The last becomes a thread in the book, as Shetterly weaves her tale of NASA with one outlining the development of the civil rights movement. In addition to the careers of the four women profiled, Shetterly tells of their personal lives-the struggles they endured on the road to success, their community involvement, and the times in which they lived.
Each found success by persevering in the face of direct and indirect discrimination based on both their race and gender. Finally, Christine Darden was hired by NASA in 1967, worked in sonic boom research, and went on to earn her PhD. The flight trajectories she calculated were used for Project Mercury and the Moon landings of 1969 and subsequent years. Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson joined West Computing two years after Mary, but soon joined the Flight Research Division, leading to a distinguished career that directly contributed to the space program in the 1960s. After a couple of years, Mary joined an engineering group and would go on to become an engineer. Mary Jackson began working for Dorothy in 1951. She eventually rose to become head of the area for nearly a decade before it was closed. She was one of the female African American “computers” (as they then called people who did calculations) who made up the West Computing area. Dorothy Vaughan was the first of the main characters hired as a mathematician by Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (later Langley Research Center). Likewise, because so many Black and White men were away fighting the war, women had greater access to employment than ever before. With a mandate to desegregate the federal workforce for the war effort during World War II, more opportunities became available for African Americans. Shetterly’s goal is to make known the stories of women like those she was acquainted with growing up. Each was largely hidden from the public view: Most people think of White male astronauts when they think of NASA, and the countless mathematical calculations that lie behind the agency’s accomplishments are known only to specialists.
The title is a play on the meaning of the word “figures” in the sense of both people and numbers. The story focuses on four African American women as examples of the many such women who worked at Langley.
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