Hidden Figures (2016)

From IMDB:

The story of a team of African-American women mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the US space program.

For a synopsis of the film read the Wikipedia account.  Recall that the events take place in the 1960’s and that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 supposedly ended racial segregation. If anything, this film is exactly about racial segregation in the government. For example, the main character, Katherine Goble, worked in a NASA building which had no bathroom for non-whites so that in order to go the bathroom, she had to leave her building and travel to another building.  Black Katherine’s calculations were project-saving whereas white John Glen received all the admiration. Be sure to read the final screen notes which explain how Kathering was finally honored. For example, to quote Wikipedia:

In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a new 40,000-square-foot Computational Research Facility at the Langley Research Center was renamed the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility in her honor the following year.[

Here the facts are more important than the entertainment value of the film.

 

Leave a Reply