{"id":48983,"date":"2016-09-06T02:48:18","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T02:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=48983"},"modified":"2016-09-06T02:48:18","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T02:48:18","slug":"on-being-a-black-female-math-whiz-during-the-space-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=48983","title":{"rendered":"On Being a Black Female Math Whiz During the Space Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Being a Black Female Math Whiz During the Space Race<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2016-09-05<\/p>\n

Cara Buckley<\/strong><\/a>, Culture Reporter<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nKatherine Johnson<\/a>, left, and Christine Darden<\/a>, two of the former NASA<\/a> mathematicians in the book \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d
\nCredit: \u00a0Chet Strange for The New York Times<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

HAMPTON, Va.<\/a> \u2014 Growing up here in the 1970s, in the shadow of Langley Research Center<\/a>, where workers helped revolutionize air flight and put Americans on the moon, Margot Lee Shetterly<\/a> had a pretty fixed idea of what scientists looked like: They were middle class, African-American and worked at NASA<\/a>, like her dad.<\/p>\n

It would be years before she learned that this was far from the American norm. And that many women in her hometown defied convention, too, by having vibrant, and by most standards, unusual careers.<\/p>\n

Black and female, dozens had worked at the space agency as mathematicians, often under Jim Crow laws<\/a>, calculating crucial trajectories for rockets while being segregated from their white counterparts. For decades, as the space race made heroes out of lantern-jawed astronauts, the stories of those women went largely untold.<\/p>\n

Four of them are the subjects of Ms. Shetterly\u2019s first book, \u201cHidden Figures<\/a>,\u201d a history being released on Tuesday by William Morrow<\/a>. The book garnered an early burst of attention because its movie version, starring Taraji P. Henson<\/a>, Octavia Spencer<\/a> and Janelle Mon\u00e1e<\/a>, is scheduled for a year-end release and set for an Oscars run. The movie rights were snapped up weeks after Ms. Shetterly sold her book proposal in 2014, and well before she started writing the book in earnest, a disorientingly fast, if exhilarating, turn…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Being a Black Female Math Whiz During the Space Race The New York Times 2016-09-05 Cara Buckley, Culture Reporter Katherine Johnson, left, and Christine Darden, two of the former NASA mathematicians in the book \u201cHidden Figures.\u201d Credit: \u00a0Chet Strange for The New York Times HAMPTON, Va. \u2014 Growing up here in the 1970s, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,8,20],"tags":[16301,24938,19571,23837,19572,19573,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-48983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-cara-buckley","tag-christine-darden","tag-katherine-johnson","tag-margot-lee-shetterly","tag-nasa","tag-national-aeronautics-and-space-administration","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48983"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48984,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48983\/revisions\/48984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}