14 Lesser-Known Black Americans Who Changed Our Country For the Better

Theodore Melfi's film Hidden Figures, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, tells the story of three remarkable women who worked at NASA as mathematicians in the 1960s. The women, Katherine G. Johnson (shown here), Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, overcame sexism, racism, and segregation, and helped oversee John Glenn's Mercury mission. Johnson went on to calculate trajectories for the Apollo 11 and 13 and Space Shuttle missions, while Jackson became a space engineer.