Northern Virginians will have the opportunity to meet Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, at the University of Mary Washington’s Dodd Auditorium on Saturday, March 4.
Shetterly, a Hampton native and University of Virginia alumna who now lives in Charlottesville, will give a brief talk about her New York Times best-selling book, which was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated movie of the same name starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae. A Q&A session and book signing will follow her talk.
For those unfamiliar with the now-ubiquitous story, Hidden Figures uncovers and praises the team of African-American women and mathematicians—Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden—who worked behind the scenes for NASA during the Cold War, the Space Race and the Civil Rights movement. The four women, who once taught math in segregated schools in the South, were called to assist NASA at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory after WWII labor shortages. Though they could not yet work alongside their white counterparts due to Jim Crow laws, Vaughan, Jackson, Johnson and Darden are credited with launching John Glenn into space.
The Hidden Figures talk is a free event coordinated by Central Rappahannock Regional Library as part of its Rappahannock Reads initiative.
“We have had Rappahannock Reads for a few years now, but this is the first time that we have had so much interest that we’ve had to move the venue from the library to the University of Mary Washington,” Michele Brown, adult services coordinator for CRRL, says.
In addition to the success of the book and the movie, the popularity of the event is in part thanks to the Stafford chapter of the NAACP, which helped promote the talk. What was once going to be a maximum 200-person event could now attract as many as 1,000 people, and Brown believes many of them will be young women.
“We snagged [Shetterly] before it was known by the general public that there was going to be a movie, and we like to think that one of the reasons that she’s agreed to see us is because she wants to give back to her community,” Brown says.
“She’s an exceptional person, and the story is so uplifting,” Brown adds. “We wanted to have a book that reflected diversity because February [was] Black History Month. Not only is [Hidden Figures] about African-Americans, it is also written by someone from Virginia and can easily segue into Women’s History Month [in March].”
