"Hidden Figures" cannot be historically accurate

It looks like snowflake bullshite.

I'm sure there were a few black chicks that worked in the space program. I'm also sure that this movie over-exaggerates their role by about 1,000,000 times.

Is this the new Hollywood thing I'm supposed to care about?

So NASA had an army of women that they hid in the back and gave thousands of math problems too?

Sounds horrible

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So NASA had an army of women that they hid in the back and gave thousands of math problems too?

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Its sad but true.

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The first black computers didn’t set foot at Langley until the 1940s. Though the pressing needs of war were great, racial discrimination remained strong and few jobs existed for African-Americans, regardless of gender. That was until 1941 when A. Philip Randolph, pioneering civil rights activist, proposed a march on Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the continued injustices of racial discrimination. With the threat of 100,000 people swarming to the Capitol, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, preventing racial discrimination in hiring for federal and war-related work. This order also cleared the way for the black computers, slide rule in hand, to make their way into NACA history.

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Exactly how many women computers worked at NACA (and later NASA) over the years is still unknown. One 1992 study estimated the total topped several hundred but other estimates, including Shetterly’s own intuition, says that number is in the thousands.
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. “They were just part of a vibrant community of people, and everybody had their jobs,” she says. “And those were their jobs. Working at NASA Langley.”

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So NASA had an army of women that they hid in the back and gave thousands of math problems too?

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They were just trying to figure out how many slices were in the pie they baked.

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Well, that is racist.

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Where are the current ones?

I'm sure it's like how Hollywood portrayed the Tuskegee airmen as the winners of the war

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I mean, factually speaking there is no way that a group of 8 or so African American women in 1950s and 1960's America would have the education and experience necessary to provide critical information to the top scientists in the world working at NASA.

Am I wrong? I didn't see the movie but I just am suspicious of every liberal I'm friends with on Facebook having non stop posts about this.

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I was with the space program from 1960 thru 1993. Early on, there were no blacks to be seen anywhere I worked - from Pomona, CA to St Louis, MO to Clear Lake City, TX nor in my travels to Cape Canaveral to Langley to Huntsville to Buffalo.

I recall the first black man hired into our dept after Affirmative Action came to be. One of my co-workers called him a 'parrot' - he knows how to say about a dozen things and every now and then he will say one of them. He was put on 'fast track' in the management track.

The first black female we hired turned out to be a real pain in the arse. She was hired as an electrical engineer from one of the HBCs. She was incapable of doing anything and soon got passed around to every working group so that no one group had to bear the entire load of her salary. When she made it to my group, I sat down with her to find out just what she was capable of doing. Turned out she was a draftsman = she could draw the symbols for resisters and capacitors, etc and could take a crude drawing and make it print-worth. No insight at all. She not so soon had to be let go for incompetence but was immediately hired by another aerospace company in the area - black female 'engineers' were the most valuable commodity a company could have in those early days of AA. She sued every company she worked for on racial discrimination grounds.

NASA had a few black employees at Clear Lake - all male. They were very good. NASA was apparently not as liable as independent companies for having the proper quotas.

I you are referencing a movie in "hidden figures" I have never heard of it. My experience is anecdotal, but I'd question the validity of any assertion that there was a cadre of black females providing critical information in the early days of the space program.

However - in those days digital computers were a rare commodity for everyday operations - had to have a super high priority job to get time on one. For the run-ot-the-mill mundane work we had people whose job title was "computer.' These were mostly female but I never saw a black one where I worked. They operated a Friden calculator and we gave them essentlially a flow chart defining the logic and calculations to be made and they banged it out on the calculators. It didn't take any special education to do that, but they had to be extraordinarily fast, competent, and reliable in what they did. One of those 'computers' I first met in St. Louis became a Department Manager in our Houston operation. She was fantastic one one look at her would not cause anyone to think she had "slept her way to the position."

There could have been a cadre of that type worker somewhere who did provide very essential services during the early pre-computer days.

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I haven't seen the movie. Katherine Johnson though has been decorated out the wazoo for her work.

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That's just one of the repercussions of giving frauds like Obozo joke Nobel Prizes and other "awards" and positions they don't deserve (like President of the Harvard Law Review). We'll never really know if this woman really deserved these decorations or if they have been given to her because of the color of her skin and it makes the government progs feel good about themselves.