The Book Tells The True Story

Rating: 7/10 (10 February 2017)

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT Did Dorothy Vaughn really walk into an unattended IBM computer room at NASA and re-position a circuit probe to correct a problem that was bedeviling the white guys? No. Did Al Harrison really take a sledge hammer to the Colored Girls Restroom sign? No. Kevin Costner's character (and Jim Parson's for that matter) weren't real, they're composites. At times during this movie I felt I was being played, so I bought the book to see if it's as contrived as the movie. It's not. In documentary style it tells the very real stories of some extraordinarily talented black women, who managed to excel in spite of the racist southern culture they grew up in. Did Vaughn really teach herself how to program and operate the IBM 7090, a task that seemed beyond the ken of the white computer guys? Yes she did, but to be fair the men at NASA were not the dense drones portrayed in this and other scenes. I'd like to say that Katherine Johnson really did vent her frustration when explaining to some manager why her trips to the ladies room took so long, but she didn't. It was Mary Jackson however, who on one occasion suffered the giggles and humiliation of having to make that long walk. It would have been truer to life to learn that it was on that walk when she ran into an engineering manager who not only lent a sympathetic ear to her rant about the infuriating arrangements but who also took the opportunity to offer her a position that led to her getting the engineering position she deserved. Did John Glenn really ask for "the girl", meaning Katherine Johnson, to check the electronic computer's output in 1961? Yes he did, but it's even more impressive to know that for the Apollo moon landings that same girl also developed the equations to time the lunar module's launch window and engine burn time to rendezvous with the command module in orbit around the moon to take them back to Earth. I thought that the liberal Hollywood elite was going overboard in hitting us over the head with all the racism, but what gets revealed in the book shocked me. Imagine a school for black kids where the black teachers and principal get paid less than the white janitor, or Prince Edward County in Virginia which defunded its entire public school system in 1959 rather than integrate it. The state provided tuition grants for white students to attend white-only private academies but the parents of black kids were left to fend for themselves. They did what they could but education just ceased for many of those kids. Virginia got away with this for five years until the Supreme Court finally struck it down in 1964. So when Kirsten Dunst's character drawls, "Despite what you may think, I have nothing against y'all," it's an understatement when Octavia Spencer shoots back, "I know you probably believe that."