#Hidden figures movie how to#
#Hidden figures movie movie#

#Hidden figures movie how to#

Dorothy Vaughan became a manager in 1948, not 1968, and Mary Jackson petitioned the segregated city of Hampton early enough in the 1950s that she earned her degree in 1958Īnother pivotal plot in the film is that of Dorothy Vaughan, who, supposedly in the 1960s, had to teach herself how to use the new IBM computer, and sneak her black co-workers in after hours to learn the machine so well that the white computer geeks had to let her run the joint because only she could run the thing effectively.

Mary Jackson actually did go in search of a blacks only bathroom at one point, after some giggling women made her feel unwelcome, but it was short lived. In truth, in the 1950s, there was an informal segregation of bathrooms that Katherine Johnson was unaware of for years and just ignored when someone pointed it out to her. The stand up and cheer moment of the film is Katherine’s tearful speech standing up for herself, which leads to Clueless White Guy finally noticing the separate coffee pot next to the one he uses every day, and marching across campus to physically break down the colored bathroom sign. Her supervisor, the decent-white-guy-who-is-oblivious-to-the-outrageous-prejudice-all-around-him, played by Kevin Costner, finally demands to know why her bathroom breaks are so darn long, while he is working his butt off to put John Glenn into orbit.

#Hidden figures movie movie#

The most dramatic scene in the movie never happenedĪ good deal of the movie is spent building our outrage at Katherine having to run about a mile and a half through the lab in order to use the “colored only” bathroom, sometimes in the rain. She says she never experienced any overt racism and talks glowingly about the team effort of NASA. Katherine Johnson, the real woman behind the story of the film, started working there in 1952. FDR ended this, and it certainly wasn’t in full view in the Kennedy Administration. Something like this may have been the case in 1942, but not 1962. The lab is portrayed as having white and colored bathrooms, water fountains, and even coffee pots. Hidden Figures, the movie, is set in the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton Va., as the United States is trying to overtake the Russians in the space race in the 1960s. NASA, like all federal agencies, was desegregated in the 1940s So as Hidden Figures hovers around the top spot in DVD sales on Amazon, here are four pivotal reasons to be cautious about adding it to your collection as a compelling history lesson that’s suitable for young minds. And there are still separate bathrooms at NASA labs in Virginia? In the 1960s?” As a preacher commended a handsome soldier for being part of the president’s enforcing of Brown v.