HIDDEN FIGURES (2016) | KAIROS GLOBAL | SEPTEMBER 2023

Author: Joseph Anthraper

Racism is a sin; a sin that divides the human family, blots out the image of God among specific members of that family, and violates the fundamental human dignity of those called to be children of the same Father…. it is [in fact] a denial of the truth of the dignity of each human being revealed by the mystery of the Incarnation (U.S Bishops letter on Racism, 1979). 

Looking back, it is easy for us in the West today to see the inherent moral wrong of a practice like racism or Nazism and be repugnant about it. Yet, we know for a fact that for those societies, and for the people who lived here not so long ago, racism was a fact of life. Like us, the majority of the people who lived in America in the 1950s and 1960s (as well as most German people during the Second World War) were decent individuals – a lot of them God-fearing Christians. Like us, they too were preoccupied, even inundated, with the rigours of everyday life – family, work and the daily chores of life. Yet now, it beggars belief how these people, having much more in common with us than we would sometimes like to admit, could through their indifference and apathy of a social structure into which they were either born, or found themselves in, tacitly enabled and empowered such evil to take root and to continue unabated. It also raises the question – how many are the social evils in the culture around me, that through my indifference is gaining foothold today. Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven (Matthew 7:21). For blessed indeed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Hidden Figures is an American biographical drama based on the true story of three African-American mathematicians, Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, who during the 1960s worked at NASA and played a significant role in making the American Space programme a success during the era of space wars. 

The year is 1961, before the advent of computers as we know it today and with the two superpowers of the world (US and Soviets) trying to advance their sphere of influence into everything in the world and beyond, NASA is right at the centre of the space wars – competing with the soviets for dominance in space. And feeling the heat is Al Harrison, the head of NASA’s Space Task Group, tasked with sending the first man to the moon – assuming he can do this before the Soviets achieve it. 

Katherine Goble is a mathematical genius who works as a human computer at the West Computing division of NASA, along with Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan. The West Computing division is the segregated section where the coloured women work at NASA, doing computations on a temporary, ad-hoc basis for other sections that need it. 

As Mr Harrison needs a smart human computer to do the calculations, Katherine is assigned to the space task team, the first coloured woman among a group of highly intelligent, yet, prejudiced white men. Katherine faces discrimination day in, day out – not primarily because the people around her are bad, but because the structures of racism are so deep seated and ingrained both within the society as well as within the human hearts that form these social structures. From simple things like going to the loo – because the toilets are segregated and there is no coloured toilets in the East wing, Katherine has to run half a mile to the West wing to relieve herself, or having different coffee and drinking water facilities for coloured people; to more pressing things at work – because she doesn’t have the necessary ‘clearances’ she has the impossible task of cross checking the calculations with half the numbers redacted for security reasons; every day is a battle for Katherine.

Mary – an engineer at heart, is assigned to the space capsule heat shield team, where her team-lead, a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor, who is aware of her engineering genius, inspires her to apply for an engineer position at NASA. Although she has the necessary degrees, Mary is rejected because her supervisor says she needs to take additional courses in order to apply for the position – courses that are only available at the whites-only Hampton High School. Not one to take no for an answer, Mary files a petition in court to be allowed to the all-white school.

Dorothy supervises the women at the West computing section but is never officially promoted to the rank of a supervisor, despite multiple attempts and pleas. And when NASA installs the first IBM mainframe computer to do digital computations, she realises that very soon, she and the other women human computers at the West wing would be made redundant as these mainframes are able to do more than ‘24,000 multiplications per second’. Realising that mainframes are going to be the future, Dorothy gets hold of a FORTRAN book, first teaching herself and then the other coloured women under her supervision, programming.

Meanwhile the Soviets are a step ahead and Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space, while NASA keeps on testing and failing. Will Katherine be able to shine through the prejudice surrounding her to make her mathematical genius seen and heard so as to salvage pride for NASA and put a man in space? Would the court grant Mary access to the course at the whites-only college, and would Dorothy’s gamble of learning mainframe programming pay off?

Although living and working in a society and culture where segregation was the norm, Hidden Figures tells the story of how these three middle-aged women through their courage, dedication, faith and hard work, fought through an unjust system to achieve their dreams and with it, make it possible for the many millions after them to dream.