I was surprised how little I knew about the significant contributions to aviation that had happened right there in Hampton, Virginia.
— Margot Lee Shetterly
It has been very rare to see a black woman as a protagonist. And also as three-dimensional people - mathematicians, mothers, wives, complicated people, not perfect.
I remember 'The Norfolk Journal and Guide,' which is a black newspaper that still exists, but it was really influential, as you can imagine, in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. But all of their archives are online and digitized, and it was a really great resource.
Five of my father's seven siblings made their bones as engineers or technologists, and some of his best buddies - David Woods, Elijah Kent, Weldon Staton - carved out successful engineering careers at Langley.
I guess it's inevitable that I would become somebody who would write about scientists.
The success of 'Hidden Figures' proves that people are interested in, hungry for, stories about transcendent human experiences.
The Russians had got a real head-start into space; America was playing catch-up.
You need to decide that you're going to use a story to enlighten and inspire people in the modern day.
Katherine Johnson actually integrated the public university in West Virginia. And Mary Jackson had to petition state courts to be allowed to attend an all-white college to get the qualifications needed to become an engineer. At every turn, these women were involved in the Second World War, the Cold War, the civil rights movement.
As much as I think it is necessary and desirable for white people to have an expanded view of the black American experience, it's probably even more important for black people to have that expanded view.
I feel like, in a lot of ways, 'Hidden Figures' is the book that I wrote and have been waiting to read since I learned to read.
We want the big stories, of course, of the great men, but there's as much drama and interest and lessons to be learned in actions that people like us take on a daily basis.
How do we fill the need for technology workers, people who have computer skills and math and science skills? How do we get a more diverse science workforce? These are all issues - I would look at these documents that were from the '50s and '60s and '70s, and you'd swear they were written two weeks ago because the issues are the same.
Growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.
My dad worked with Mary Jackson very closely at one point. I knew Katherine Johnson as well. They were all part of this group of black engineers and scientists within this larger NASA community.
My dad joined Langley in 1964 as a co-op student and retired in 2004 an internationally respected climate scientist.
I want to keep telling stories of ordinary people.
A lot of times, we talk about black people as if being black is all they are. They get up, go to work... and are as complex and interesting and variable as any other group of people. We don't often capture that or write about it.
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of people actually - and among them many African-American - migrated to the Hampton Roads area because of the job boom that was happening. It was a place where you could get stable war jobs.
You don't get the good without the bad, but you really do have to see it all in order to make progress.
Without imagination, I don't think there's any progress.
The black experience isn't exclusively slavery/civil rights/Obama.
I knew a lot of black scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and female mathematicians and engineers, women of all backgrounds. So this idea that anyone could be an engineer, a mathematician, or whatever, was something that I had grown up with and thought was really normal.
History happens as soon as I pick up my coffee cup - it happened 30 seconds ago. It's history.
I'm not a scientist or a mathematician.
I started to think of 'Hidden Figures' as the first part of a mid-century African-American trilogy.
Our next-door neighbour taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother's sorority, and electrical engineers sat on the board of my parents' college alumni associations.
As a callow 18-year-old leaving for college, I'd seen my home town as a mere launching pad for a life in worldlier locales, a place to be from rather than a place to be.
There is so much talent among our young people; I hope the women in 'Hidden Figures' inspire them.
For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity.
Every time you go to an airport and get on a plane, you are basically taking advantage of the work that was done at Langley. Between World War I and World War II, they did just tremendous amount of fundamental research into basically making airplanes safer, making them more stable.
You can't change history. These things happened the way they did. What you can change is how you look at it and how you understand that it takes the good moments and it takes the difficult moments to move forward.
That's what 'Star Trek' was: We don't know how to make an ideal society, but we're going to portray that, and then we're going to work backward. I think that's why science fiction - despite the dystopian parts - comes out of this super ideal that, eventually, we will get to some better place where we actually live up to our ideals.
A lot of times, when you have a story of minorities in America, it's always this super, oppositional thing. It's segregation, it's the racism, and those are the hard facts of the story.
My dad worked at NASA his whole career; he's a research scientist.
