This is hardly a fairy tale.
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Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, and Mary Jackson are the real-life go-getters, innovators, risk-takers, and leaders of Hidden Figures, the story of the African American women mathematicians beh…
gsgcfblog.org
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson are the real-life go-getters, innovators, risk-takers, and leaders of Hidden Figures, the story of the African American women mathematicians beh…
gsgcfblog.org
These African-American women made NASA's early space missions possible.
www.space.com
I attended a NASA seminar in Huntsville in 1965. Vaughan was a speaker. I spoke to her after the seminar and I remember her as being a really smart lady. I never heard anything about all the stuff in movie until I saw it.
I'm sure she was great. I bet she was very smart.
So why wasn't that a good enough story to tell? Why did they have to embellish and just plain fabricate so much shit in that movies?
en.wikipedia.org
From the link;
"Historical accuracy[edit]
The film, set at NASA Langley Research Center in 1961, depicts segregated facilities such as the West Area Computing unit, where an all-black group of female mathematicians were originally required to use separate dining and bathroom facilities. However, in reality, Dorothy Vaughan was promoted to supervisor of West Computing in 1949, becoming the first black supervisor at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and one of the few female supervisors. "In 1958, when NACA became NASA, segregated facilities, including the West Computing office, were abolished."[18] Dorothy Vaughan and many of the former West Computers transferred to the new Analysis and Computation Division (ACD), a racially and gender-integrated group.[19]
Mary Jackson was the one who had to find her own way to a colored bathroom, which did exist on the East Side.[20] Katherine (then Goble) was originally unaware that the East Side bathrooms were segregated, and used the unlabeled "whites-only" bathrooms for years before anyone complained.[21] She ignored the complaint, and the issue was dropped.[22] In an interview with WHRO-TV, Katherine Johnson denied the feeling of segregation. "I didn't feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research. You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job ... and play bridge at lunch. I didn't feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn't feel it."[23]
Mary Jackson did not have to get a court order to attend night classes at the whites-only high school. She asked the city of Hampton for an exception, and it was granted. The school turned out to be run down and dilapidated, a hidden cost of running two parallel school systems.[24] She completed her engineering courses and earned a promotion to engineer in 1958.[25]
Katherine Goble/Johnson carpooled with Eunice Smith, a nine-year West End computer veteran at the time Katherine joined NACA. Smith was her neighbor and friend from sorority and church choir.[26] The three Goble children were teenagers at the time of Katherine's marriage to Jim Johnson.[27]
Katherine Goble/Johnson was assigned to the Flight Research Division in 1953, a move that soon became permanent. When the Space Task Group was created in 1958, engineers from the Flight Research Division formed the core of the Group, and Katherine moved along with them. She coauthored a research report in 1960, the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.[28]
Katherine gained access to editorial meetings as of 1958 simply through persistence, not because one particular meeting was critical.[29][30]
The Space Task Group was led by Robert Gilruth, not the fictional character Al Harrison, who was created to simplify a more complex management structure.
The scene where Harrison smashes the Colored Ladies Room sign never happened, as in real life Katherine refused to walk the extra distance to use the colored bathroom and, in her words, "just went to the White one".[31] Harrison also lets her into Mission Control to witness the launch. Neither scene happened in real life, and screenwriter Theodore Melfi said he saw no problem with adding the scenes, saying, "There needs to be white people who do the right thing, there needs to be black people who do the right thing, and someone does the right thing. And so who cares who does the right thing, as long as the right thing is achieved?"
Dexter Thomas of Vice News criticized Melfi's additions as creating the white savior trope: "In this case, it means that a white person doesn't have to think about the possibility that, were they around back in the 1960s South, they might have been one of the bad ones."[32] The Atlantic's Megan Garber said that the film's "narrative trajectory" involved "thematic elements of the white savior".[33] Melfi said he found "hurtful" the "accusations of a 'white savior' storyline", saying,
It was very upsetting to me because I am at a place where I've lived my life colorless and I grew up in Brooklyn. I walked to school with people of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and that's how I've lived my life. So it's very upsetting that we still have to have this conversation. I get upset when I hear 'black film,' and so does Taraji P. Henson ... It's just a film. And if we keep labeling something 'a black film,' or 'a white film'— basically it's modern day segregation. We're all humans. Any human can tell any human's story. I don't want to have this conversation about black film or white film anymore. I wanna have conversations about film.
The Huffington Post's Zeba Blay said of Melfi's frustration,
His frustration is also a perfect example of how, when it comes to open dialogue about depictions of people of color on screen, it behooves white people (especially those who position themselves as 'allies') to listen ... the inclusion of the bathroom scene doesn't make Melfi a bad filmmaker, or a bad person, or a racist. But his suggestion that a feel-good scene like that was needed for the marketability and overall appeal of the film speaks to the fact that Hollywood at large still has a long way to go in telling black stories, no matter how many strides have been made.[34]
The fictional characters Vivian Mitchell and Paul Stafford are composites of several team members, and reflect common social views and attitudes of the time. Karl Zielinski is based on Mary Jackson's mentor, Kazimierz "Kaz" Czarnecki.[35]
John Glenn, who was about a decade older than depicted at the time of launch, did ask specifically for Johnson[36] to verify the IBM calculations, although she had several days before the launch date to complete the process.[37]
The author Margot Lee Shetterly has agreed that there are differences between her book and the movie, but found that to be understandable.
For better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie. Timelines had to be conflated and [there were] composite characters, and for most people [who have seen the movie] have already taken that as the literal fact. ... You might get the indication in the movie that these were the only people doing those jobs, when in reality we know they worked in teams, and those teams had other teams. There were sections, branches, divisions, and they all went up to a director. There were so many people required to make this happen. ... It would be great for people to understand that there were so many more people. Even though Katherine Johnson, in this role, was a hero, there were so many others that were required to do other kinds of tests and checks to make [Glenn's] mission come to fruition. But I understand you can't make a movie with 300 characters. It is simply not possible.[38]
John Glenn's flight was not terminated early as incorrectly stated in the movie's closing subtitles. The MA-6 mission was planned for three orbits and landed at the expected time. The press kit published before launch states that "The Mercury Operations Director may elect a one, two or three orbit mission." [39] The post mission report also shows that retrofire was scheduled to occur on the third orbit. [40] Scott Carpenter's subsequent flight in May was also scheduled and flew for three orbits, and Walter Schirra's planned six-orbit flight in October required extensive modifications to the Mercury capsule's life support system to allow him to fly a nine-hour mission.[41] The phrase "go for at least seven orbits" that is in the mission transcript refers to the fact that the Atlas booster had placed Glenn's capsule into an orbit that would be stable for at least seven orbits, not that he had permission to stay up that long.
The Mercury Control Center was located at Cape Canaveral, Florida, not at the Langley Research Center in Virginia. The orbit plots displayed in the front of the room incorrectly show a six-orbit mission, which did not happen until Walter Schirra's MA-8 mission in October 1962. The movie also incorrectly shows NASA flight controllers monitoring live telemetry from the Soviet Vostok launch, which the Soviet Union would not have been sharing with NASA in 1961.
Katherine Johnson's Technical Note D-233, co-written with T.H. Skopinski, can be found on the NASA Technical Reports Server.[42]
The visual blog Information is Beautiful deduced that, while taking creative licence into account, the film was 74% accurate when compared to real-life events, summarizing that "the crux of the story is true, [and] any events that didn't actually happen are at least illustrative of how things really were".
All movies do this. So take the same amount of time looking to discredit white people.
Yeah, it's called taking creative license.
I'm pretty astounded at how much effort they put into picking the movie apart, all while failing to note that the time period was 1961, three years prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so the segregated restrooms fall right in line with the time.
I noticed you didn't mention anything about the fact that they bought that big ole IBM main frame computer but the vendors who they were paying all that money to (you know those 'guy' who would find it beneath them to labor away in a service industry job) couldn't get it working initially. What Dorothy Vaughan did was what many of us had to do, we had to learn things that others were taught and we were excluded from, all on our own in order to try to make sure we remained relevent in the job field.
But what that scene really drove home to me is how everytime anyone makes a suggestion of reparations for the centuries of legal discrimination sanctioned by our government towards black people, we're told it's not possible and none of us were alive and there is no way to calculate it. Dorothy Vaughan made a very good point when she stole the FORTRAN book from the library. She stated that her taxes paid for the library and the book. So think about it. Black people were required to pay the same amount of taxes as everyone else, yet only received a percentage of the goods services in exchange. Having the police called on you to throw you out of the library that your taxes paid for is a perfect example. So IF the government wanted to make reparations, they could launch it by using the tax roles, just as one example of to address one part of the problem.
As I was watching the movie for the 3rd time with my neice, I was explaining to her the various violations of the Civil Rights Act (of today) that were perfectly legal back in 1961, particularly the disparate treatment, disparate compensation, not to mention the whites/colored only restrooms.