Hidden Figures

In 1957, Christine Mann, a rising senior at the Allen School for girls in Asheville, North Carolina, starts her day at the library where she collects and sets out the daily newspapers. The news that season is all about the Little Rock Nine, the nine black teenagers trying to integrate the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Christine, following the story with interest, imagines herself in their shoes while standing in the Allen’s library.

The rest of the world is also following the story with interest. Photos of black children menaced by large white police officers circulate the globe. The United States tries to use its propaganda machine to turn the story around, but fails. Then, the Soviet Union causes a distraction.

The Russians become the first people to send an object—the Sputnik satellite—into space and control its trajectory. Christine lives through a massive shift in American history, the official start of the Space Age. Christine is as frightened by Sputnik as she was by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. As tensions increase between the US and Russia, extreme violence begins to seem more likely. Fallout shelter signs proliferate. Christine takes part in defense drills at school. Many people think of Sputnik as a technological Pearl Harbor.

Just before World War I, the country’s lack of air force intelligence and technology gave rise to the NACA. Then, America’s inadequate aircraft industry was forced to catch up to, and then outplace, that of its enemies. Now the country has to rise against a new competitor: Russia and its space program. Many black newspapers and their readers fault the segregated school systems for America’s lag when it comes to space technology. Russians compel all their students to get the best possible educations, while the United States shuts black students out of the schools with the most resources. Until the United States cures itself of its racism, it will never best Russia.

Three years before, Christine had witnessed the desegregation of the schools after the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education. Christine grew up in a town full of black people, where most of the men made their living working for the railroad line, while black women held jobs in the cotton mill or as domestic servants. In Newtown, she wonders how she will compete with white students from across the tracks. Her father works as a sales rep for North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company, the successful black-owned company that underwrites the home loans of the black home buyers in Hampton. Christine attends a private school for black girls run by white Christian missionaries.

Christine matriculates at the Hampton Institute on a scholarship covered by the United Negro College Fund after graduating from high school in 1958. Between 1957 and 1958, the Soviets launch two more satellites: Sputnik II, carrying the space dog Laika, and Sputnik III. The United States manages to put satellites Explorer I and Vanguard I into orbit, but the nation laments its lack of talented scientists and engineers. Eisenhower initiates the National Defense Education act to cultivate STEM talent. Russian engineering schools are filled with women (1/3 of the graduates from these schools were female) but the US still does not fully support women and black people in the sciences.