Hidden Stories

I was reminded of the power of motion pictures when I watched two inspirational films.

Black Panther is a mythical story in a mythical African country, Wakanda, based on a Marvel comic book hero and produced in 2018 by Marvel Studios (2019). It has clearly generated pride in African American and African youth. I also had the pleasure of watching Hidden Figures, produced by 20th Century Fox in 2016. It may be more crucial and relevant because it was mostly factual and portrayed African American intellectual achievement. It is the incredible untold story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, brilliant African-American women working at NASA who served as the brains behind the launch into orbit of astronaut John Glenn, a stunning achievement that turned around the space race. It is loosely based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly (2016) about black female mathematicians who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the space race at that time between the United States and the then Soviet Union.

The book takes place from the 1930s through the 1960s when women were still viewed as inferior to men and, I think most importantly, when an entire educational system was based on the intellectual inferiority of African Americans. At that time computers were simply not powerful enough for flight calculations and the story follows the lives of these three mathematicians who pretty much functioned as human computers. They had to overcome discrimination, as women and as African Americans. They included Christine Darden, who was the first African-American woman to be promoted into the Senior Executive Service for her work in researching supersonic flight and sonic booms.

I was born and raised just 10 miles from Hampton, Virginia and remembered well John Glenn ’s orbital flight. I and many others did not know that African American women were not only key but essential to the space program because of their mathematical prowess. Indeed these women were in that role at a time that academic and engineering jobs were out of reach for women. The movie and book noted that these women were part of a segregated system but did not try to explain why segregation existed. At that time in Virginia and much of the south, public schools were segregated and many institutions of higher education did not accept people of color. The justification was based in part on the justification for slavery: African Americans were intellectually and emotionally inferior.

At the time of Hidden Figures, scholarly papers and prominent intellectuals were promoting the concept that not only were African Americans intellectually inferior but that the inferiority was genetically based and therefore largely unmodifiable (Jensen, 1969). A local newspaper had a very prominent editor who routinely ran stories citing the work of researchers at the University of Virginia at elsewhere noting that African Americans were intellectually and genetically less capable. I have to wonder what impact this published view had and what would have happened if during that time the success of these ladies would have been more publicized. Despite the removal of de jure segregation participation of African Americans in academia or in professional fields remained very limited even to the present.

I had the experience of meeting Dr. John Forbes Nash, who developed the disorder schizophrenia, but recovered over the years. He ultimately received the Nobel Prize in economics for his mathematical work. His experience described in the movie A Beautiful Mind (2001) was clearly a factor in the wide acceptance of the recovery movement in schizophrenia and the ceasing of viewing it as hopeless. I often wonder what would have happened if Hidden Figures had been released in the ’60s and its impact on the school segregation which was based heavily on the purported intellectual inferiority of African Americans and such efforts as the massive resistance program that was designed to counter school segregation laws.

At a time when disparities in academic achievement and health outcomes still persist, it is a reminder why Black History Month exists. It provides the opportunity for young people to realize the larger perspective that can define their lives.