“Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. Sometimes they have more imagination than men.”
Katherine Johnson
Ever since I was a kid, I have been enamored with the early days of the space program. Among my favorite memories are getting Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell’s autograph and gawking at the massive Saturn rockets at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. But it wasn’t until the movie Hidden Figures came out that I understood the critical and unacknowledged role women played in that program. The story of the movie’s central character, Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson was one of a brilliant mathematician who faced uphill battles not only because she was a woman, but because she was a Black woman in segregated Virginia.
Movies, of course, never tell the whole story of who a person is — the fullness of their character or their struggles.
Katherine Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She was a gifted child, particularly when it came to numbers. Her parents, realizing the lack of educational opportunity for African-American children in the area, sent Katherine and her siblings away to school. Quickly, Katherine flew through the available math courses, becoming only the third African-American to earn a PhD in mathematics at West Virginia State College, a historically Black school.
In the late 1930s, there was little opportunity for a woman with a math degree. Katherine had virtually no choice but to become a teacher. And although West Virginia University selected Katherine as one of three Black persons to be allowed to attend classes there, she left her graduate math course after one semester to marry James Goble and start a family, returning to teaching for the next 13 years.
Meanwhile, the military found a need for personnel to calculate artillery trajectories during World War I, and again (albeit to a much greater degree) in World War II. The work was considered low-status drudgery and, women could be employed at less than half the cost of men. After World War II came the space race, and the need for human computers continued.
At Langley Air Force Base, in Newport News, Virginia, a branch of the newly established National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, precursor to NASA) was hiring. The work paid better than most and even accepted married women with children into the computing force. Enter Katherine in her mid-30s, married, with three daughters. I don’t have to tell you how unusual it must have been for a husband to be willing to move his family for his wife’s job in the 1950s, and yet he/they did.
Katherine was hired as a “colored computer” in the all-black, all-women West Area Computing Unit in 1953. Work areas, cafeterias, and restrooms were all segregated.
Over the next decade, Katherine played a critical role in analyses that would allow the United States to put Alan Shepard into space. She was the first woman from her unit to be listed as an author of a research report. She was persistent and confident, and was, at times, the only woman – a Black woman – in traditionally all-male meetings. Outside of her career, she continued to raise her daughters even after her first husband died of cancer in 1956. She married Army veteran Jim Johnson in 1959.
As a testament to the quality of Katherine’s knowledge and her reputation, in 1962, prior to his groundbreaking trip around the earth, John Glenn personally requested “that girl” check over the equations for his flight because he trusted her numbers over the mechanical computer’s. When asked what she was most proud of in her time at NASA, Katherine replied it was her work with Apollo 11, that allowed Neil Armstrong to take the first step on the moon. Her work was critical for getting James Lovell and the crew of Apollo 13 home safely, and continued through to the Space Shuttle program.
Katherine Johnson passed away little more than a year ago at the age of 101. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2015 for her contributions to our country, a well-deserved and long overdue acknowledgement.
It is a bit ironic, I think, that the foundation of a program so utterly dependent on mathematics was, in turn, dependent on the calculations of women while the broader society convinced itself women were no good at math. Thankfully women like Katherine Johnson refused to listen.
Amy East is a freelance copyeditor, wannabe homesteader, and recovering archaeologist living in Cass County. She loves her family, her menagerie of animals, and her garden, although depending on the day, the order of those may vary.
