Actually, ive written a lot about race and media and also have, i interviewed taraji p. Henson for the smithsonian, so weve got a little bit many common here. [applause] so our esteemed guest, the daughter of a nasa scientist and english professor . Yes. Virginia native. You worked in Investment Banking . That was my first job. Wow. Out of high school. And also had a magazine for expats in mexico. Inside mexico . Yeah. Started working on Hidden Figures in 2010. Wow. And became a New York Times number one best seller, spawned a movie that was oscarnominated. Margot lee shetterly, everyone. [cheers and applause] so i heard that you gave an amazing speech last night where you talked a little bit about charlottesville and race. Could you give us just a little taste of what you talked about there and how it compares to what you talk about in the book. Yeah. You know, the thing that we talked a little bit about what i started out doing, which was working in Investment Banking out of school. And really when i was growing up, that seemed like progress and the future and very protagonist ways. Lifes, you know, career to have, like, very powerful. And history, more me, it was something that always 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 taught in schools as, you know, slavery, Martin Luther king and, obvious, now theres obama thats very, you know [laughter] 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 tell your own story. And to be the protagonist in your own story as opposed to the telling a story where you are kind of the passive recipient of history. And so, you know, i live in charlottesville, virginia. I went to the university of virginia but recently moved there. And, you know, this entire, you know, issue of the statues and the white supremacist marches, all of that stuff has been happening since ive 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. But i think part of the issue also is that those, those statues, they also represent an absence of a counternarrative. That there is this 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 in which africanamericans are protagonists, you know . And these stories in which you are allowed to be a protagonist matter. I mean, each of us is the protagonist in our own life. You know, we see ourselves as people with agency, you know . And i think thats why we love stories about superheroes and kings and, you know, i mean, these stories make us feel powerful. And so, you know, i think that it is really, it is about the presence of the apartheid and the presence of the racial terror and of slavery, but its 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. Right. Well, for people who may have been under a rock for the last year or so [laughter] Hidden Figures, this amazing book about these black women who served as Human Computers working for both the agency before, that preceded nasa, and for nasa; crunching all of this complex math, these complex numbers that were used first to develop the aerodynamics for planes and then, later, to for space flight and the moon shot. Now, i saw in the book you said this isnt hidden history, its unseen history. And i know you say everybody asks you why dont we know this, but im going to ask you, why dont we know this . [laughter] and why is it unseen, you know . Are we afraid to look at it . Are we were we too busy lionizing nasa and 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, you know, and not just at nasa. So there was this cadre of africanamerican women working at nasalangley. They were part of a much larger cohort of women from all backgrounds doing the work at all of the different nasa centers. There were women Computers Working in the army, in 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. I mean, virtually everywhere you found Technological Progress that required number crunching and, you know, reduction of data, there were women. There were rooms full of women kind of like a living excel spread sheet. [laughter] wow. Doing math. And i, this work was considered subprofessional work, you know . It was very necessary but, literally, the women at nasa were, they were classified as subprofessionals which meant they were above clerical employees. They were not as high in the hierarchy as men who were engineers, who were considered professional employees. And so i think that thats a large reason why this work was invisible. They were kind of the equivalent of our computers sitting on our desk doing the work today, and yet without them, you know, 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 ive talked to people, and they go, well, i had this idea, and then i made it a reality by doing x, y and z. And i think to myself, wait a minute, i want to hear about how you had the idea. Because that, to me, is the key. Deciding i mean there were plenty of people who were growing up around these stories. What made you decide this was worth a book . Well, you know, ive told this story, its interesting. Theres a very specific moment when Hidden Figures came into existence. And interestingly, it came out of a moment between the two most important men in my life, my father and my husband. And so my husband and i had gone back to hampton, and we were visiting my parents for christmas seven years ago now, and we had run into a woman who had worked at nasa many years as a computer. And, you know, so that sort of sparked this conversation of my dad sort of, you know, going into this, you know, speech about what she had done and the other women and, you know, Katherine Johnson who, you know, she calculated the launch window for the astronauts in this very casual way. [laughter] youre like, wait a minute yeah. That moment where the needle slips off the record. Yeah. But i didnt have that moment. I didnt hear the needle slip off the record because i had heard a lot of those stories before, and i had grown up there, and i had known these women. But i had known them as my parents colleagues and friends. But the needle definitely slipped off the record for my husband who is not from hampton and was like, wait a minute, you know . Can you please replay that for me, and why havent i heard that story before. So for me, it was a moment of looking at the community, the people, nasa, this very extraordinary kind of place that i had grown up and that was also extremely normal and ordinary. But looking, being able to see past what was so normal to me and say, wow, that is pretty remarkable yeah. And whats amazing to me about the book is the level of detail that youre able to bring forth about these peoples lives. I mean, i feel like, you know, when Dorothy Vaughn is walking to teach at the high school, im walking right along with her because youre able to describe what that journey was like. How did you get that level of desnail howd you find the research desnail howd you find the research to say what the place smelled like or the landmarks she passed walking to the high school . You know, 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 book that i love reading, which is really detailed, narrative nonfiction where, you know, you are so immersed in this dream and this life that you lose yourself, you know . You go into this time machine. And so, i mean, the sources were there were so many different kinds of sources, you know . First of all, interviews with people, you know . Katherine johnson, who just turned 99 years old, really amazing. I was very taraji p. Henson. Yes. [laughter] for the audience that didnt read book. So i got to spend a a lot of time with her and talk to her not just about her life, but also Dorothy Vaughn, for example, and the relationship between Dorothy Vaughn and the women who 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 newspapers, amazing source of information. Mary the description of Mary JacksonsWedding Dress in the book came from an article in the norfolk journal and guide. Telling our own stories. Yeah, it is amazing, absolutely extraordinary. The Nasa History Office and the Langley Research center has done a spectacular job in preserving wind tunnel records, research reports, phonebooks, seating charts, photos of offices and work groups, you know, teams of people. It was, you know, so i really, i loved that part of it. And, you know, i if i didnt have to eventually turn in a book, i probably would still be doing that research. [laughter] now, i heard that you already, that you sold the rights to this to be made into a movie while you were writing it . Man, im scared of you. [laughter] i am scared of you. Howd you convince somebody to buy the movie rights to a book you hadnt even finished writing yet . That i hadnt actually even started writing, is the [laughter] i want her agent. Whos your agent . [laughter] [applause] yeah, i will tell you i have a very good literary agent, her name is Mckenzie Brady watson, very young excuse me. [laughter] she was the one who represented my book proposal, you know, and sold it to harpercollins. She was the one who basically facilitated the, getting it into the hands of donna yes ge locks tti gelotti. She immediately felt a sense of mission, i think, you know . She really made her job championing this story as a movie. Like, she made it her mission. And but, i mean, it is not a usual or it was sort of a Lightning Strike set of circumstances that happened with the book and the movie. Wow. Well, now what i love about the book, in addition to all the great detail that we get about these wonderful women, is that youre able to talk about so many Different Things within that narrative. One example is the way in which weve always had these periods where theres 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 backlash where black soldiers are coming back from the war and they get beat up, this attempt to put people back in their place. Talk a little bit about how those themes work in Hidden Figures and why it was so important to make sure that we had a sense of this sweep of history in 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 . And i wanted that these women had that epic narrative. So it wasnt enough to, either to show their lives or simply to show the history. I wanted their lives directly connected to the sweep of history. And the thing about these women is that they, in so many ways, their lives were connected to the big history. And you know, not just for them working at nasa starting in world war ii, but like, for example, Katherine Johnson was one of three black students to integrate the graduate schools 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 the lawsuit that was eventually incorporated into the brown v. Board of education suit, and that School System was shut down by the state of virginia rather than comply with the board decision and integrate. So it was, it really was fascinating to me to look at these sweeps of history and to 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 threat. And that we would see, you know, these periods of backlash, for example, when after brown when virginia closed its schools. So, you know, i wanted to understand how the big picture circumstances affected the individual lives of these people and how they responded to those circumstances. Yeah, yeah. 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 it brought on america to show that, hey, were not really that bad, hey, well strike down segregation. Please join us instead of going with the communists, india, liberia or cuba. And you were also able to show how that fit into their stories too, which i thought was amazing. Yeah. This time of sputnik, you know, 1957, when the soviets put sputnik, their satellite, into space that really kicked off the space race version of the cold war, you know, that was a fascinating time. You know, this is a time of mccarthyism, its the time of, you know, the sputnik, obviously, the excitement of going into space, the fear of that maybe the russians are spying on us. Its 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, you know . [laughter] during its sort of orbit around the earth. Wow, wow. And so i found this Washington Post article 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 soviet 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 is because they gave women more agency as engineers in the soviet union. Yeah. There were many, many more female engineers in Engineering School there than there were here in the United States where women were still having problems even getting admitted to engineering programs. So, yeah. No, i mean, i think one of the things that was very clear doing the research into Hidden Figures is that the story is so important. The stories that we tell ourselves, the stories that we, that we disseminate inside the country, outside of the country, you know, all of these things affected the decisions that people made in a very real way, and the government was involved in shaping those stories both internally and, you know, externally. Now, your book covers a wide swath of history. It starts in 1943, comes all the way through to the end of the Space Program. Hidden figures, the movie, doesnt do that. Now, i went through the whole book looking for ken costner, i didnt see [laughter] no Kevin Costner. Laugh so, and i know you said you enjoyed the movie and didnt have a problem with it, but were you surprised how they chose to tell the story . It seems like they kind of conflated a lot of things and crunched a lot of circumstances together to make the narrative more compelling. Yeah. I mean, it was a really interesting experience of this whole Hidden Figures thing, you know . While i was writing my first book and learning how to do that your first book. [laughter] her first book [applause] oh, my gosh. [applause] you know, i was always 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 the difference between fact and truth, you know . So there are a lot of facts that are 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, it is very true to the circumstances, its very true to nasa and that sense of what it was like, you know, during those early days of the space race. But it was really hard for me because, you know, first of all, i wrote this book from 1943 to 19, you know, 69. I was, like, why cant you make a movie that goes from 1943 to 1969 . Or a tv show you know . That was hard. I think it was very much the right decision to make a compact narrative focused around this very dramatic moment in Katherine Johnsons life where she calculates the trajectory for john glenns flight. Yeah. And it was, you know, it was difficult to see certain elements of the story, you know, shifted from one character to the other or see things that were creative like, you know, im sure anyone whos seen the movie, you probably did figure this out. Yes, there was no Kevin Costner character who sledgehammered the coloreds sign in langley [laughter] i was looking. I was in the index, wheres yeah. [laughter] but, you know, so it was there are moments when, you know, i struggled with some of the decisions well, one of the things that struck me, for example, was in your book you say that they basically ended segregation in nasa in 58 . Is. Yeah. So, basically, when so time that a theyre portray anything the movie where portray