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Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

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moment when the white women laughed<br />

at her, Mary had been demoted from<br />

professional mathematician to a secondclass<br />

human being, reminded that she<br />

was a black girl whose piss wasn’t good<br />

enough for the white pot.<br />

Still fuming as she walked back to West<br />

Computing later that day, Mary Jackson<br />

ran into Kazimierz Czarnecki, an<br />

assistant section head in the four-by-fourfoot<br />

Supersonic Pressure Tunnel. A<br />

stocky fellow with a lantern jaw who<br />

played first base in the Langley softball<br />

league, Kazimierz Czarnecki—friends<br />

called him “Kaz”—was a native of New<br />

Bedford, Massachusetts, who had come<br />

to the laboratory in 1939 after graduating<br />

from the University of Alabama with an<br />

aeronautical engineering degree. His

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