SE: Wildcats Take in 'Hidden Figures,' Reflect on Movie's Importance
Feb 14, 2017 | Women's Basketball
K-State Athletics celebrates Black History Month by honoring the trailblazing achievements of past African-Americans as well as recognizing current events and activities that tie into the month's significance.
(In case you missed the first part of this series: K-State led charge in breaking racial barriers.)
In the middle of “Hidden Figures,” the Oscar-nominated movie about African-American women’s vital role at NASA during the space race, Karyla Middlebrook whispered something to Breanna Lewis that stood out.
It wasn’t the complex math being done, or the fact that African-American women were the people doing it in the 1950s and ‘60s, when segregation was still alive and gender roles in the workplace were much different than today.
What caught the attention of Middlebrook, a junior for the K-State women’s basketball team, was a series of scenes involving Katherine G. Johnson, one of the movie’s main characters. Johnson, after being assigned to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, was forced to run more than half a mile from her working space to use a bathroom designated for African-Americans.
“I was sitting next to Bre and I was, like, ‘I don’t think I could’ve done that,’” Middlebrook said. “The discipline to not give up, even through little things like that, it kind of forces you to appreciate what people before you have done, just for simple things like being able to go to the bathroom right next to your desk.”
Middlebrook and Lewis were part of a group of K-State student-athletes to take in the movie at the Carmike Town Center and IMAX Theatre in Manhattan on Sunday. Each came away inspired in some way.
“I just think it was a great movie. I learned a lot. It informed me on a lot of things I didn’t know about,” K-State track and field sophomore Devie Freeman II said. “It’s Black History Month, too, so this is the perfect time to watch this movie and kind of put a tribute to African-Americans who did things in the past that comes to light now.”
“You get to this point in life, you grow up and you just see far we have come,” added Justin Davis, a freshman for the K-State track and field team. “It just makes us realize how much we’ve accomplished and how much we can do in the future.”
The movie, based on a best-selling book released in 2016, centers around three characters: Dorothy Vaughan, the first African-American female supervisor at NASA — NACA until 1958 — where she was also a leading engineer; Mary Jackson, who fought through school segregation to become NASA’s first African-American female engineer; and Johnson, whose work at NASA played an integral role in Alan Shepard’s journey to space, John Glenn’s orbit around the Earth and eventually Neil Armstrong’s moon landing.
Lewis, a senior for the women’s basketball team, complimented the movie for showing the behind-the-scenes work that made all of these historical achievements possible.
“‘Hidden Figures,’ it’s a great title for the movie because you see everyone who’s on TV and who’s part of things like that but you never see the people who are behind the scenes,” she said. “It informed me of things that went on behind the scenes at NASA and how it was to work there while being African-American and being part of something so big. For them to be able to succeed and to see how hard they had to work, it was really eye opening.”
Even if it was for only a few minutes, the two-hour movie put life into a different perspective for each of the Wildcats.
“It really gives me an appreciation for how grateful I am to not have to go through that and how it’s easier to get further now,” Lewis said. “They had to work harder, way harder than us, and to do that and be so successful, that was good to see.”
“For me, personally, it was very inspirational because the women in that movie, they didn’t let other people dull their shine,” Middlebrook said. “They knew their worth, they knew what they were capable of and they just found a way to do what they knew they could do. That was very inspirational.
“I think it’s really important, especially with everything going on right now, just to really look back and remember the times when things were more segregated and when we didn’t value every human being for just being a human being and realize we can’t make any regress into that. We just have to keep progressing forward. Hopefully a movie like that can help people see that more.”
Davis came away from the movie with “a lot” on his mind but said he would take one overlying theme from it.
“Never take no for an answer. If you know you can do something, then shoot for it,” he said. “Don’t ever let someone say you can’t do something.”
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