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 JacksonsWedding 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 sto