March 5, 2021 Before the age of electronic computers, humans who did complex mathematical calculations by hand were called computers. The movie “Hidden Figures,” based on a book of the same name, tells the story of three Black women who worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as human computers: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. They and their Black colleagues in the segregated West Area Computing Unit played an instrumental role in sending John Glenn to space in 1962 and getting him back to earth safely, but many of their NASA colleagues remain hidden figures to this day due to systemic racism that allows the achievements of their white colleagues to outshine theirs.