[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] me i have your attention. Please take your seats. The presentation is about to begin. There will be a question and answer time at the end of the presentation. You can go to one of the two microphones and line up for a question for you to begin i like to, tv critic for npr. [applause]. How you doing . Thanks so much for joining us here. As was said im a tv critic for National Public radio, so i should be talking to an author. Actually, i have written a lot about races and media and interviewed for the smithsonian so we have a bit in common here. Our esteemed guest, the daughter of a nasa scientist and english professor . Yes. Virginian native. You worked in Investment Banking . That was my first job out of school. And had a magazine inside mexico and started working on Hidden Figures in 2010 and became a New York Times number one bestseller, spawned a movie that was oscarnominated, Margot Lee Shetterly. [cheers and applause] so, i heard you gave an amazing speech last night where you talked a bit about charlottesville and race. Could you give us a little taste of what you talked about their and how it appears to what you talk about in the book . Yeah, you know the thing that we talked a bit about what i started out doing it, which was working in the Investment Banking out of school and really, when i was growing up that seemed like progress in the future and mary protagonist way, life or career to have 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 schools as slavery, Martin Luther king and now obama, this very long but extremely narrow arc of history and so during the fourth of writing Hidden Figures what i really came to understand was how powerful it is to tell a story and to write a story and to tell your zero this story and to be the protagonist in your own story as oppose to telling a story where you are a passive recipient of history and 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 in the White Supremacists marches, all of that stuff has been happening since ive moved there and i think for me we are very focused on the presence of the statute and the meaning of the statues, what that come to symbolize, but i think part of the issue also is that those statues also represent an absence of a counter narrative that there is the slavery narrative, these confederate statues, but in terms of a diversity and richness of africanamerican stories there are very few and very few in which africanamericans are protagonists in these stories in which you are allowed to be a protagonist matter i mean each of us is a protagonist in our own life. We see ourselves with people and i think thats why we love stories about superheroes and kings and, i mean, these stories make us feel powerful and so i think it really is about the presence of the apartheid and the presence of the racial terror and slavery. Its also about the absence of the counter narrative. 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. That people have been there. In the history is there. The stories are what we need to tell now. Well, for people who have made been under a rock the last year, Hidden Figures is an amazing book about black women who served as Human Computers working for that agency that preceded nasa and nasa crunching all of this complex math and numbers used first to develop that aerodynamics warplanes and later to for spaceflight. Now, i saw the book you said this isnt hidden history, its unseen history and i know you say everyone asks you why dont we know this. What im going to ask you, why dont we know this and why is it unseen . Are we afraid to look at it . Were we to busy life 19 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 not just at nasa, so there was this contrary of africanamerican women working at nasa langley. They were part of a much larger cohort of women from all backgrounds doing the work at all of the different nasa centers or do there were women Computers Working in the army, navy, cell labs which many of you may know as the precursor to at t and basically founded the communication revolution, cell phones and things like that i mean virtually everywhere you found Technological Progress that required numbercrunching and reduction of data. There were women, rooms full of women like living self spreadsheet doing math and this work was considered sub professional work. It was very necessary, but literally the women at nasa were classified as sub professionals which meant they work above clerical employees. Of a were not as high in the hierarchy as the men who were engineers who were considered professional employees and so i think that it is a large reason why this work was invisible. They were kind of that equivalent of our computers sitting on our desk doing work today and yet without them all of these advances would not have been possible. Im interested in how you decided to focus on this because i know you were surrounded by people when you were growing up and i done panels where i talk to people in they say i had decided and i say to myself wait a minute i went to hear about how you had the idea because that to me is the key, deciding i mean there were plenty of other people who grew up around these people and in your neighborhood when you were growing up im sure everyone knew these stories. What made you decide it was worth a book . Its interesting there is a very specific moments when trying to what would become Hidden Figures them into existence and interestingly it came out of a moment between the two most important men in my life, my father and my husband. My husband and i had gone back to hampton and 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 that sort of start this conversation with my dad sort of you know going into this speech about what she had done and the other women and Kathryn Johnson who calculated the launch window for the astronauts. [laughter] that moment where the needle flipped off the record. Yeah, but i didnt have that moment i did not hear the needle flip 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 as my parents colleagues and friends, but the needle deftly slipped off the record for my husband who was not from hampton and was like wait a minute 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 being able to see past what was so normal to me and say wow, that is pretty remarkable. The level of detail that you are able to bring forth about these peoples lives at you like with dorothy thought is lucky to teach at the high school of walking along with her because you are able to describe that journey. How did you get that level of detail . How did you find the research to say what this place smelled like or the landmark she passed when she was walking through the high school . Doing the research i loved it, i mean, i loved it and i really the kind of book i wanted to write was the kind of book that i had loved reading which was really detailed narrative nonfiction where you are so immersed in this wife that you lose yourself. You going to this time machine and so, i mean, the sources there were so many different kinds of sources. First of all, interviews with people. Kathryn johnson who had just turned and 99 years old, really amazing. I was [inaudible] i got to spend a lot of time with her and talk to her, not just about her life, but also dorothy bonds, for example, and the relationship between Dorothy Vaughn and the one who worked for her. Avera were employee newsletter starting in 1942 for the Langley Research center called the reason Langley Aeronautical Laboratory back then. Black newspapers, amazing source of information. The description of Mary JacksonsWedding Dress in the book came from an article in the journal and guide, i mean, the level of detail in the black newspapers. Like telling our own story. Absolutely extraordinary. Nasa History Office and Langley Center has done a spectacular job in preserving the wind tunnel records, research reports, phone books, seating charts, photos of offices and workgroups, teams of people, so i love that part of it and if i didnt have to eventually turn in a book id would probably still be doing that research. [laughter] i heard you sold the rights to this to be made into a movie while you were writing it . I am scared of you. How did you convince somebody to buy movie rights to a book you had written scenic or that i had not even started writing. [laughter] i want her agent. Whos your agent . [laughter] i will tell you i have a very good literary agent named Mckenzie Watson young and she was the one who represented my book proposal and sold it to her Herbert Collins and she was the one who basically facilitated getting it into the hands of donna gelati the producer of Hidden Figures and donna read it and she immediately felt a sense of mission, i think. She really made her job championing this story as a movie like she made her mission and, 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. What i love about this book in addition to all the great details we get about these wonderful women is that you are able to talk about 70 Different Things within the narrative. One example is the way in which we have 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 periods of a backlash where black soldiers are coming back from the war in the get beat up in attempt to put people back in their place. Put talk about how those things work in Hidden Figures and how it was so important that we had a sense of history that way. Yeah, think again a lot of it came from my interest in my preference for these epic narratives and i wanted that these women had that epic narrative. It wasnt enough to either show their lives or simply show the history. I wanted their lives directly connected to history and the thing about these women is that in so anyways their lives were connected to the big history and not just for them working at nasa starting in world war ii, but like for example Kathryn Johnson was one of three black students to enter 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 boards decision and integrate, so its 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 that external threat and that we would see these periods of backlash for example when after brown and virginia closed schools. I wanted to understand how the big picture circumstances affected that individual lives of these people and how they responded. I also love this idea of looking at for example during the cold war when all of these countries were fighting off their colonial suppression pressures and the pressure in america do show we are not that bad and we will strike down segregation, please join us. You were able to integrate that into the story. This time of sputnik, 1957 when the soviets put sputnik there satellite into space i kicked off the space race version of the cold war. That was a fascinating time, i mean, this was a time of mccarthyism, a time of sputnik obviously in the excitement to space, the fear that maybe the russians are spying on us. If the time that little rock happened in 1957, so one of the most mean unbelievable documents that i found that putting the book that sort of connected those two things is that the russians would always publish a timetable of where the sputnik satellite was over flying its orbit around the earth, so i found this Washington Post article that shows that the russians published what it was flying over little rock, arkansas. So, theory direct connection 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 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 us where women were still having problems even getting admitted to engineering programs, so, i mean, one of the things that was very clear during 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 on this the government was involved in shaping those both internally and externally. Now, your book covers white [inaudible] 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 Kevin Costner. [laughter] and i know you said you enjoyed the movie and didnt have a problem with that, but were you surprised how they chose to tell the story because it seems like they inflated a lot of things and crunched a lot of circumstances together to make the narrative more compelling. I mean, it was a really interesting experience, this whole hidden figure thing while i was writing my first book and learning how to do that. Your first book. Her first book. [applause]. I was also getting a crash course in what it takes to adopt 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, so there are a lot of facts that are completed in the movie, but what i really appreciated about the final product of the movie is that its very true, true to the nature of the women. Very true to the circumstances. Its very true to nasa and that sense of what it was like during those early days in the space race, but it was hard for me because first of all wrote this book for 1943 to 1969 and i was like my cat you make a movie that goes from 1943 to 1969. Or tv show. I mean, that was hard. I think it was the right decision to make a compacted narrative surrounding this very dramatic moment in Catherine Johnsons life where she calculates the trajectory for john glenns flight. It was difficult to see certain elements of the story shifting from one character to the other or see things that were created like im short anyone who has seen the movie you probably figured this out, but yes, there was no Kevin Costner character whose sledge hammered the colored spine in langley, but i was looking in the index. But, there were moments when i struggled with some of the decisions and one of the things that struck me for example is that in your book you say things basically ended segregation in nasa in 58. Basically, yeah so the time they are portrayed in the movie where they are still seems to be segregation they had already stopped that . Yes. The department was a segregated during that time . Exactly, but in order to bring the other these two dramatic things, which is don klans orbital and Catherine Johnson during the calculation and the end of segregation they were conflated in terms of timeline. Was very moment when they had to break that to you . I have to say i know a lot of people who have written books and have them made into movies and have different opinions, but i had a very positive experience with this and the producer in particular donna who is the producer really kept me in the loop. Every once a while it was like 3 00 a. M. And id be up working trying to finish this draft to turn it in and this script would pop up 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 the authenticity of the story of a witch i was very happy with. So, the movie comes out and its very successful. I figure was the highest grossing movie of the next all the movies nominated for best picture the year it came out your gear book was in the New York Times bestseller and then a year later we have White Supremacists marching through virginia who feel like they have been supported by the president of the United States. What do you think i need on the one hand the