Twin Cities professor shares book about black women in NASA

RIVER FALLS, Wisconsin – Many Americans became familiar with the largely untold story of black female mathematicians working at NASA through the 2016 Oscar-winning film “Hidden Figures,” but one Twin Cities professor is telling the story in her own way.

Macalester College professor Duchess Harris, who is the granddaughter of one of the women who worked at NASA during the time period depicted in the movie, was recently invited to share her story as part of the Ann Lydecker Lecture series at the University of Wisconin-River Falls. After conducting research about her grandmother and her cohorts at NASA, Harris published the book “Hidden Human Computers: The Black Women of NASA.” It has many similarities with the book and film “Hidden Figures,” but tells the story a little differently.

Harris said that anyone unfamiliar with the story presented in “Hidden Figures” might assume that it is a civil rights story, because it takes place at the height of the Civil Rights era 1961-1962.

“In fact, it’s actually a World War II story, and the way I know that is because for me, it’s a family story,” she said.

Her maternal grandmother, Miriam Daniel Mann, was born in Covington, Georgia in 1907. She went to a historically black college, Talladega, and returned to live with her family with a plan to teach chemistry. She then met and married her husband, a faculty member at Hampton Institute, now Hampton University, in Virginia. The Langley Research Center run by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, and later, NASA) also happened to be in Hampton.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, he was pressured by black unionists to sign an…

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