bitch-media:This sounds cool: A film about the lives of Black women who worked for NASA during the s
bitch-media:This sounds cool: A film about the lives of Black women who worked for NASA during the space race is in the works. The upcoming film developed by producer Donna Gigliotti and screenwriter Allison Schroeder is based on the Margot Lee Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures, which is coming out next year from Harper Collins. Director Ted Melfi (of St. Vincent fame) has signed on to direct.Here’s a description of Hidden Figures from Shatterly. For her, the story is personal: Most Americans have no idea that from the 1940s through the 1960s, a cadre of African-American women formed part of the country’s space work force, or that this group—mathematical ground troops in the Cold War—helped provide NASA with the raw computing power it needed to dominate the heavens. My current work in progress, a narrative non-fiction book entitled HIDDEN FIGURES recovers the history of these pioneering women and situates it in the intersection of the defining movements of the American century: the Cold War, the Space Race, the Civil Rights movement and the quest for gender equality. We all know what a scientist looks like: a wild-eyed person in a white lab coat and utilitarian eyeglasses, wearing a pocket protector and holding a test tube. Mostly male. Usually white. Even Google, our hive mind, confirms the prevailing view. Just do an image search for the word “scientist”.For me, growing up in Hampton, Virginia, the face of science was brown like mine. My dad was a NASA lifer, a career Langley Research Center scientist who became an internationally respected climate expert. Five of my father’s seven siblings were engineers or technologists. My father’s best friend was an aeronautical engineer. Our next door neighbor was a physics professor. There were mathematicians at our church, sonic boom experts in my mother’s sorority and electrical engineers in my parents’ college alumni associations. There were also black English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors and contractors, black shoe repair owners, wedding planners, real estate agents and undertakers, the occasional black lawyer and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so many African-Americans working in science, math and engineering that I thought that’s just what black folks did.Read more about the film at Shadow and Act. Photos: Margot Lee Shatterly and Dr. Christine Darden, both courtesy of NASA. -- source link
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