Behind the Scenes of the Hidden Human Computer Project
Dozens of African American women worked for NASA as expert mathematicians from the 1940s to the 1960s and almost no one knows about it. Segregated within NASA facilities in Hampton, Va., well-educated Black women used slide rules and pencils to do the calculations for flights by astronauts John Glenn and Alan Shepherd.
That this history is little known makes it ripe for research by collaborators Lucy Short ’15 (St. Louis) and American studies professor Duchess Harris, whose grandmother, Miriam Daniel Mann, was one of these extraordinary women.
