Inspiration is often where you find it, and students at several Hamilton County schools didn’t have to look far to find it on Monday.
Thanks to anonymous local donors, students at Brainerd High School could find it at the Carmike East Ridge 18 theater as they watched the movie “Hidden Figures,” an Academy Award-nominated film that tells the story of black women mathematicians whose work was critical in the early days of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
East Ridge, Tenn., resident Andre Boaz poses with a portrait of his great-aunt Mary Jackson, left, and mother Aurellia Mitchell Boaz who were both featured in the recent movie “Hidden Figures.”
One of the principals in the movie, the late Mary Winston Jackson, who had relatives in Chattanooga, became NASA’s first black female engineer in 1958. That was two years before Brainerd High, then an all-white school, opened, and when the city still had separate public restrooms and water fountains for whites and “colored.”
More than 150 students of the school, which is now more than 95 percent non-white, attended the viewing. Brainerd Principal Uras Agee said the meaning of the film was not likely to be lost on the students.
“They were smart in spite of all the obstacles,” he told this newspaper’s Yolanda Putman, referring to the movie’s subjects. “That empowerment came off the screen to the kids.”