Summary
In 1960, the Greensboro Four sit at a Woolworth’s counter in North Carolina and refuse to leave until they’re served. These nonviolent protests, called sit-ins, spread throughout the South, despite prison sentences and white retaliation. Christine Mann joins them as a university student in Hampton, Virginia. Virginian schools are inching now toward desegregation, but Dorothy Vaughan’s previous home, Farmville, is in a county that completely defunds the school system rather than integrate.
Langley heads in the opposite direction, with the old West Computers spread throughout the building. Men take on this work now, too, as technology advances and “computers” become tools for humans to work with—and a definite path to a career for male mathematicians. Vaughan reinvents herself as a computer programmer; engineers still come to her, and she takes the calculations to an IBM 704 computer instead of a West Computer, translating the equations into FORTRAN. NASA constructs a worldwide network of tracking stations to keep in communication with astronauts in late 1960. In 1961, the U.S. cuts ties with Cuba; John F. Kennedy replaces Eisenhower as president; and in April—without warning America—Russia sends Yuri Gagarin into space, where he becomes the first human in space and the first to orbit the earth.
With 1.2 million tests, multiple failures, a chimpanzee named Ham sent into space, and three and a half years of work, NASA puts out a live broadcast of their first manned mission (carrying astronaut Alan Shepard). 45 million Americans tune in to the suborbital flight that covers only 303 miles, a small distance compared to Gagarin’s full orbital flight, but enough to inspire President Kennedy to promise a manned mission to the moon. Around the same time, NASA decides to move its headquarters to Houston, Texas, so the Langley residents have to decide whether to move with it. Katherine Johnson is asked to transfer but decides to stay for her family. Meanwhile, the Soviet space program continues to leap ahead, performing a 17-orbit trip around Earth—almost a full day in space.
In preparation for NASA’s first full orbital flight, astronaut John Glenn (who doesn't fully trust machine computers, like most pilots/astronauts) asks for human eyes to double-check the IBM computer. Katherine Johnson is given the job, manually confirming the flight trajectory. It takes a day and a half of intense calculations, but her numbers match the computer’s, so the mission goes forward. On February 20, 1962, Glenn heads into space on the Friendship 7, successfully orbiting Earth. His flight lands early due to technical failures—the control system acts up; the heat shield is loose; there are several minutes of communication blackout—but America’s pride is restored. John Glenn is a national hero, and at least among the black community, so is Katherine Johnson.
In 1963, 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Katherine Johnson’s photo is used in a US Department of Labor brochure called “America Is for Everybody,” celebrating “the Negro’s epic hundred-year journey up from slavery.” On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, organized by A. Philip Randolph. The effect of the speech is felt at Langley—Dorothy Vaughan is awarded for 20 years of government service, and Langley’s director, Floyd Thompson, laments the lack of black applicants to engineering positions and redoubles recruitment efforts. Mary Jackson is one of many who help the new black recruits settle into life in Virginia.
Christine Mann Darden (now married) joins Langley in 1967. She gets to know Katherine Johnson through social events, but they never get to work together, though she hears about Johnson’s achievements. When the Apollo 1 command module catches fire in February 1967, three astronauts are killed instantly while still on the ground, and all of NASA mourns. Johnson and many others spend the 1960s writing reports and refining calculations, arriving early and staying late, as each mission brings the US closer to the moon.
600 million people watch the Apollo 11 mission land on the moon on July 20, 1969. Johnson watches from her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority retreat in the Poconos, surrounded by successful, charitable, accomplished black women, the daughters and granddaughters of black servants and laborers who struggled so future generations could escape the legacy of slavery.
The space program approaches its highest point, but the civil rights movement feels suspended—white men have gone to the moon, but black men can hardly go to the next state without fear of discrimination, predatory police, and race-based violence. Dr. King is assassinated in 1968. The United States spends $24 billion on Apollo, but blacks and whites alike are starving in the poor parts of America; despite the thousands of black employees at NASA, the face of the space program is exclusively white. There’s a slight tailwind of black representation in space in the late sixties, thanks to Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols—though fictional, this black woman in space allows many to imagine a diverse intergalactic future (including Dr. King, who was a huge Trekkie). “You have to expect progress to be made,” Katherine Johnson often said, and as she watches Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, it confirms her belief in progress. Once you take the first step, anything is possible.
The epilogue recounts the accomplishments of the women in the years after the moon landing. Katherine Johnson lived over 100 years and is the most recognized of all NASA computers, black or white, though she thought of herself as just doing her job—one of many people contributing to progress. Mary Jackson hit a glass ceiling as an engineer in 1979, and she became Langley’s Federal Women’s Program Manager, clearing the way for more women of all races to rise. She retired in 1985 and remained active in the community until her death in 2005. Christine Darden got a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Code she wrote is still the core of sonic boom minimization programs used today. (The epilogue also mentions people Shetterly couldn’t include in the main text—for example, Gloria Champine, Mary Jackson’s friend and a champion of equal opportunity, who helped Christine get her well-deserved promotion within Langley.)
Dorothy Vaughan retired in 1971, presumably after being passed over for a section head position that was given to a white man; Vaughan didn’t like to make a fuss, and she didn’t really talk about it. She traveled extensively and, though her name didn’t appear on a single research report, she contributed to scores of them—and her greatest legacy, Christine Darden and the other young women standing on the shoulders of the West Computers, was still in the offices at Langley.
Analysis
These final chapters depict the climax of the space race, as America puts a man on the moon. Exploration of space still happens today, of course, but is largely defunded (at least federally) and usually divorced from national spirit. This was not the case for the moon landing, which was viewed worldwide and made a lasting impression on everyone who saw it, not just the people who worked for years to make it possible.
The American civil rights movement came to a head at around the same time, at least the movement led by Dr. King, and the record of its progress is less triumphant in Hidden Figures. Shetterly describes the movement as "suspended," as money and attention are given to the space race instead. (This guide is oversimplifying history, but for the purpose of analyzing Hidden Figures, these movements are directly compared.) Dr. King is assassinated a year before the moon landing.
The proximity of these stories in the text highlights the difference in possible "climax" moments: Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon, and Dr. King is murdered. The space race ends with a moment of triumph, while the American civil rights movement closes here in a moment of despair. Whether the tens of billions of dollars invested in the Moon Landing were worth it or not, the prioritization of funds detracted from black Americans' progress on a federal level; the highly televised room of exclusively white engineers/leaders/mathematicians meant that young black folks had to look to a fictional character, Lieutenant Uhura, for hope in a better future (but at least they have hope, thanks to representation).
The climax of Hidden Figures occurs far before the end of the characters' real-life equivalents' lives. Structurally, Shetterly resolves this using the epilogue. While the narrative ends on a period of national change, Johnson, Vaughan, Jackson, and Darden are given personal resolutions decades after the late 60s. Summarizing their lives outside the main body of the text helps the story feel more narrative, less like a textbook, but it also lets Shetterly end on a more respectful note for the protagonists. Their lives, achievements, retirements, and deaths aren't sensationalized. Vaughan's reason for leaving Langley is left private, as she kept it in her personal life, honoring her personality rather than engaging in speculation or including a dramatic "quitting" scene to force an emotional climax.
Both the main text and the epilogue end on a note of hope: Once you take the first step, anything is possible; and the greatest legacy of Vaughan and the many, many other women who took that "first step" is still at work today, in the next generation and the ones after—whether they're at Langley, going to school, pursuing their passions, or remembering those who came before and sharing their stories—as Shetterly has done with Hidden Figures.
