Hidden Figures By Margot Lee Shetterly: An Analysis

The novel “Hidden Figures” by Margot Lee Shetterly takes place at the time of world war two. With the men going off to join the war effort women were needed to to fill in their spots in the work force. Melvin Butler, the personnel officerat Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, started filling up these spots with African American mathematicians, also known as human computers. Three of these women were Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, and Mary Jackson. If it were not for these three women, Dorothy, Katherine, and Mary, a few other African American women, and their coworkers, we would probably not be where we are today with our United States space program, NASA.Without them we would not have been able to send a man to space, much less the moon, or another planet. All three of those women were mathematicians. They worked with numbers and checked the calculations to get a rocket ship well enough to get a man into space. Although the Russians beat us in the space race, we eventually got someone up there. Years later we got a man to the moon and back.

African Americans had to use different bathrooms than the whites, which could sometimes be really far away from their workplaces. African Americans and whites also had to sit in different places on busses and other forms of transportation. On busses the African Americans had to sit in the back while the whites got to sit towards the front. If there was not enough room on the bus for whites, the African Americans would have to give up their seats. Allowing African Americans to work in the same place and area as the whites is the first step in getting rid of segregation. That was a much needed step and a big help. We do not have segregation in the world anymore or if we do it is only in certain places and is very