The only such school for 'colored' students starts at the sixth grade and Katherine is only eight, so she will have to skip several grades. The official wants to sent Katherine to a school for gifted students - she's an advanced student and a genius at math. A young Katherine Coleman ( Lidya Jewett) is waiting, naming the geometric shapes in a stained glass window, while her parents talk to a school official. HuggoīASED ON A TRUE STORY The film opens in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1926. Her burgeoning romance with National Guardsman Jim Johnson is also dramatized, their relationship despite their rocky start. To get to Harrison, Katherine has to go through lead engineer Paul Stafford, who sees her as an irrelevant underling, he always falling on the excuse of clearance to quash Katherine's ability to do her job effectively. And widowed mother Katherine Gobel is the mathematical genius whose expertise in analytical geometry gets her assigned to the Space Task Group under the lead of Al Harrison, a no nonsense man who wants the job done at any cost. With the first IBM mainframe computer just having been purchased at NASA, Dorothy, with the odds stacked against her, tries to learn as much as she can on her own about its workings to make herself and the entire African-American female computing section relevant in this changing time. Dorothy believes not getting that promotion is largely the doing of her Caucasian supervisor, Vivian Mitchell. Dorothy Vaughan has been acting supervisor of the section, only having the responsibilities but not the title or the associated pay. Her struggles are exacerbated by her husband Levi Jackson, a civil rights activist who only sees the advancement of African-Americans in a narrow view. In what ends up being the Catch-22, Mary does not have the necessary qualifications for the promotion, and cannot get those qualifications as the extension courses are not taught in any high school accessible to African-Americans in Hampton where she lives. Mary Jackson, assigned to the space capsule heat shield team, is encouraged by one of the engineers on the team to apply for one of the more senior engineering positions, he seeing her expertise. Their largely unheralded at the time contributions to the advancement of the American space program are dramatized, their contributions which they were able to achieve despite facing both gender and race issues, the latter as much of the US, including NASA, was still segregated. Approximately one year (early 1961 to early 1962) - what is the height of the American-Soviet space race - in the life of three female friends who worked in the female African-American computing section of NASA at Langley, is presented.

Katherine hidden figures movie