In the text’s Prologue, author Margot Lee Shetterly explains that her father was a scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center. As a girl, she was surrounded by so many African American scientists, engineers, and mathematicians that she “thought that’s just what black folks did” (1). Shetterly was “part of the NASA family” (2), and much of her community worked at the agency. It wasn’t until Shetterly grew up that she realized the unique nature of her father’s position and the other African American employees at NASA. Her father was part of only 1% of engineers who were African American in the 1970s, and it was “extraordinary” that Black women worked at NASA; many, like Shetterly’s Sunday school teacher, were “computers,” solving complex math for NASA’s air and space programs.

Shetterly argues that the African American women who worked at NASA made an important contribution to American history. These women deserve to be recognized “as the center of their own story” (2).

The four women on whom the text focuses—Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden—have several things in common. They loved math, worked as schoolteachers after college, and did groundbreaking mathematical work as “computers” for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (