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Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

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Not everyone shared Cronkite’s<br />

exuberance. All that money—and for<br />

what? many wondered. So much money<br />

spent so that between 1969 and 1972 a<br />

dozen white men could take the express<br />

train to a lifeless world? Why, Negro<br />

women and men could barely go to the<br />

next state without worrying about<br />

predatory police, restaurants that refused<br />

to serve them, and service stations that<br />

wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the<br />

bathroom. Now they wanted to talk about<br />

a white man on the Moon? “A rat done<br />

bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the<br />

Moon,” rapped performer Gil Scott-<br />

Heron in a song that stormed the<br />

airwaves that year.<br />

At the beginning of the decade, the<br />

space program and the civil rights<br />

movement had shared a similar

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