In 1940, after a stint as a teacher, she became one of three exceptional Black students selected to integrate the graduate school at all-white West Virginia University. She received a full academic scholarship to the historically Black West Virginia State College, from which she graduated summa cum laude with degrees in math and French. As Shetterly puts it, she was a “black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school.” Born in 1918, Johnson was a precocious child who counted everything from stars to stair steps. Make no mistake: Katherine Johnson was a genius. It does not detract from Johnson’s genius to say that in her life of stunning achievement - and her long-overdue fame - she also represented a cohort of women who pioneered the STEM field in the mid-20th century, and who are only now beginning to receive credit. Henson portrayed her in the film adaptation of Margot Lee Shetterly’s best-selling book, Hidden Figures. In 2015, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the actor Taraji P. But her renown grew, and by the time she died this year, at 101, she had become a household name. In the world at large, Johnson was mostly unsung. The historic flight would prove an important step toward the ultimate goal of sending an American to orbit Earth.Īt the time, Johnson’s pivotal contribution to human spaceflight was known within NASA, as well as in the tight-knit community of African Americans she knew in the Hampton Roads, Virginia, area - many of whom, like her, worked at NASA’s Langley research facility. In 1961, the Freedom 7 mission sent astronaut Alan Shepard, packed in an almost impossibly tiny capsule, hurtling up into space thanks to Johnson, he also came down, safely. The engineers would give her the splashdown point, and she would tell them where to aim the rocket. “Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up,” she said upon joining the Project Mercury program. Johnson also, in this case, literally worked backward. As a Black woman in segregated America, she embodied the adage about Ginger Rogers - who did everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in heels - in the sense that she had to overcome countless barriers to win a respected place among a largely white, male NASA staff. Johnson at that time was a “human computer,” a job title for people - usually women - assigned to do the complex calculations underlying scientific disciplines such as astronomy and navigation. “Let me do it,” Katherine Johnson famously said when, in the late 1950s, her NASA colleagues were looking for a mathematician to join the team working to launch the first American into space.
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