Hidden Figures Calculates the sum of a Story Untold

Hidden Figures Calculates the sum of a Story Untold

- Eliza Berman

Katherine Johnson Was Always Running. She Ran, several times a day, the half mile from her desk at NASA to the “colored ladies’” restroom on the other side of Virginia’s Langley Research Center, toting binders full of calculations so as not to lose precious time that—this being the height of the space race—the Soviets no doubt were using well. She ran around her home, chasing three daughters whose father had died of a brain tumor. And she ran, on a February afternoon in 1962, from the West Area Computing Unit back to Mission Control when John Glenn refused to take off on his orbit around Earth until Johnson, and only Johnson, double checked his launch calculations.

When Taraji P. Henson, who plays the sprinting space scientist, read the script for Hidden Figures, Theodore Melfi’s drama about the black female mathematicians, engineers and programmers who helped get Americans into space, her knee-jerk reaction was anger. “I was like, What?” she recalls. “I’m 46, I went to college, and I don’t know this?” Henson’s co-stars—Janelle Monáe, who plays engineer Mary Jackson, and Octavia Spencer, who plays supervisor Dorothy Vaughan—both assumed they were reading a work of fiction.