I had never considered just how terrible that two-word phrase is.

Colored Only.

I knew something about segregation, of course, even before I watched the new film “Hidden Figures.”

The movie, which is based on the lives of three African-American women who worked for NASA in Virginia in the early 1960s, is hardly the first to depict the rampant racism that left such an indelible stain on America’s history.

“Hidden Figures” is based on real events but it is not a documentary.

Typically I prefer the latter. My bookshelves, to briefly switch mediums, are more heavily weighted to the work of historians than to novelists.

But it seems to me that occasionally the less stringent factual standard of a feature film help the director make a more compelling statement than even the most scrupulous documentarian can manage.

I think this is especially true when the subject, as is the case with “Hidden Figures,” doesn’t involve deadly events such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. or the appalling physical abuse of civil rights protestors in places such as Montgomery, Alabama.

The segregation detailed in “Hidden Figures” is the routine sort that dominated life in the South for so many decades.

There are no fire hoses or rifle bullets.

There are empty coffee pots and signs over restroom doors and subtle looks of disdain, and the very banality of these things is in a way more awful than any singular episode of violence because these symbols convey how instinctive and how ingrained this separation of society actually was.

Many of the scenes in “Hidden Figures” didn’t actually happen.

But this didn’t diminish the film’s emotional power.

Indeed these scenes magnified that power because they represented the indignities that hundreds of thousands of Americans endured, quite literally, every day of their lives when they wanted to do something as simple as have a sip from a water fountain or check out a book from a library for which the word “public” has no real meaning.

The great accomplishment of director Theodore Melfi, who based “Hidden Pictures” on Margot Lee Shetterly’s non-fiction book of the same name, was to explore this deplorable situation by way of an intensely compelling story that, in a general sense, was also true.

I cared about the three women — Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson — not solely because they were oppressed, but because they were good people doing important work, and doing it well.

I would have been spellbound by their story even if segregation hadn’t been such a major factor.

The space race of the 1950s and 1960s is one of the great tales of American scientific achievement, and “Hidden Figures” delves into a chapter of that tale that was not widely known.

The astronaut John Glenn, who died last month, is famous, and rightfully so.

But Johnson, the most prominent character in “Hidden Figures,” a math savant who helped calculate the figures needed to safely return Glenn after he became the first American to orbit the Earth, is not.

I’m glad this film was made, if only to highlight the accomplishments of all the other NASA employees, not just those of Johnson, Vaughan and Jackson.

But ultimately it is that trio’s experience, of being discriminated against solely because they have dark skin, that for me elevates “Hidden Figures” above superficially similar films such as “Apollo 13.”

Very rarely, perhaps only a handful of times, have I walked from a theater feeling exhausted in a psychological rather than physical sense.

When I rose from my seat at the Eltrym my eyes had that peculiar warm and tired feeling they get after they’ve welled several times with tears, and my stomach felt as though I had done a couple dozen crunches.

During the preceding two hours and seven minutes I had been at turns sad and furious and elated. I had been, to put it another way, an emotional puppet of the director, Melfi.

I have no personal experience with the segregation depicted in “Hidden Figures.”

I have never lived, nor even visited, the Deep South. And I was born in 1970, after the types of institutional, even legal, discrimination in this movie had finally been given the banishment they so richly deserved.

But I believe that you need only be human to be profoundly affected by such things.

I know nothing of filmmaking in a technical sense, and so I can’t judge Melfi on those grounds.

Yet it seems to me there is greatness in any form of communication, whether it’s a passage of poetry or a book or a movie, that literally makes your chest ache.

And my guts tell me that “Hidden Figures” is great indeed.

— — —

This is a tale of two sidewalks.

Two towns’ sidewalks, to be more specific.

One is Mill City, the town in the Cascade foothills where my parents live. The other is Baker City.

It happens that during this memorable winter I have had occasion, in the wake of a snowstorm, to sample the sidewalks — and so have my boots — in both places.

I was not surprised, of course, that from a pedestrian’s point of view Baker City handily won this contest.

(I concede the likelihood that residents in the two towns were not aware they were engaged in any sort of competition.)

Snow, after all, is common enough in Baker City that the snow shovel is a ubiquitous tool in our arsenals.

I don’t believe the implement is anything like as common in Mill City.

I went for a walk there one evening in December, two days after a modest fall of snow of perhaps three inches. The sidewalks, almost without exception, were a tortured geography of half-congealed slush for which crampons would have been an appropriate accessory.

Over the course of the winter I’ve walked more than a dozen times in Baker City, visiting almost every neighborhood.

Generally speaking these paths have been either bare, or covered with the skim of snow that a shovel leaves behind. Getting around has been only slightly more difficult than it is during summer, even as the banks of snow have inexorably risen, rather like one of those time-lapse photo sequences you sometimes see at a ski area or highway pass.

I make this comparison not to disparage Mill City residents. If I lived there I probably wouldn’t own a snow shovel either. I grew up not far from there and as far as I can remember we never had one, nor often could have made use of one if we did have.

My point, rather, is to publicly thank the dozens, or more probably hundreds, of Baker City residents who have wielded a snow shovel or piloted a four-wheeler this winter. Your efforts have allowed me to get out in the good clean air rather more than I might have done had our sidewalks more resembled the treacherous messes that Mill City’s were.

So anyway, thanks, anonymous diggers, wherever it is you hang your hat (and shovel). You have my gratitude — and also that of the various parts of my body that have been spared certain bruises and possible fractures.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.