Overall Favorite Books of 2016
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12.
HIDDEN FIGURES
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“No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But
a woman! What more can you ask to be?” astronomer
Maria Mitchell, who paved
the way for women in American science,
admonished the first class of female astronomers at Vassar in 1876. By the middle
of the next century, a team of unheralded women scientists and engineers
were powering
space exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Meanwhile, across the continent and in what
was practically another country, a parallel but very different revolution was
taking place: In the segregated South, a growing number of black female
mathematicians, scientists, and engineers were steering early space exploration
and helping American win the Cold War at NASA’s Langley Research Center in
Hampton, Virginia.
Long before the term “computer” came to
signify the machine that dictates our lives, these remarkable women were
working as human “computers” — highly skilled professional reckoners, who
thought mathematically and computationally for their living and for their
country. When Neil Armstrong set his foot on the moon, his “giant leap for
mankind” had been powered by womankind, particularly by Katherine Johnson — the
“computer” who calculated Apollo 11’s launch windows and who was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama at age 97 in 2015, three years
after the accolade was conferred upon John Glenn, the astronaut whose flight
trajectory Johnson had made possible.
In Hidden
Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (public
library), Margot Lee Shetterly tells
the untold story of these brilliant women, once on the frontlines of our
cultural leaps and since sidelined by the selective collective memory we call
history.
She writes:
Just as islands — isolated places with
unique, rich biodiversity — have relevance for the ecosystems everywhere, so
does studying seemingly isolated or overlooked people and events from the past
turn up unexpected connections and insights to modern life.
Against a sobering cultural backdrop,
Shetterly captures the enormous cognitive dissonance the very notion of these
black female mathematicians evokes:
Before a computer became an inanimate
object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed
the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme
Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established
that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther
King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial, Langley’s West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics,
space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as
female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also
female.
Shetterly herself grew up in Hampton, which
dubbed itself “Spacetown USA,” amid this archipelago of women who were her
neighbors and teachers. Her father, who had built his first rocket in his early
teens after seeing the Sputnik launch, was one of Langley’s African American
scientists in an era when words we now shudder to hear were used instead of
“African American.” Like him, the first five black women who joined Langley’s
research staff in 1943 entered a segregated NASA — even though, as Shetterly
points out, the space agency was among the most inclusive workplaces in the
country, with more than fourfold the percentage of black scientists and
engineers than the national average.
Over the next forty years, the number of
these trailblazing black women mushroomed to more than fifty, revealing the
mycelia of a significant groundswell. Shetterly’s favorite Sunday school
teacher had been one of the early computers — a retired NASA mathematician
named Kathleen Land. And so Shetterly, who considers herself “as much a product
of NASA as the Moon landing,” grew up believing that black women simply
belonged in science and space exploration as a matter of course — after all,
they populated her father’s workplace and her town, a town whose church
“abounded with mathematicians.”
Embodying astronomer Vera Rubin’s wisdom
on how
modeling expands children’s scope of possibility, Shetterly reflects on this normalizing and rousing
power of example:
Building 1236, my father’s daily
destination, contained a byzantine complex of government-gray cubicles,
perfumed with the grown-up smells of coffee and stale cigarette smoke. His
engineering colleagues with their rumpled style and distracted manner seemed
like exotic birds in a sanctuary. They gave us kids stacks of discarded 11×14
continuous-form computer paper, printed on one side with cryptic arrays of
numbers, the blank side a canvas for crayon masterpieces. Women occupied many
of the cubicles; they answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but they
also made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and conferred with my father
and other men in the office on the stacks of documents that littered their
desks. That so many of them were African American, many of them my
grandmother’s age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things:
growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.
[…]
The
community certainly included black English professors, like my mother, as well
as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors, and contractors,
black cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents, and undertakers, several
black lawyers, and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child,
however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and
engineering that I thought that’s just what black folks did.
BRAIN PICKINGS
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