove that women can power a movie to great success, that African-Americans can power a movie to great success. You don’t have to keep making movies for white boys,” she told her.
In 2015, only 32 of the top 100 films at the box office featured a female lead or co-lead, only three of those leads were women of colour and almost half of them didn’t feature a black female character in any capacity, according to news site The Atlantic.
And as writer and filmmaker Austin S Harris put it in the Huffington Post, “no black woman has ever been nominated for playing someone with a college education . . . black women have a long history of playing maids in movies”.
But “people are hearing the message and they’re feeling the message”, Octavia believes. “I realised that as an actress in this film, representing people who are largely underrepresented, that we can make a difference,” she said after the SAGs.
Octavia (46) also won the praise of her co-stars when she bought out entire cinemas in the US to ensure low-income families would have an opportunity to see the film.
So moved was she by the story of Mary Jackson, who became Nasa’s first black woman engineer, that Janelle (31) shelved the album she’d been working on for four years. “I was a bit puzzled and upset that as a young woman of colour, I had no clue who these women were,” she says. “I knew I had to drop what I was doing and make sure no other young girl or boy would go on without knowing about these brilliant women who helped get America into space.”
THE “brilliant” women depicted in the movie are hidden figures no more. While Dorothy and Mary aren’t alive to see their legacy come alive on the big screen, the movie’s main character, Katherine Johnson, has seen the film three times.
Now 98, Katherine loved it and felt the actors did a good job of representing her and her fellow “human computers”. She eventually married Corporal Jim Johnson (played by Oscar nominee and SAG winner Mahershala Ali) and they still live in Hampton Virginia, where the film is set.
Katherine – whose job it was to calculate the trajectories of spacecraft – was instrumental in the launches of Project Mercury and Apollo 11 and the Space Shuttle programme.
But she’s modest about her contribution to space travel. “There’s nothing to it, I was just doing my job,” she says. Taraji (46) had a tougher time doing her job because she felt immense pressure honouring the influence of someone who was still living. She overcame the pressure by speaking to Katherine at length about her experiences of working in a male-dominated industry in the segregated South.
“What I admire most about them is that they didn’t focus on the problems, they focused on the solutions. There’s a reason why it [the film] was made now and not two years ago, not five years, not 10 years ago – because the universe needed it now,” Taraji says.
Katherine’s daughter Joylette, also a maths graduate and systems engineer and programmer, has seen the film – which has sparked interest from young girls who now want to study maths – nine times.
“It’s wonderful,” she says. “Despite my mom’s humility, everyone’s finding out what she did.”
Hidden Figures opens in SA cinemas on 24 February.
The book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly is available from Takealot.com at R219.