May have your attention please. Take your seats. The presentation is about to begin. Before we get started like you to be aware most likely a question and answer period at the end of the presentation. When it is time for theat questions and answers go to one of the two microphones on either side of the stage, line up to ask a question. To begin our presentation, i would like to introduce eric digins, a tv critic for npr. [applause] how are you doing . Thanks so much for joining us here. We really appreciate it. As was said, im eric degins, tv critic for National Public radio. So of course i should be talking to a author. Ive written a lot about race in media and also, i interviewed taraji p. Henson for the smithsonian. We have a little bit in common here. So our esteemed guests, the daughter of a nasa scientist and english professor . Yes. Virginia native. You worked in Investment Banking . That was my first job out of school. Wow. Also had a magazine for expats in mexico . Mexico. Inside mexico. Started working on Hidden Figures in 2010. Became New York Times best circle. Spawned a move that that was as car nominated. March margo lee shetterly. [applause] i heard you gave an amazing speech last night where you talked a a little bit about charlottesville and race. Tt could you give us a little taste what you talked about there, how it compares to what you talk about in the book. Yeah. The thing that we talked a a little bit about what i started out doing which was working inin Investment Banking out of school and really when i was growing up that seemed like progress and the future and very protagonist way life, career to have, like very powerful. History for me, it was something that always felt, you know, i think as an africanamerican, always so heavy and connected to this past which is usually is taught in schools slavery, Martin Luther king, now there is obama. A very long but extremely narrow arc of history and 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 telt your own story, to be the protagonist in your own story. As opposed to telling a story where you are the passive recipient of history. And so you know, i live in charlottesville, virginia. Ow i went to the university of virginia but recently moved there and, you know this entire, you know, issue of the statues and you know, the white supremacist marchs, all of that stuff has been happening since i moved there and, you know, i think for me, were very focused on the presence of the statues and the meaning of the statues, you know, what they have come to symbolize. I think part of the issue also is that, those statues, they also represent an absence of a counternarrative. That there is the slavery narrative. There are these confederate statues, but in terms of a diversity and a richness of africanamerican stories, there are very few, and there are very few which africanamericans are protagonists and these storieses which you are allowed to be a protagonist matter. Each of us is a protagonist in our own life. We see ourselves as people with agency, you know. That i think we love stories about superheroes and kings. St these stories make us feel powerful. Yeah. So i think that it is really, it is about the presence of the apartheid and the presence of the racial terror and the slavery that is also about the absence of the counternarrative. I really see that one of the jobs of bringing, bridging some of these divides is 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. S right. For people who may have been under a rock for the last year or so Hidden Figures, this amazing book about these black women who served as Human Computers working both the agency, that preceded nasa, and for nasa, crunching all of these complex math and complex numbers that were used to first develop the aerodynamics for planes and then later to, for spaceflight and the moonshot. I saw in the book you said it isnt Hidden History but unseen history. Everybody asks you why dont we know this but im going to askis you, why dont we know this and why is it unseen . Are we afraid to look at it . Were we still too busy lionizinp nasa and john glenn and people like that . Why was it unseen . I think the primary reason this history is unseen because this work was womens work. You know, and that not just at nasa. There was this cadre of africanamerican women working at nasa langley. They were part of a much larger cohort of woman from all background doing work at all the different nasa centers. There were women Computers Working in the army and the navy. They were working at bell labs which many of you may know is the precursor to at t and basically founded the communications revolution, cell phones and things like that. C i mean virtually everywhere you found Technological Progress that required number crunching and reduction of data there were women. There were rooms full of women kind of like a living excel spreadsheet doing math. It was considered subprofessional work. It was very necessary but literally the women at nasa they were classified as subprofessionals. H which meant they were above clerical employees. They were not as high in the hierarchy as the men who were engineers who were considered professional employees. So i think thats a large reason why this work was invisible. They were kind of the equivalent of our computers sitting on our desks doing the work today and yet without them, all of these advances would not have been possible. Now im interested in how you decided to focus on this because i know of course you were surrounded by these people when you were growing up. And, you know, ive done panels where i talk to people, they goo i have this idea. Then i made it a reality by doing x, y and z, i think to myself, wait a minute, i want to hear how you had the idea, because that to me is the key. Deciding i mean there were plenty of other people grew up around these people. In your neighborhood when you were growing up, im sure everybody knew these stories. Up what made you decide this was worth a book . I told the story before, it is interesting, the moment, there is a very specific moment when Hidden Figures, what would become Hidden Figures became into existence. Interestingly came out of the moment between the two most important men in my life, my father and my husband. We had gone back to visit my parents christmas seven years ago now. We had run into a woman who had worked at nasa many years as a computer and you know, that sort of sparked this conversation of my dad sort of you know, going into this speech about what she had done and the other women and Catherine Johnson, she calculated the launch window fot the astronauts in a very casual way. Wait a minute. That moment where the needle slips off the record. I didnt have that moment. I didnt hear the needle slip off the record, you know, because i had heard a lot of those stories before. I had grown up there. I had known these women but had known them as my parents colleagues and friend. But the needle definitely slipped off the record for my house who is not from hansen. He was like, wait a minute, can you please replay that for me and why i havent heard the story before . For me it was a moment looking at the community, the people, nasa, this very extraordinary kind of place that i had grown up, that was also extremely normal and ordinary but looking, being able to see past what was so normal to me, say, wow, that is pretty remarkable. Yeah. And whats amazing to me about the book, the level of detailai youre able to bring forth about these peoples lives. I feel like, when Dorothy Vaughn is walking in to teach at the high school, im walking right along with her. Youre able to describe what that journey was like. How did you get that level of detail. Ho how did you find the what the place smelled like or thee landmarks she passed walking into the high school . Doing the research, i loved it, i loved it. I really, the kind of book thate i wanted to write was the kind of book that i loved reading which is really detailed narrative nonfiction, where youre so emersed into this dream and this life that you lose yourself. You go into this time machine. And so i, i mean the sources, there were so many some different kind of sources. First of all, interviews with people. Catherine johnson, who just turned 99 years old, really amazing. I was very fortunate at that raja p henson . For those that didnt read the book at not just her life but Dorothy Vaughn, for example. The relationship between Dorothy Vaughn and women that worked for her. There were employee newsletters starting in 1942 for the Langley Research center which was called the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory back then. Black newspaper, amazing source of information. The description of Mary JacksonsWedding Dress in the book came from an article in the norfolk journal and guide. The level of detail in the black newspaper. He like telling our own story. It is amazing, absolutelyabsu extraordinary. Of the Nasa History Office and langery Research Center done a excellent job with wind tunnel records, seating charts, photos of offices and work groups, teams of people. It was, you know, so i really, i loved that part of it. If i, if i didnt have to eventually turn in a book i would probably still be doing that research. Now i heard you already, you sold the rights to be made into a movie while you were writing it in man, im scared of you. I am scared of you. I am sca y [laughter]. Buy movie rights of a book you hadnt even finished writing yet . T . Ti i actually hadnt even started writing. [laughter]g, i want her agent. Who is her agent . E] [laughter]. [applause] i tell you i have a very good literary agent. This is Makenzie Brady watson. Young, very smart. Excuse me. And she was the one, who represented my book proposal. Sold it to heart per collins. She is the one basically facilitated getting into the hands of the producer for Hidden Figures and donna read it. She immediately felt a sense of mission i think. She really made her job made her job championing this as a movie. She made it her mission. It is not a usual, it was sort of a Lightning Strike set of circumstances that happened with the book and the movie. Wow. What i love about the book, inle addition to all in addition too all the great detail of the women, youre talking about all those things with the narrative. One of which there is periods where there is progress on civil rights in america, often because america is threatened, world war ii, world war ii, the cold war. Then these periods of backlash where black soldiers are coming back from the war and they get beat up. This team to put people back in their place. Talk a little bit how those themes work in Hidden Figures and why it was so important to make sure we had a sense of the sweep of history of that way. Yeah. I think again, you know, a lot of it came from my interest and my preference for these epic narratives, you know. That these women had that epic narrative. So it wasnt enough to either to show their lives or simply show the history. I wanted their lives directly connected to the sweep of history. The thing about these women they in so many ways their lives were connected to the big history. You know, not just for them working at nasa starting in world war ii. Ar but like for example, Catherine Johnson was one of three black students to integrate the b graduate schools inest west virginia. Dorothy vaughn worked at 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. That School System was shut down by the state of virginia, rather than comply with the board decision and enat that great. So, it was, it really was fascinating to me to look at these sweeps of the history and see how this opening for all of these women happened during world war ii. Because of the need for labor. And pause of the external threat and that we would see, you known these periods of backlash. For example, when, after brown when virginia closed its schools. Nia cl so you know, i wanted to understand how the bilge picture Second Quarter big picture circumstances affected individual lives of these people and how they responded to those circumstances. Yeah. I also love the idea of looking at it, for example, during the cold war, when all of these countries were fighting off their colonial oppressors anda pressure it brought on america it show, were not that bad. Well strike segregation instead of going with the communists in. Bulgaria, liberia, or cuba. You showed how that fed into their stories which i thought was amazing. The time of sputnik, 1957, when soviets put sputnik, satellite into space, thatat kicked off a space race version of the cold war, that was a fascinating time. I mean this was a time of mccarthyism. It was a time, you know the sputnik obviously, the excitement of going into space. The fear that maybe the russians are spying on us. It is the time that little rock happened in 1957. So one of the most, i mean just unbelievable documents i found that i put in the book that connected those two things is that the russians would always publish a timetable where the sputnik satellite was overflying during, sort of orbit around the earth. Wow. So i found this w Washington Post article that, that showed that the russians published, when it was flying over little rock, arkansas. So, you know, very direct connections between the domestic turmoil in the United States and this international, global, battle between the United States and the soviet union. And this idea that because of segregation, and because people were oppressed, that america was holding itself back. Maybe one reason, the russians got sputnik up earlier is because they gave women more agency as engineers in the soviet union . There were many, many more female engineers in Engineering School there than there were here in the United States whereh women were still having problemv even getting admitted to engineering programs. Yeah, i think one of the things that was, that was very clear during the research into Hidden Figures, the story is so important, stories we tell ourselves. The stories that we, that we disseminate inside of the country, outside of the country. All of these things affected the decisions that people made. In a very real way. The government was involved in shaping those stories both internally and externlynally. Now your book cover as wide swath of history. Starts in 1943. Comes all the way through to the end of the space program. The Hidden Figures the movieie doesnt do that i went through the whole book looking for kevic costner. I didnt see no Kevin Costner. So, and i know you said thaw enjoyed the movie, didnt have a problem with it, were you surprised how they chose to tell the story . Seems like they conflate ad lot of things and kind of crunched a lot of circumstances together to make the mayor tiff more compelling . It was a real interesting experience of this whole Hidden Figures thing. While i was writing my first book, learning how to do that. Her first book. Her first book. Oh, my gosh. Lause] [applause] you know, i was also gettinge a course 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 difference between fact and truth. You know. Ruth, yo there are a lot of facts that are conflated in the movie but what i really appreciated about the final product of the movie,d is that it is very true. It is very true to the nature of the women. It is very true to the circumstances. It is very true to nasa, and that sense of what it was like during the early days of the space race but it was really hard for me. First of all i wrote the book from 1943 to 1969. I thought, why cant you make a movie from 1943 to 1969 . Or a tv show from a critic. It was hard to make a picture to focus on very traumatic moment for Catherine John ans life where she calculates the trajectory of john glenns flight. It was different seeing elements of the story shifted from one character to another. See things that were created. Yo im sure anyone who has seen the movie you probably did figure this out, there was no Kevin Costner character who sledgehammers the colored sign in langley, but i was looking. I was in the index. Yeah. You know, there are moments when you know, i struggled with some of the decisions and one of the things that struck me, for example, in your book you say, that they basically ended the segregation in nasa, in if i have at this 8 00. In the movie there seems to be segregation. They already stopped that. Yeah. The department wasnt segregated during the time the movie showed . Yeah. In order to bring together two very traumatic things which is john glenns orbit al flight and Catherine Johnson doing the calculations, the end of segregation they were conflated in terms of timelines. Was there ever a moment they had to break that to you . Well you know what . I have to say, i know a lot of people who have written books and have them made into movies have different opinions but i had a very posi