[as Mary goes to hitchhike she notices a police car approaching them]

Mary Jackson: Girls.

Dorothy Vaughan: No crime in a broken-down car.

Mary Jackson: No crime being Negro neither.

Katherine Johnson: Button it up, Mary. Nobody wants to go to jail behind your mouth.

Mary Jackson: I’ll do my best, sugar.

[the cop car pulls up by them and get out of his vehicle]

White Cop: Not a great place for three of y’all be having car trouble.

Mary Jackson: We didn’t pick the place, Officer. It picked us.

White Cop: Are you being disrespectful?

Mary Jackson: No, sir.

White Cop: You have identification on you?

Mary Jackson: Yes, sir.

Katherine Johnson: Yes, sir. We’re just on our way to work at Langley. NASA, sir.

[all three show him their IDs]

Dorothy Vaughan: We do a great deal of the calculating, getting our rockets into space.

White Cop: All three of you?

Katherine Johnson: Yes, sir.

Mary Jackson: Yes, Officer.

[he takes Mary’s ID and looks at it]

White Cop: NASA, now that’s something. I had no idea they hired…

Dorothy Vaughan: There are quite a few women working in the space program.”

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This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

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