Katherine Johnson: The Inspiration Behind Hidden Figures
By: Leila Herman
After its release in 2017, the movie Hidden Figures was nominated for three Academy Awards. The movie owes its success to not only a talented cast and director, but also to the moving, real story of three talented African American women working at NACA (now known as NASA) in the 1950s. During their time there, the three scientists, and in particular Katherine Johnson, faced racial and gendered discrimination, despite their exceptional accomplishments.
Johnson was always a talented mathematician. She grew up in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where she attended school until her 8th grade year. Already she started to show her bright intellect, skipping several grades. Because the only high school accepting black students was in Institute, West Virginia, Johnson’s family moved there and temporarily left her father in White Sulphur Springs. She then attended college at the historically black West Virginia State College, and graduated at age 18 with a degree in mathematics. After teaching at a primary school in Marion, Virginia for a year, she enrolled in the newly-integrated graduate program at West Virginia University. Johnson was one of only three black students and the only black woman in the program. Though she left early to marry her husband, James Goble, and start a family, Johnson resumed her mathematics career in 1953 when she started her employment at NACA.
Then began the thirty-three years Johnson would work at the National Committee for Aeronautics, and later the National Aeronautics and Space Association. After only two weeks, the mathematician began working with the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division. She worked on project after project with the group, remaining behind the scenes but helping in the engineering of several major space events. To list a few of her numerous accomplishments, she contributed to the 1958 Notes on Space Technology with innovative mathematical equations. She performed trajectory analysis for the Freedom 7 mission of 1961, the first human space flight, and developed mathematical concepts that enabled the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, the first landing on the moon. Johnson earned such a reputation within the association that in 1962, before John Glenn’s orbital mission, the astronaut asked for her specifically to verify the flight numbers and equations by hand, saying that if she approved of the mathematics he was “ready to go.” But despite her outstanding professional path, Johnson stayed in the shadows and did not receive proper recognition for her accomplishments.
Katherine Johnson endured many challenges due to her gender and race throughout her career at NASA. With separate working spaces for black women and white women, she had to work against social norms of the time. In fact, almost all of the engineers at NASA were white men. Notably, the paper on the Freedom 7 mission, which Johnson heavily contributed to, was the first of the division to include a woman’s name. She had to break down barrier after barrier to work as an engineer and mathematician at NASA, and was only recognised for her accomplishments after the novel and movie Hidden Figures were released. Years after her retirement, at age 97, the mathematician was bestowed the well-deserved Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama for her indispensable work for the country. Kathernine Johnson passed away in February 2020 at the age of one hundred and one years, and remains an inspiration to all. She led the way to the next generations of black women at NASA, and to minorities in STEM fields in general.