Hidden FiguresHidden Figures

Today, my hometown-the hamlet which in 1962 dubbed itself "Spacetown U.S.A."-looks like any suburban city in a modern and hyperconneeted America. People of all races and nationalities mingle on Hampton's beaches and in its bus stations, the whites only signs of the past now relegated to the local history museum and the memories of survivors of the civil rights revolution. Mercury Boulevard no longer conjures images of the eponymous mission that shot the first Americans beyond the atmosphere, and each day the memory of Virgil Grissom fades away from the bridge that bears his name. A downsized space program and decades of government cutbacks have hit the region hard; today, an ambitious college grad with a knack for numbers might set her sights on a gig at a Silicon Valley startup or make for one of the many technology firms that are conquering the NASDAQ from the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley's West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female. For a group of bright and ambitious African American women, diligently prepared for a mathematical career and eager for a crack at the big leagues, Hampton, Virginia, must have felt like the center of the universe. -from the Prologue Book jacket.