Mary Jackson 1977, NASA photo,
The story of Mary W. Jackson, the first black female engineer at NASAexemplary and pioneering in itself would probably not have needed the film Hidden figures (2016), Italian version The right to count (2017, on Rai Uno in prime time on 30 October 2024) based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly to be told and recognized in the world, but it is a fact that the film, taking the substance from its true story with the addition of some inevitable poetic license, has contributed to giving impetus to its public and international recognition, so much so that in 2020, and not surprisingly right after the film, the US aerospace agency decided to name its headquarters in Washington after her.
The trappings of exceptionality to impose her as a symbol of civil rights, after all, Mary W. Jackson’s human story really had them all from the beginning: the racial segregation in progress, the Origins from a Southern stateThe glass roof for a woman and, moreover, the prejudice that still exists today – let alone a hundred years ago – girls who aren’t good at numbers.
Born on April 9, 1921 in Hampton, Virginia, to a family active in Bethel AME, the African Methodist Episcopal church in the cityYes, Mary grew up in that context, animating, among other things, the scout group for several years. She graduated with honors from the all-black George P. Phenix Training School and in 1942, earned a dual degree in mathematics and physics from Hampton University with highest academic honors..
As expected, his path was uphill, for years he accepted various jobs, not all of which were commensurate with his qualifications. She taught at a school for African Americans in Maryland, was a receptionist at the King Street USO club in her hometown and then an accountant at the Department of Health Institute. Married in 1944 to a US Navy soldier, she twice stopped working for a period after the birth of each of her two children.
The turning point in his lifeas Clayton Turner, current director of NASA’s Langley research center, recalled during the naming ceremony of the headquarters, came in 1951, when Mary W. Jackson began working as a “human computer” for Naca, a precursor body to NASA, in the West computer area. It was an office in which segregation existed (separate kitchens and bathrooms) and in which women, mostly mathematicians, including black ones, were recruited to check the calculations performed by the machines with the help of a calculator and make them available to researchers. It is in this office that Mary met Dorothy Vaughanalso black, mathematician and computer programmer, manager of the West area since 1949 and Katherine Johnsonwho arrived there in 1952, after years of teaching and with a degree in mathematics obtained at the age of 19 at West Virginia State College, one of America’s historically African-American universities.
The work of these women played a fundamental role in the success of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission in 1962, the first American to complete at least one orbit around the Earth. In the film we see a scene in which John Glenn asks that “the girl” (referring to Katherine Johnson) manually control the calculations generated by the electronic computers, which are fundamental for the mission. According to NASA, the request actually happened but the cinematic times are compressed, because: «this happened well before the launch and it took a day and a half to calculate the output of 11 different variables with eight significant figures. His calculations matched those of the computer exactly, and this gave John Glenn, and everyone else, confidence that the computer’s critical software was reliable.”
As the Encyclopedia Britannica tells it, in 1953 Jackson left the West area to collaborate with Kazimierz Czarnecki, who biographies define as his “white mentor”, an engineer who was conducting supersonic wind tunnel experiments. It was he who laid the foundations for Jackson to become, later in 1958, the first African-American female engineer at NASA: He suggested that she increase her qualifications by entering the training program, which was not easy because she would need special permission to attend courses reserved for whites. The film is inspired quite faithfully by the figure of Cazarnecki, although with some changed details, the character of Karl Zielinski of the same name is almost faithfully inspired.
Thus began the career of the engineer Jackson, a woman and black, probably the only one in the fifties: a highly respectable career which included twenty years of publications, but which did not translate into opportunities to progress in her career despite the talent demonstrated and the obstacles overcome, something which, as the NASA website documents, convinced her to make a drastic change to her path: «she leaves engineering and suffers a demotion in order to occupy the open position of manager” to fully commit to breaking the glass ceiling and to promote equal opportunities in the scientific field: in the Federal Women’s Program, in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs in NASA and in the Affirmative Action Program.
Mary W. Jackson worked at NASA’s Langley research center until 1985, receiving numerous awards. She passed away on February 11, 2005. Her remains are located in the cemetery of the church where she grew up in Hampton.
The film dedicated to his story is titled in the original version Hidden figures (literally: hidden people/figures), title plays on the double meaning of “figure”, which means both person and figure: an allusion to the fact that the stories of Mary W. Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson had remained until then almost unknown but also good with numbers. The Italian title tried to make the same game with The right to countwhere counting means both “to enumerate” and “to count”. The film achieved its aim, it aroused curiosity around these people, so much so that the American Space Agency website took the trouble to organize an answer service to the most frequently asked questionsto bring order between true history and cinematic license.
It turns out there that NASA provided the film with help and support for historical sources and that the story came out “late” because the systematic historical research on the female computers of Langley began in 1990. As often happens with films based on real events once this has happened, the need for synthesis leads to saving the substance but also to some license in the details, for dramatic needs and for the need to introduce figures that are not strictly historical but serve to convey the idea of an era.
The character played by Kevin Kostner, for example, has an invented name, Al Harrison, but is loosely based on a real figure, Robert C. Gilruthhead of the Space Task Group at Langley Research Center and later the first director of what is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston. «However», explain the NASA FAQ, «the organizational structure of the Space Task Group was much more complicated than it appears and was changing rapidly in the period in which the film takes place. For clarity in the film, the management structure is compressed and the composite character Al Harrison was created.”
Likewise the characters of Vivian Mitchell and Paul Stafford respectively synthesize multiple figures and situationsi: Vivian represents mentalities and attitudes of the time in white women in coordination roles; Stafford encompasses the frequently rotated team of engineers with whom Katherine Johnson worked on the Space Task group. Even though they are not historically identifiable, they emblematically represent the reality of something that existed, what we could call an “environmental factor” and that bit of creative autonomy that distinguishes a historical film from a documentary.
