Good grief. It was a true story. The whites were assholes. The only decent one was the one that knocked down the sign. It was ridiculous that the whites made her run a mile to the bathroom. And yes, it was TRUE.
“Employing dramatic licence in this way is typical of Hollywood – but, crucially, in this case events could not possibly have happened that way. Harrison’s “white saviour” outburst comes after realising Johnson has been wasting valuable computing time rushing between the white and black sections to use a segregated toilet. Yet Nasa abolished segregated wings in 1958, and Johnson says she used the unlabelled “white” toilets all along, first by accident, later in defiance...
...Vaughan was indeed the first black supervisor at Nasa, as seen in the film, but took up the role 13 years earlier, in 1948. Similarly, Jackson was Nasa’s first African-American female engineer, as the film claims, but also achieved this earlier, in 1958.”
“Katherine Johnson herself denied experiencing the treatment the film shows her receiving. “I didn’t feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research…You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job…and play bridge at lunch. I didn’t feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn’t feel it.” Likewise, Jackson only recalled one instance in which she felt disrespected, and the man involved subsequently apologized when he realized that he was in the wrong...
...While the film suggests that the white computers earned more than the black computers, the truth is that the two groups were paid the same, but that their pay was 40% less than the equivalent male pay, even during the NACA period.
So I think that the real problem with the film, at least for me, is that it was trying too hard to make its point about segregation, a point it could only make by misrepresenting the degree of segregation at NASA. Instead, the real story in the material seems to be the way that NASA was excluding women of talent from important roles.”
https://aelarsen.wordpress.com/2017/02/12/hidden-figures-laudable-lies/
Actually, the veracity of that movie was debunked by people who were actually there almost immediately after the movie came out.