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Hidden Figures Dorothy Byron Analysis

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Dorothy Vaughn Dorothy Vaughn is known as NASA’s first African American supervisor and previously worked as a math teacher. Dorothy Vaughan unofficially supervised West Computing to analyze data for aerospace engineers before being promoted as supervisor. Eventually, the West Computing Wing would be abolished and replaced by higher technology from IBM to calculate equations at a much faster rate. Thus, forced Vaughn to take the helm and find a new way to provide jobs for the “computers” or women of color who computed data calculations for NASA. From analyzing Hidden Figures, the movie recognizes the prejudice that black women of that time have experienced in and out of the work place. Vaughn plays a very valuable role in Hidden Figures as a motherly figure to not only her children but to black women whom she worked with. …show more content…

At the beginning of the movie we see that Vaughn was fixing the car and gives Katherine and Mary rides to and from work. In the movie during scene 28:12 Vaughn says to Mary “Get you damn feet off my dashboard. This ain’t your livin room”, during this scene we see that Vaughn spoke to Mary in a motherly tone. Later in the movie after Vaughn and her sons were kicked out of the library for being black a police officer escorts them out of the building and she pointedly states at scene 50:12 "Get your hand off my boy. Don't touch them. You have a bless day". The similarity between these two statements shows that Vaughn does play a motherly figure towards the women she works

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