CELEBRATING KICK-ASS WOMEN: KATHERINE JOHNSON

Katherine Johnson :

A Hidden Figure No More written by Dana Costa

I’m a sucker for a good underdog story. I flock to them on Netflix. I love them even more when they are based on true events. That’s how I felt when I saw the first trailer for Hidden Figures in 2016. I had every intention of going to see it in the theaters, but, you know...life.

When I finally saw it in 2018 or so, I felt all the feels. I was sad and happy and frustrated and enraged and dumbfounded...and inspired.

I realized that women like those portrayed in Hidden Figures were the women who bravely fought for the opportunities I have now. I didn’t know it—or about them —until I was almost 50-years-old, and I felt less for it.

If you are not familiar with the award-winning film based on the non-fiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly, it follows three women of color who fought discrimination in color and race segregated in the 1960s to be instrumental in the United States’ space race with the Soviet Union: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson.

Then, as I was writing the first feature in our Celebrating Kick-Ass Women series in February 2020, Ms. Katherine Johnson had just passed away at the age of 101. I watched Hidden Figures again in her honor but I needed to know more about Ms. Johnson, and the parts of her life not depicted in the movie. I was blown away at what I found.

Born in West Virginia in 1918, Ms. Johnson excelled in school but because African-American girls couldn’t go to school past 8th grade, she transferred to a school 130 miles away from home. Her family split their time between the two towns in order to support Ms. Johnson’s education. She graduated from high school at age 14. She graduated with honors from West Virginia State, a historically black college, at age 18 with degrees in mathematics and French. Typical for women at the time, Ms. Johnson

worked as a public school teacher after graduating from college. Ms. Johnson married in 1939, leaving her teaching position and enrolling in graduate school at West Virginia University, the first African-American woman to do so. She left the program after a year in order to start her family. Fast forward to the early 1950s. The post-World War II Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is in full swing. Everything is a race between those two countries, including the Space Race. In 1953, Ms. Johnson starts working for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA as a computer, using her math skills to

“We needed to be assertive as women in those days—assertive and aggressive—and After her retirement from NASA in the late 1980s, Ms. Johnson continued to encourage women, especially women of color, to enter in STEM fields such as mathematics and engineering. In 2015, President Barack Obama presented Ms. Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed upon a citizen of the United States. But the accolades don’t stop there. Ms. Johnson has numerous honorary degrees, two buildings at NASA Langley (Virginia) named after her, NASA’s Silver Snoopy Award (and many more NASA awards—too many to list), the Congressional Gold Medal, and even has a Barbie modeled after her.

the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be .”

calculate and analyze various aircraft, and eventually spacecraft, movements.

Over the course of her 35 years with NACA/NASA, Ms. Johnson broke gender and color barriers to contribute to the success of most major space events and even when NASA switched to electronic computers for calculations, Ms. Johnson was often called upon to verify the calculations manually. Without the book and movie about her life, her accomplishments may well have been hidden from the world. Luckily, we know about Ms. Johnson’s intelligence, bravery, and determination—and her legacy will never be forgotten.

Sources: Wikipedia; Biography.com.; NASA.gov; Houston Style Magazine.