Film and History In class write

Hidden Figures In-class Write

1. From watching my movie, Hidden Figures, someone can learn about the civil rights movement and equality, not only of races but of genders as well. These three women fought there way into their job positions and because of them many others were able to do the same. This movie took place around the same time that the civil rights movement was in action so these women were right in the middle of it. Each one of them has their  own story and has their own thing that stood in their way.

Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson was the only black employee in the space task group room and one of the two women to ever work in that room. The other woman in that room was the receptionist, or secretary, character to their boss. Dorothy Vaughan, played by Octavia Spencer, was NASA’s first african-american supervisor. Again the color of her skin was what made it nearly impossible for her to get that job. She wasn’t even offered the job until she was caught putting a new piece of equipment together that would launch a man into space. Mary Jackson, played by Janelle Monaé, struggled to become an engineer at NASA because of who she was. One of her co-workers asked her “If you were a white male, would you wish to be an engineer?” and her response was seen as one of the more powerful scenes of the film. She said “I wouldn’t have to. Because I’d already be one” by her saying this quote it gives proof that the reason she wasn’t doing the job she really wished to be doing was because of the color of her skin and her gender.

Something else that a person could learn from watching this film, still in regards to civil rights, would be how little they gave those with colored skin and how much people looked at them differently. When Katherine Johnson first stepped into the space task group room every head turned. There was also one mug for her, it was brown while all the other were white, and she had one bathroom available to her which was half a mile away from where she currently worked. When those men walked in on Dorothy Vaughan working on he IBM she was yelled at and accused of doing something completely different than she was. When Mary Jackson went to the night school and she was the only person of color, and women there, everyone in the class looked at her as if something was wrong with her.

2. From just watching the film there are two main things that can’t be learned. The first is that Margot Lee Shetterly, author of “Hidden “Figures”, father worked at the space center that these remarkable women worked at. Shetterly also knew mathematicians like those at the space center. It was said that, “As a child, Shetterly knew these brilliant mathematicians as her girl scout troop leaders, Sunday school teachers, next-door neighbors and as parents of schoolmates. Her father worked at Langley as well, starting in 1964 as an engineering intern and becoming a well-respected climate scientist.” (Backstory of the author and the movie).

The other thing that can’t be learned from the movie is exactly how much these women did for NASA. “The West Computers were at the heart of the center’s advancements. They worked through equations that described every function of the plane, running the numbers often with no sense of the greater mission of the project. They contributed to the ever-changing design of a menagerie of wartime flying machines, making them faster, safer, more aerodynamic. Eventually their stellar work allowed some to leave the computing pool for specific projects—Christine Darden worked to advance supersonic flight, Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions.” (Backstory of the author and the movie). Without these women, John Glenn may have never gone to space and most of the technology we have today, we might not have.

3. If the person who made this movie had an extra 20 minutes I think they should include some of the civil rights marches that took place because I think it would be very powerful to see the lengths that people will take, or did take, to get something they truly cared about. A little bit of this was shown when Dorothy Vaughan was looking for a book in the white’s section but I think that if 20 minutes was shown of people truly standing up for their own rights and people doing whatever they possibly could to get something they deserved would be very powerful.

Another way it could be shown, that would also be very powerful, would be if it was one of these women children asking their mother what those people marching were doing as they pass them on the street and having the adult explain it to the child because you would really get to hear everyone's thoughts and opinions on what was going on during this time in our history. Again Dorothy did a little of this when her and her kids were on the bus after going to the library but I think there should have been, or if there was an extra 20 minutes, there could be more of that shown.