Segregation and Syrians

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve heard about the movie Hidden Figures. I got to see it recently with my Red Hat Society group of ten and then the next day I had lunch with my Movie and Lunch Club of fifteen who’d just come from seeing the film. Without exception everyone absolutely loved it and I can say without reservation that it deserves every award and all the praise it gets. Here’s how IMBd sums up the storyline: “Based on a true story. A team of African-American women provide NASA with important mathematical data needed to launch the program's first successful space missions.” And from Popular Mechanics, “This was a group made up of mostly women who calculated by hand the complex equations that allowed space heroes like Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard, and Glenn to travel safely to space. Through sheer tenacity, force of will, and intellect, they ensured their stamp on American history—even if their story has remained obscured from public view until now.” 

The three women featured in the movie were pulled up the ladder from a pool of thirty who worked in a room labeled, ‘Colored Computers’ (humans computing figures by hand) in an era when bathrooms, lunch counters and drinking fountains were separated by race. A NASA historian quoted in the Popular Mechanics article says the hiring decision was made because they worked cheater than their male counterparts and he also says the film is pretty much on target accurate in all it depicts. That being said, my esteem for John Glenn rose even more after seeing this movie and reading the Popular Mechanics article. Isn’t it a sad statement on our society, though, that it took President Obama giving Katherine Johnson---the protagonists in the film and a real life hero---The Presidential Medal of Freedom (11/15) before most people even knew about this chapter in Black History, Woman’s History and Space History!

There’s one scene in the movie that had me and my movie companions all crying. Katherine’s boss was chewing her out for being away from her desk for twenty minutes twice a day and demanded to know where she went. Her answer? To the bathroom ten blocks away because there weren’t any ‘colored restrooms’ any closer. I won’t spoil the scene for you if you haven’t seen the movie, other than to say she really lite into him with a barrage of words and you could hear a pin drop with her co-workers and in the theater. My favorite line in the barrage was words to the effect: “I work like a DOG and I don’t even get paid enough to buy the only piece of jewelry the employee handbook says I can wear!”

It’s been an interesting week. I also went to a lecture at the senior hall billed as “Cultural Education: Radical Islam and Refugees.” A refugee is defined as someone who flees their homeland due to war, political upheaval or natural disasters with only what that they can carry. Today, there are 65 million people who are classified as refugees (one in every 100 people on earth). The speaker talked about how during the Bosnia carnage they even booby-trapped mass graves to keep people from paying their respects and how during the 90 days of genocide in Rwanda over one million people were slaughtered. Today, the largest refugee camp in the world is in Kenya a literal tent city that houses 500,000 people from Africa and the Middle East. The Kenya government wants to close the camp (Dadaab as it’s called) but repatriation and resettlement of that many people is a complex problem that will take a lot of time, international help and diplomacy.

Thus enters the humanitarian groups that help refugees relocate around the world. The speaker was from one of those groups that goes over to refugee camps to dig deep water wells, build micro-small health clinics and they distribute solar powered audio Bibles in dozens of different languages. They also sponsor refugees who come here to the States. I was surprised to learn that my city is the most prolific place in the country to sponsor Syrian and Somalian refugee families. 

During the question and answer period a woman in the audience was very aggressive about asking a line of questions that centered on the idea that maybe distributing Bibles in Muslim refugee camps was contributing to the growing resentment and unrest within the camps. “Oh, no!” the speaker replied. “We’re all about love. We don’t preach.” I’m not so sure I agree with that, given the fact that the brochure from his parent mission says they encourage forming listening groups to hear the audio Bibles. Our lecturer has been doing this kind of work for nineteen years, had traveled the world and knew missionaries who'd been taken hostage. It was a fascinating lecture that sent chills up my spine and made me feel lucky to live in a carnage-free country, despite the fact that Trump claimed the opposite in his inauguration speech. Agree with the Q&A above, or not, it does give you something to think about. ©

Popular Mechanics article