To The Moon

Back in 1961, nasa launched the first american into space. The world didn’t know about the black women geniuses who helped put him there—until now. In the new movie hidden figures, Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe send the unknown story into the stratosphere.

- Karen Good Marable

Power to the people!” Taraji P. Henson says. Actually, she shouts this in the back of a chauffeured black car. The actress is headed to New York City’s JFK airport en route to Chicago, where, for the next couple of months, she will be taping her hit TV show Empire. But what has her breathless is the news announced mere minutes ago that the Army would stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to explore alternate routes—a victory for Standing Rock Sioux Tribe water protectors and their allies. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all year!” she adds.

That’s not hard to believe, because Lawd knows 2016 had been exhausting. It was truly a year of bitter sideswipes: the sudden passing of Prince Rogers Nelson, the back-to-back videotaped police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the utter disgrace that was the presidential election cycle and America’s “crowning” of a man whose way of appealing to the Black vote was to ask us, “What do you have to lose?”

If art is considered to be a form of resistance, then Henson’s new film, Hidden Figures, could be thought of as a kind of grenade. It recounts the true tale of Katherine Johnson (played by Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe): three brilliant Black women mathematicians who made history and changed the world while working at NASA.