Margot Lee Shetterly Discusses HIDDEN FIGURES In Advance of Upcoming Lecture

Margot Lee Shetterly's book, HIDDEN FIGURES, has also been nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards to be presented Sunday, Feb. 26. The Star Tribune interviewed Shetterly in advance of her sold-out upcoming talk at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute.

On discussing the unknown history of black female mathematicians, Shetterly says:

"I grew up in Hampton, Virginia, in the neighborhoods where these women lived, raised families, went to church and worked at NASA's Langley Research Center like my father did. It was all very normal to us - I took it for granted that that's what scientists looked like - regular people who loved their work.

Back then I knew many of them worked at NASA, but I didn't know exactly what they did. It was only about six years ago that I understood the magnitude of the work black women were doing there. It was nice to grow up in a place where that achieved such a degree of normalcy that people weren't talking about it all the time. [That's when the author started researching archives and interviewing former and current NASA employees and family members.]

A lot of times we talk about black people as if being black is all they are. They get up, go to work ... and are as complex and interesting and variable as any other group of people. We don't often capture that or write about it. There is so much more to black history, black life than slavery, civil rights and Obama - much more than the firsts and onlys."

Read more here.

Margot Lee Shetterly is the author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (William Morrow/HarperCollins). She is also the founder of The Human Computer Project, an endeavor that is recovering the names and accomplishments of all of the women who worked as computers, mathematicians, scientists and engineers at the NACA and NASA from the 1930s through the 1980s.

Shetterly a Hampton, Virginia native, University of Virginia graduate, an entrepreneur, and an intrepid traveler who spent 11 years living in Mexico. She currently lives in Charlottesville, VA.

HIDDEN FIGURES is the phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space-a powerful, revelatory contribution that is as essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America as Between the World and Me and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner.

Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South's segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America's aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam's call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

Even as Virginia's Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley's all-black "West Computing" group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.

Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.

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