Tweet us, twitter. Com. book tv or post a comment on her facebook page, facebook. Com. book tv. Man have your attention please. Please take your seats. The presentation is about to begin. Be aware there will most likely be a question and answer time at the end of the presentation and when its time you can go to one of the two microphones on either side of the stage and lineup. To begin i would like to introduce eric dagan, tv critic for npr. Tvpplause]. How are you doing. Thank you for joining us here. We appreciate itwe and as was said my name is eric dagan. I have written a lot about race and media and have also interviewed henson for the smithsonian, so we have a bit here. Our esteemed guest, the daughter of a nasa scientistshe and english professor, virginian native. You worked in Investment Banking . That was my first job out of school. And also a magazine inside mexico. Yesic. Started working on Hidden Figures in 2010 news and became a york times number one best seller and spawned a movie that was oscarnominated. Margot lee shettely, everyone. [applause]. I heard you gave an amazing speech last night where you talk a bit about charlottesville and race. Could you give us a little taste of what you talked about their and how it compares to what you talked about in the book. Yeah, the thing thattoouou we talked a little bit about what i started out doing, which was working in Investment Banking out of school andnd really, when i was growing up that seemed like progress in the future and varied protagonist way, a career tab like very powerful and history for me was something that always felt as an africanamerican always so heavy and connected to this past, which is usually taught in the schools ast slavery, Martin Luther king and now there is obama. A very long, but extremely narrow part of history. So, during the course of writing Hidden Figures what i really came to understand was how powerful it is to be able to tell a story and to write a story and to tell your own story and it to be the protagonist in your own story as opposed to telling a storyur where you are kind of that passive recipient of history. So, i live in charlottesville, virginia. I went to the university of virginia, but recently moved there and this entire, you know, issue of the statues and the white supremacist of march, all that stuff has been happening since i moved there and i think for meth we are very focused on the presence of the statues and the meaning of the statues, what they have come to symbolize. I think part of the issue also is that those statues also represent an absence of a counter narrative. There is this slavery narrative. There are these confederate statuesna, but in terms of the diversity and richness of africanamerican storiesca, there are very few and there are very few in which africanamerican our protagonist and these stories in which you are allowed to be a protagonist matter anyto each of us is the protagonist in our own life. We see ourselves as people with agency and i think thats why we love stories about superheroes and kings, i mean, these stories make us feel powerful and so i think that its about the presence of the apartheid and the presence of the racial terror and slavery, but its also about the absence of the counter narrative. I really see that one of the jobs of bringing bridging some of these devices bringing forward these stories that have always been there. The people have been there. The history is there. The stories are what we need to tell now. Well, for people who have maybe been under a rock for the last year or so, Hidden Figures is an amazing book about these black women who served as Human Computers working for about the agency before that preceded nass and for nasa crunching all of thissa complex math that was used first to develop the aerodynamics warplanes and later to for spaceflight and the moon shot. Now, i saw the book you said this isnt hidden history, its unseen historyy, and i know you say everyone asks you why dont we know this, but im ask you, why dont we know this and why is it unseen . Are we afraid to look at itun . Were we to busy lionizing nasa, john glenn and people like that . Why was it unseen . I think the primary reason why this history has been unseen is because this work was womens work and not just at nasa, so there was this cadre of africanamerican women working ats nasa langley part of a much larger cohort of women from all backgrounds doing the workfr as all of at all of the different nasa centers with women Computers Working in the army, navy. They were working at belt lab which many of you may know as the precursor to at t and founded the communications revolution, cell phones and things like that. Virtually everywhere you found Technological Progress that required numbercrunching and production dataeq, there were womenon of our rooms full of women like a living excel spreadsheet. They were doing math and this work was considered sub professional work. It was very necessary, but literally the women at nasa work classes classified as a sub professional which meant they were about clerical employees. They were not as high in the hierarchy as the men who are engineers who were considered professional employees and so i think that is a large reason why this work was invisible peer they were kind of that equivalent of our computers is sitting on our desk ti doing the work today and yet without them all of these advances would not have been possible t. Im interested in how you decided to focus on this because i know you were surrounded by these people when you were growing up andd i have done panels where i talk to people and i go i had this idea and then they mated a by doing xyz and i think to myself wait a minute, i want to hear about how you had the idea because thats music he, deciding i mean there were plenty of other people that grew up around these people in your neighborhood while growing up and im sure everyone knew these stories. What made you decide this was worth a booke . I told the story before and its interesting there is a very specific moments when Hidden Figures what would become Hidden Figures came into existence and interestingly it came out of a moments between the two most important men in my life, my father and my husband and is so my husband and i had gone back to hampton busy my parents for christmaswe seven years ago, now. We had run into a woman who had worked at nasa many years as a computerr and that sort of start this conversation of my dad sort of going into this, you know, speech about what she had done and the other women and Kathryn Johnson who calculated the launch window for the astronauts. That moment where the needle slips off the record. But i didnt have that moment. I didnt hear the needle flip off the record because i had heard a lot of those of stories before and i had grown up there and i had known these women and had known them as my parents colleagues and friends, but the needle definitely slipped off the record for my husband who was not from hampton and was like wait a minute, you know or can you please replay there for me and why havent i heard that story before and so for me it was a moments of looking at the community, the people, nasa t, this extraordinary kind of place that i had grown up in that was also extremely normal and ordinarys , but being able to see past what was so normal to me and say wow, that is pretty remarkable. What is amazing to me about the book is the level of detail you are able to bring forth about these peoples lives i feel like when Dorothy Vaughn is walking to teach at the High School Im walking right along with her because you are able to describe what that journey was likee. How did you get that level of detail . How did you find the research to sayay what the place is smelled alike or the landmarks she passedh walking into the high school . Doing the research i loved it, i mean, i loved it and i really the kind of book that i wanted to write was the kind of a book that i loved reading, which is really detailed narrative nonfiction, where you are so immersed in this dream in this life that you lose yourself. You going to this time that machine and so, i mean, the first there were so many different kinds of sources. First of all interviews with people. Kathryn johnson who just turned 99 years old, really amazing. I was very [inaudible] i got to spend a lot of time with her and talk to her, not just about her life, but also Dorothy Vaughn, for example, in the relationship between the between dorothy and the women who worked for her. There were employee newsletters starting in 1942, for the Langley Research center which was called that Langley Aeronautical Laboratory back then took blackett black and newspapers, amazing source of informationso took the description of Mary Jacksons Wedding Dress in the book came from an article in the norfolk journal and guide i mean the level of detail in the black newspapers. Like telling our own story. Amazing. The Nasa History Office in the Langley Research center had been a spectacular job in preserving wind tunnel records, research reports, phone books, seating charts, photos of offices and a worker groups, teams of people. So, i love that part of it and if i didnt have to eventually turning a book i probably would still be doing that research. [laughter] i heard youbo b sold the rights to this to be made into a movie while you were writing it . I am security you. I am scared of you. Headed you convince someone to buy the movie rights to a book that you had not finished writingha them that i had not even started writing. [laughter] i want her agents. Whos your agent . [applause]. I have a very good literary agent named Mckenzie Brady watson, young, smart and she was the one who represented my book proposal and sold it to Herbert Collins and then she was the one who basically facilitated getting it into the hands of donna gelati who is the producer for Hidden Figures and donna read it and she immediately felt a sense of mission, i think. She really made her job champion this story in the movie. Like she made her mission, and it is not a usual lower it was sort of a lightning strikeke set of circumstances that happened with the book and the movie. What i love about the book in addition to the great detail we get about these wonderful women is that you are able to talk about 70 Different Things within that narrative. One example is the way in which we always had these periods where there has been progress on civil rights in america often because america is threatened, world war i, world war ii, the cold war and then these periods of a backlash where black soldiers are coming back from the war in the get beat up. Attempt to put people back in their place. Talk a little bit about how those themes work and Hidden Figures and why it was so important to make sure that we hadre a sense of this history in that way. I think again, a lot of it came from my interest in my preference for these epic narratives and that these women had that epic narrative. It was enough either to show their life or something to show the history i wanted their livess directly connected to the suites of history and the thing about these women didid these women is that in summary ways their lives were connected to the big history. Not just for them working at nasa starting in world war ii, but like for example Kathryn Johnson was one of the three black students to integrate the graduate school in west virginia. Dorothy vaughn worked at as a math teacher before she went to nasa. She worked at a school in farmville, virginia, that filed a lawsuit that was eventually incorporated into the brown versus board of education suit and that School System was shut down by the state of virginia, rather than comply with the board decision in integrate. So, it really was fascinating to mewa to look at the these sweeps of history and see how this opening for all of these women happened during world war ii and because of the need for labor. And because of the external threats and that we would see these periods of backlash, for example, when virginia closed its school. Wanted to understand how the big picture circumstances affected the individual lives of these people and how they responded to those of circumstances. I also love this idea of looking at, for example, during the cold war when all of these countries were fighting off their colonial oppressors and the pressure that are brought on america to show that, hey, were not really that bad. We will strike out segregation. Please join us instead of going with the communist, india or liberia or cuba and you also showed how that set into their stories, also this time of sputnik, 1957 when the soviets put sputnik, their sunlight into space that really kicked off the space race version of the cold war. That was a fascinating time, i mean, this was a time of mccarthyism, the time of the sputnik is the excitement of going into space. Of the fear of that may be the russians are spying on us and if the time that little rock happened in 1957, so one of the most, i mean, just unbelievable documents that i found that i put in the book that sort of connected those two things is that the russians would always publish a timetable of where the sputnik satellite was overflying during as sort of the orbit around the earth, so i found this Washington Post article that showed that the russians published when he was flying over little rock, arkansas. So, very direct connection between the domestic turmoil and the United States and this international globalrm battle between the United States and the. Oviet union and this idea that because of segregation and because people were oppressed that america was holding itself back like maybe one reason the russians got sputnik up earlier was because they gave gave women more agency as engineers in the soviet union. Yes, they were many more female engineers there than there were in the us where women were still having problems even getting admitted to engineering programs, so , i mean, i think one of the things that was very clear in doing the research into Hidden Figures is that the story is so important, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories that we disseminate inside the country, outside the country, all of these things affect the decisions people made in a very real way and the government was involved in shaping those stories both internally and externally s. Now, your book covers a wide swath of history starting in 1943 all the way through to the end of the space program. E Hidden Figures the movie doesnt do that. Now, went through the whole book looking for Kevin Costner and i didnt see no Kevin Costner. [laughter] and i know you said that you enjoyed the movie and didnt have a problem with it, but or you surprised at how they chose to tell a story becausee it seems like they inflated a lot of things and crunched circumstances together to make the narrative more compelling. I mean, it was interesting experience of this whole Hidden Figures thing. While i was writing my first book and learning to do that your first book. Her first book. [applause]. You know, i was also getting a crash course in what it takes to adapt a book for film and how you tell a story through film and how you tell a story sort of a different between fact and truth. So, there are a lot of facts conflated in the movie, but what i really appreciated about the final product of the movie is that its very true. Its very true to the nature of the women. Its very true to the circumstances. Its very true to nasa and in that sense what it was like during those early days in the space race, but it was really hard for me because. First of all i wrote this book from 1943 to 1969 and i was like why cant you make a movie that goes from 1943 to 1969. Or a tv show. Yeah, that was hardd. I think it was the right decision to make eight compact and narrative focused around this very dramatic moment in Kathryn Johnson five where she calculates that trajectory for john glenn and it was difficult to see certain elements of the story shifted from one character to the other or see things that were created like you know im sure anyone who has seen the movieyo you probably did figure this out, but yes, there was no kevin caused her character whose sledge hammered the colored sign in langley. I was looking. I was in that index. Where is he a mac but, there were moments when i struggled with some of the decisions and one of the things that struck me, for example, was in the book you say they basically ended segregation and now that in 58 . Basically yeah. The time they are pro train in the movie where there still seems to be segregation they had already stopped that yes. So the department wasnt segregated during that time . Exactly, but to bring together these two very traumatic things and dramatic things which is john glenns orbital life in Kathryn Johnson doing the calculationon and the end of the segregation they were conflated in terms of timelineskn. Was there ever a moment when they had to break that to you . I have to say i know a lot of people who have written books and had them made into movies and they have different opinions. I had a very positive experience with thisis and the producer in particular, donna gelati , who is the producer really me in the loopo. Every once in a while like 3 00 a. M. And i would be up working to try to finishy this to turn it in and then the script would pop upnd. Like the latest version of the script and so they really did an amazing job, i think, of keeping me in the loop of honoring my suggestions, really listening to me and doing all they could to understand and preserve that authenticity of the story, which i was happy with. So, the movie comes out and its very successful. I think it was the highest grossing movie amongst all the movies that were nominated for best picture the year it came out. Your book was in the New York Times bestseller and then a year later we had White Supremacists marching through virginia who feel like they have been supported by the president of the United States. What do you think . Coming on the one hand there is this sense this story comes out people are so hungry for this history and they are so worried about how people have been oppressed and how o history has been oppressed and then a year laterst we have people who would be right at homeop upholding White Supremacy marching down the middle of the streets in the town you live in. What do you think of thatwn clinic you know, i mean, i think this is america. I think a lot up theres been a lot of commentary to charlottesville that both the town and the states in the country that this is not who we are. It is who we are coming to america you can clap for that what i mean is that its a complicated place and its been a complicated place from the beginning and we have some of the most admired and beautiful and worthy ideals. I mean, we hold these truths to be selfevident that all men and people are created equal, i mean, this is something that we navigate by and that we believe here are fundamentallyin. We are always at war with the ideal that and the reality of the implementation and that is and when i say this is america, that struggle is that as the struggle that we are always facing and so i think thats we are this is a part of that strugglele for living up to those ideals andfo saying what does it take to really support and allow everyone into those ideals and believing in those ideals, doing what we can to enforce them into spread of them and for me i live 12 minutes driving from monticello. I think monticello is a fascinating place, i mean, Thomas Jefferson was a riveting person who owned people, humans something that today we find objectionable and who wrote to some of the most amazing and insightful and beautiful words about the nature of human freedom. So, that dichotomy is that is sort of the core, i think, in a lot of ways, that struggle of america and particularly for me anyway as an africanamerican really trying to you nice those two things to say that i both acknowledge y the circumstances of slavery in the past and all of the heaviness that comes with that and i also embrace and love the beautiful parts of those ideals of our country and the best of our country, so its complicated. Every humans are complicated and this is a complicated place, but i think the fact that we are living in a moments that it feels like we are living in the history right nowfe. Its a terrifying, fascinating, all of these things at the same time and i think its a moments where the american ideals are calling to us and it is sort of like saying can we take these idealssa and put them in practice in our everyday lives. Now, we will take a g few questions, something to ask if you have a question to line up at one of these two microphones and i will point to you and ask you to say your question and , please, make it a question. [laughter] please. I always feel like the stories of especially black women in the south get out what you just talked about, you know, the wonderful things about our country and also the things that we struggle with. At the duality of all of these popular figures. We live that. I am a native virginian and a native of the south. He i love the south. Lot of these issues that exist everywhere in america are maybe closer to the surface in the south. So i do, you know, and southerners have a, you know, i guess a reputation of being great lovers of history, you know . [laughter] and i think, you know, this and i think embracing even hard things like trying to face those hard and make part of who we are as a country and as individuals and for me, trying to do the work as an individual and embrace all those, even painful things is part of my heritage as an american. Within me that sort of using of all of the conflict. I want all those things to coexist even if they are difficult. Lets start over here, tell us your name and your question. My name is debbie greenberg. I loved your movie, gave me insight into my uncle and cousin who grew up at langley. You. You should read the book, there is more about it. Somebody who grew up here a few years after what you portray, what was the rural environment, ratable environment, the interfaith environment . Houses that influenced you in your outlook i consider myself having grown up in a very interesting place at a very wonderful time. I didnt realize just how close i was to the tail end of this period of desegregation of schools in virginia because virginia tried to secede for a long time. When i went to school i went to integrated schools, black kids and white kids, a lot of vietnamese people who lived in the community, very thoroughly Military Area so in addition to nasa, any number of armynavy bases air force base, it does get a lot of people from a lot of places. And i was a period, the space thing just happened, people were optimistic about that so i feel like i grew up in what to me was sort of still writing about optimism for progress and change from the civil rights movement, the space race at hansen, i went to a very kind of normal american normal, whatever that is, the popular admission it kids from a lot of different backgrounds. A few economic backgrounds, something that has changed since i was in school. I went to school with kids on public assistance and whose parents were quite affluent. I think growing up with very diverse, not just ethnicity but in terms of economic nationality was a real privilege. So i feel very fortunate to have gone to the hampton public schools, got a great education and very much loved my hometown. Up here, name your question. Katie gambler. I was wondering if you following the story of ed white or the mercury 13. It was a group of women who were being recruited with the ideas they could also be part of the astronaut corps. And white is an africanamerican recruited into the astronaut corps. Those are amazing stories, fascinating stories and people involved. Those are very worthy. Im working on a next book that doesnt have to do with nasa, i spend so much time even now reading about people who were involved with the hidden figure story. Perhaps you can write that . You do mention ed in the book, your name and your question. I am a little nervous. I saw the movie, predominantly white. People applauded, people were crying. My wife was crying, the man next to her was crying, the asian woman next to her was crying and i wonder what you felt, was revoked that deep emotion . Tears of joy, tears of sadness . What about the emotional impact . I have seen the movie ten times in different settings and it is the same in hampton where Everybody Knows the people, with so many settings and it has been that. I think it is there are these ideals, things we want to believe about who we are, who we can be, and maybe what that movie does is shows us an instance of closing the gap between who we are, when we fall short and stand up and go to our highest level and it is optimistic, doesnt take away the hope and squarely in the eye, you can never take away the hope or progress, even in a moment, many challenges facing this country. There are always challenges facing this country. We made a lot of progress and need to acknowledge that even as we look at squarely difficult things, we are humans, we need hope and happy stories to get up in the morning and give us meaning and that is maybe it. It shows the hard things, we need to acknowledge them. It is a very hopeful movie and a movie about people who love what they are doing, for whom that has become a bond. People passionate about the space program, and enables them to be close. Your name and your question. I wrote down my question because i am nervous to talk. At the beginning of this talk, talk about how history was not hidden and it was produced one way, too much of american and international public, what are other ways that you see are unseen or counter narrative, and the awareness of these stories will affect the actions we as americans take . Growing up, i thought of history is the history of politics, president s, very big picture history but history is what each of us dues and it is about fitting into the great course of human events and i think in the same way science is seen as the great individual scientist, einstein, all these great people, mostly men, the scientific work is based on the teamwork and people coming together to create a giant leap. In the same way, we see great individuals and dont look at the people around us. That seems simplistic but looking at people around us, people down the street, the monument here has been here so long, how did it get there . Asking questions about things in our surroundings, saying we are looking at history from the ground up as opposed to the topdown. Very human level stories and i think that very human level view of why things happen is something people are hungry for. Dying to see the presentation, also writing about people in our country from the point of view that we dont always get and people are hungry for. There is a lot of Similar Energy between why people are interested in Hidden Figures, maybe people see that as a contradiction but there is a lot of similarity between what people are looking for, from the bottom up as opposed to the topdown in terms of history. In the field, better be good. My name is Alan Weinstein blues not quite einstein. Now you are really raising the bar. I would like to think i made a contribution to Computer Technology and science but i would like to talk about the vantage point, my question is how did the book differ from the movie in any significant way and what was your role in that if there was a difference between the book and the movie, what was your role in the difference . The biggest difference, in 1969, it was a sliver taking place from 1957 to 1962. As we talk about the timelines and things i was a consultant on the movie, they would ask me questions, to speak a little bit to the computer part of it. The book, nasa is an engineering organization, building planes and building spaceships, because Catherine Johnson as a mathematician in that hierarchy was a central character, created a plot in the movie hinged on that and her viewpoint, something i didnt learn until after the movie was produced and had questions about how did the script come together, they made an interesting decision to really make it a movie about math as opposed to engineering which the book is a lot more about engineering and my new show. You detail their lives. I wanted to ask you to talk about the human computer project you are working on, something you continued past the life of the book, what are you doing and how it succeeded since the book and the movie came out . The human computer project, what i was surprised about the researcher Hidden Figures. How many were involved, all these other organizations. How to catalog all the women involved in doing this work in the early days of computing and understand the work they were doing and get a snapshot and see if there is something we learned from pioneers to women working in these fields. People can find it online. Humancomputerproject. Com or reach out to me at margot lee shetterly. Com. Really appreciate your attention. We ran out of time, wrap it up, i want to thank our esteemed guest, author American Dream and the untold story of the black women mathemeticians who helped win the space race. Please enjoy the rest of the festival. [inaudible conversations] you are watching booktv on cspan2, the
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