The Guardian reports that NASA has renamed the street in front of its headquarters “Hidden Figures Way,” after the acclaimed book by Margot Lee Shetterly and its 2016 Academy Award-nominated adaptation.
The designation honors African American mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the featured icons in Hidden Figures who combated racial segregation to contribute to NASA’s earliest moon landing missions.
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Their efforts collectively spanned decades throughout World War II, the Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, and the Space Race, but opened the door for women of future generations.
Author Margot Lee Shetterly and Senator Ted Cruz joined the members of the celebrated women’s families, along with other NASA administrators who unveiled the street sign at the ceremony.
.@NASA Administrator @JimBridenstine, @SenTedCruz, DC Council Chair @ChmnMendelson, and “Hidden Figures” author @margotshetterly unveil the “Hidden Figures Way” street sign at a dedication ceremony this morning. See more 📷 – https://t.co/vuWnP6Ww2y #HiddenFigures pic.twitter.com/UcGJCd4Oky
— NASA HQ PHOTO (@nasahqphoto) June 12, 2019
Cruz, whose mother was a mathematician at the Smithsonian Institution in the 1950s, explained:
The extraordinary achievements of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Dr. Christine Darden, who’s with us today, prior to the book and the movie had not been told. Very few people knew those stories, and yet those are stories that can and do inspire and we should be telling stories like that a lot more often.
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