Johnson, and is enjoying a recent surge of fame. Katherine Johnson, who recently turned 98, lives in a retirement home with her husband of 57 years, James A. Christine Darden, now 73 and retired, had worked her way out of NASA’s computing pool to lead engineering research into sonic booms. Two of the women she would focus on are still living in the area. Shetterly said, “but it took someone from the outside saying, ‘Wait a minute’ for me to see the story there.” “I knew women who worked at NASA as mathematicians and engineers,” Ms. Shetterly remembers her husband perking up and asking why he had never heard this tale before. Shetterly’s former Sunday school teachers had worked as a mathematician at NASA, and that another woman she knew calculated rocket trajectories for famous astronauts. Shetterly’s father were driving around in his minivan when he mentioned, very casually, that one of Ms. Shetterly happened upon the idea for the book six years ago, when she and her husband, Aran Shetterly, then living in Mexico, were visiting her parents here. “It’s just as American a story as if it were John Glenn or Alan Shepard telling it.” Shetterly said during a recent visit to Hampton, which sits on the southeastern end of the Virginia Peninsula, surrounded by aquamarine waters and Navy ships. “The thrilling thing to me about the book, and the movie, is this is an American story that we’re getting to see through the faces of these women,” Ms. Shetterly sold her book proposal in 2014, and well before she started writing the book in earnest, a disorientingly fast, if exhilarating, turn. The movie rights were snapped up weeks after Ms.

Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, is scheduled for a year-end release and set for an Oscars run. The book garnered an early burst of attention because its movie version, starring Taraji P. Shetterly’s first book, “Hidden Figures,” a history being released on Tuesday by William Morrow. For decades, as the space race made heroes out of lantern-jawed astronauts, the stories of those women went largely untold.įour of them are the subjects of Ms. And that many women in her hometown defied convention, too, by having vibrant, and by most standards, unusual careers.īlack and female, dozens had worked at the space agency as mathematicians, often under Jim Crow laws, calculating crucial trajectories for rockets while being segregated from their white counterparts. It would be years before she learned that this was far from the American norm.

Growing up here in the 1970s, in the shadow of Langley Research Center, where workers helped revolutionize air flight and put Americans on the moon, Margot Lee Shetterly had a pretty fixed idea of what scientists looked like: They were middle class, African-American and worked at NASA, like her dad.

Shetterly margot lee