There is something in us that doesn’t allow us to connect women of color to these great American narratives.” It didn’t occur to the women or my father that they were making history or working with people who were making history. My father (a retired NASA mathematician and internationally respected climate scientist), worked with people who were passionate about science, engineering, math. Second, it was complex, perhaps arcane, work not everybody would be interested in. Shetterly replies: “A lot of us in Hampton knew women were at NASA, but they didn’t talk about their work. Harris and Shetterly, who were interviewed separately, agree the question they are most often asked is: “Why haven’t we heard about these women before?” “Margot writes about Langley but my book taps into a national story,” Harris says. Located on the site of a former plantation, West Computer was a mile from where the white computers were located and on the other side of a fence. Using a joint grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Shetterly and Harris walked the grounds of Langley together and visited the segregated building called West Computer where the black computers worked. Shetterly and Harris are African-American women who have roots in the Hampton area but did not know each other until 2013, when they discovered they were both working on books about these unsung black women with math and science degrees. Harris is professor and chair of the American studies department at Macalester College in St. On the cover of Shetterly’s book is a picture of the first group of these women who crunched numbers for engineers, including Miriam Mann, grandmother of Miriam Duchess Harris, whose new book for middle-grade readers is “Hidden Human Computers: The Black Women of NASA” (Abdo Publishing, $25). The film is based on Margot Shetterly’s book “Hidden Figures” (William Morrow, $27.99), which she was still writing when the film was in production. Oscar voters liked it too, nominating the movie for best picture and Octavia Spencer, who plays Vaughan, as best supporting actress. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson and their work at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory near Hampton, Va. “Hidden Figures,” the film about three remarkable African-American women mathematicians, is a hit with audiences who are sometimes moved to tears by the stories of Katherine G.
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