Summary
In the prologue, Margot Lee Shetterly describes visiting her hometown of Hampton, Virginia, in the winter of 2010. She reconnects with many of the black families she knew growing up, including multiple black women who worked at Langley as “human computers”—mathematicians who performed complex number-crunching for the engineers at Langley starting in 1943 (white female computers were hired in 1935). The spark of curiosity about these largely unremembered women “soon became an all-consuming fire” for Shetterly, and that fire powered the narrative of Hidden Figures. Even though she knew there would be many of these brilliant women, she is surprised to find stories of around a thousand female computers, both white and black, who made Hampton, Virginia, into Spacetown, USA, and put America at the forefront of aeronautics.
In May 1943, Melvin Butler is the personnel officer at Langley, and he urgently needs to hire people. The demands of World War II have left a limited labor force to address the growing need for airplanes, and Langley’s staff has grown from 500 to around 1,500 in the last four years—many of them women. In the last two years, America has become the leading producer of airplanes, largely thanks to the experiments done by the NACA engineers at Langley. However, engineers need support: craftsmen, mechanics, and number-crunchers to process the information gathered from those experiments. To fix his staffing shortage, Butler creates a separate space (because of segregation) and hires highly qualified black women to become computers in the “West Computers” area.
One of these women is Dorothy Vaughan, a math teacher with a college degree and sharp mind. Years ago, she made a difficult practical choice to go into teaching rather than get a master’s degree in math. She’s active in her community, one of the founding board members of Farmville’s NAACP chapter, an accomplished pianist, and she works in the laundry room at Camp Pickett to earn extra income for her four children. Her husband, Howard, is an itinerant bellman, traveling from hotel to hotel, so they live separately for large parts of the year. With President Roosevelt signing Executive Orders 8802 and 9346, large steps toward equal hiring practices have been made, and Vaughan sees advertisements for the computing positions at Langley. She sends an application, saying she’d be ready to start work within 48 hours.
The all-black high school where Vaughan teaches is overpopulated and underfunded, and she is an excellent and devoted teacher—but when Vaughan receives her hiring notice from Langley (offering $2,000 a year instead of her current $850) Vaughan doesn’t hesitate to move to Newport News, 137 miles away from her loving family and community.
She takes the Greyhound bus, and she remembers a summer her family moved to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, for Howard’s job. They befriended the Colemans, whose youngest daughter, Katherine, will also eventually join her at Langley. Katherine married Jimmy Goble and, like Vaughan, chose domestic life over pursuing a master’s degree despite being a gifted mathematician. Vaughan arrives in Newport News, where she’ll live as she starts work as a Langley computer.
Newport News is one of many cities around Hampton Roads harbor. Like Hampton and the other communities, its population has grown enormously during the war. Housing is limited, but Vaughan rents a room from a black couple recommended by the Langley personnel department. Overcrowding makes Jim Crow laws difficult to enforce effectively, and buses are especially contentious, with segregation worsening racial tension. Politicians' speeches makes things seem more hopeful for the American Negro, but little change has actually been made—restaurants that won't serve Vaughan will happily serve Germans from the POW camp in Newport News. Black people are conflicted, with the impression that their American identities are at war with their black souls. Was this America really worth defending? When they fought for America, what were they fighting for? As world leaders plan D-Day, Dorothy Vaughan steps behind the "Colored" line on the bus and heads for her first day of work at Langley.
Analysis
Hidden Figures begins with a broad sweep of context for the story it intends to tell. The text surveys relevant facts, emphasizing the economic pressures leading to legislation, which leads to progress. This affects Melvin Butler, from whose "perspective" we see the direct result of these pressures: Dorothy Vaughan is hired to work for the NACA at Langley. (This isn't to say that this legislative/social progress, like President Roosevelt desegregating the defense sector, was all because of economic demand—activists like A. Philip Randolph worked tirelessly to direct that demand into change.)
Shetterly uses Dorothy Vaughan's personal background to transition from broader historical fact into the particulars of the story. Vaughan is introduced as a protagonist, but also as a case study indicating themes: potential, opportunity, the conflict between familial and professional development. The passages that describe Vaughan's education, history, and eventual path to Langley illustrate the real-world implications of that broad sweep of context provided earlier.
While it's clear that if Dorothy Vaughan had been born a white male American, her path to mathematical success would have been orders of magnitude easier, Hidden Figures does nothing to indicate that she regretted her choices or situation. Vaughan is quoted in the epilogue as saying "What I changed, I could; what I couldn't, I endured." She and the second "main character" of the story, Katherine Johnson, make similar choices to pursue family life rather than a master's degree, but if there's any bitterness at that decision, it's channeled into Vaughan's engagement with her family and community, from NAACP involvement to playing the piano at church.
Margot Lee Shetterly rarely inserts an obvious opinion or personal story in the main part of the text, so her "presence" as a character in the prologue is worth noting. It establishes her authority to tell this story, since she's the daughter of a black Langley employee and personally knows many of the people in the book. The prologue also explains the type of research she does—interviews, word of mouth, documentation—which helps make the case for the story's accuracy, as well as Shetterly's qualifications to tell it. Mentioning herself meeting with Kathaleen Land and others also reminds the reader that the people depicted in this book are largely still alive. There's a tendency to remember the space race and the civil rights movement as a finished chapter in the historical record, but the people who influenced those events are still alive to be interviewed by the author.
