The American Rocket Scientists You Never Knew.

[JQPublic1]

Stop generalizing and be more specific as to what kind of men we are talking about here.
You are one kind and those who hired those Black women are another. What other option could fair minded men ( unlike you) do when the women's test scores were better than most. And even after they were hired they were segregated and paid less. Some of that "evul" you are talking about lingered, didn't it? PSSSt... that "evul" came further out of the closet with the election of Donald Trump.

Who didn't say, "boo" about WHAT? The media is not controlled by Blacks...the media feeds off images of the black boogey man. Stories about Black excellence aren't newsworthy because such revelations detract from the myth. And good news about Blacks damn sure isn't going to get a place in school history books.

Here is an article that speaks to NASA and it's hiring practices in the 60's. There were also some black engineers as well.

How NASA Joined the Civil Rights Revolution | History | Air & Space Magazine

Thanks Kat, I found this excerpt particularly interesting:

NASA’s Cooperative Education Program
When he was young, Morgan Watson says, he didn’t have a green thumb, but had what he calls “a greasy thumb”: He liked taking things apart and putting them back together. “I worked in a hardware store,” he says, “and the white store owner saw my report card one day and saw that I had good grades in math and science, chemistry, and so forth, and he said, ‘You know, you would probably make a good engineer.’ ” Watson didn’t know what an engineer did, “so I went to the library and started reading about [them].”

Watson eventually entered the new engineering school at the all-black Southern University–Baton Rouge. By the time Charlie Smoot arrived, the university faculty considered Watson and six other young men the most promising engineering students at the school.

The seven were given exams, though Smoot reports that none of the white students who found jobs at NASA through the Co-Op program were required to take them. Once the agency was convinced the students were eligible, they were hired.

Interesting indeed!

Indeed. A friend emailed me that article earlier this year when the movie was in the making and called that out as well.

If true, that revelation undermines the canard of "qualifications" being ranked by a test score.
For Whites, there was no test score. So what was the qualifier that prompted their selection to a job with such critical skill requirements?

So, the focus is not that the most advanced and elite engineering program in the history of mankind, was hiring blacks, but that the white people in charge were hiring the blacks WRONG.


It's good that your focus is to celebrate these people and not to tear down America....

What are you mumbling about? It is clear that meritocracy based on test scores wasn't an issue at NASA until Blacks were hired. Why couldn't the same qualifiers, whatever that was, applied to the hiring of Whites have been applied to Blacks too? Bright Blacks such as the Tuskegee airmen and Vivian Thomas had already modified the narrative concerning the competence of upwardly mobile Blacks decades earlier. But the aspiring Black rocket scientist had to prove themselves beyond the norm; especially if their gender was female.

Noticeably a lot of White females were pictured in photos relevant to the book, Hidden Figures. But they didn't have to pass a test. It seems that as long as White people are in charge Blacks will always be distrusted, devalued or marginalized in some manner, no matter how good they are.