In Institute, Katherine’s older siblings, and then Katherine, attended the high school associated with the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, a historically black institution that became West Virginia State College and is now West Virginia State University. Thus, every fall, Joshua Coleman moved his family 125 miles away to Institute, W.Va. Johnson told The Associated Press in 1999.īut for black children, the town’s segregated educational system went as far as only sixth grade. “I couldn’t wait to get to high school to take algebra and geometry,” Mrs. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a farmer.įrom her earliest childhood Katherine counted things: the number of dishes in the cupboard, the number of steps on the way to church and, as insurmountable a task as it might pose for one old enough to be daunted, the number of stars in the sky. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., the youngest of four children of Joshua and Joylette (Lowe) Coleman. Shetterly wrote, “when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 35 than even finish high school.”Ĭreola Katherine Coleman was born on Aug. Shetterly heard her say repeatedly in the course of researching her book.īut what a job it was - done, no less, by a woman born at a time, Ms. Johnson deflected praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home. “I don’t have a feeling of inferiority,” Mrs. “They didn’t have time to be concerned about what color I was.” Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010.
#KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA BOOK PROFESSIONAL#
“NASA was a very professional organization,” Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues - myriad calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, graph paper and clattering desktop calculating machines - won them a level of acceptance that for the most part transcended race. “As Good as Anybody”īut over time, the work of Mrs. The white women in turn were segregated from the agency’s male mathematicians and engineers. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure at Langley - from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 - was “a time when computers wore skirts.”įor some years at midcentury, the black women who worked as “computers” were subjected to a double segregation: Consigned to separate office, dining and bathroom facilities, they were kept separate from the much larger group of white women who also worked as NASA mathematicians. Johnson and her colleagues, much as “typewriters” was used in the 19th century to denote professional typists.Īs Mrs. That year, The Washington Post described her as “the most high-profile of the computers” - “computers” being the term originally used to designate Mrs. Johnson Computational Research Facility, at its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her honor, the Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.” In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, proclaiming, “Katherine G. By then, she had become the best-known member of her formerly unknown cohort. Johnson was the only one still living at the time of its release. Of the black women at the center of the film, Mrs. Johnson received a sustained standing ovation when she appeared onstage with the cast at the Academy Awards ceremony that February. Though it won none, the 98½-year-old Mrs.
The film was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture. In January 2017 “Hidden Figures” received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division - the office from which the American space program sprang - and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name. The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B.
Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday at a retirement home in Newport News, Va., calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.Ī single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.
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