The movie, mostly set in 19, highlights the indignities endured by black Nasa employees despite the agency’s reliance on them. Hidden Figures stars among others Taraji P Henson (who plays Johnson), Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe. Johnson’s story – and the largely untold history of contributions by black women during the space race – was told on the big screen last year. On Friday, Shetterly said: “We are living in a present that they willed into existence with their pencils, their slide rules, their mechanical calculating machines and, of course, their brilliant minds.” Obama joked: “If you think your job is pressure-packed, hers meant that forgetting to carry the one might send somebody floating off into the solar system.” In 2015, Barack Obama awarded Johnson the presidential medal of freedom, the highest US civilian honor, calling her a “pioneer who broke the barriers of race and gender, showing generations of young people that everyone can excel at math and science and reach for the stars”. “They just said, ‘If she says it’s right, it’s right’ because the guys didn’t do the work. “That’s the way it was,” she said in the oral history. She also verified the calculation produced by a computer for John Glenn’s 1962 orbit, and for the 1969 Apollo 11 trajectory to the moon. In 1953, Johnson joined an all-black team of “human computers”, her mathematical acuity earning her a place on the main research team, where she would produce calculations for the 1961 flight trajectory of Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Then a relative told her about a job opening at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or Naca, a precursor of Nasa. In 1939, she was one of three black students – and the only woman – to integrate the state’s graduate schools, enrolling in a math program at West Virginia University.įor more than a decade, Johnson taught in segregated schools. She whipped through every math course her college had to offer and graduated, still a teenager, with degrees in mathematics and French. She graduated West Virginia State College at 14, the age at which most students begin. Her county did not offer public schooling for black students after the eighth grade, so she had to relocate to Institute, West Virginia, to continue her education through high school. And I knew how many steps there were from our house to church.” “I counted the steps,” she said in an oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project. From an early age, she showed signs of prodigious ability. Johnson was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the youngest child of farmer and a teacher. “But without her past full of diverging roads and choices that made all the difference we would not be standing on the brink of this future.” “Today all of these things seem inevitable,” said Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of Hidden Figures, which profiles Johnson and her fellow “human computers” and was made into a film last year. In an extraordinary career, Johnson defied racial and gender constraints and was involved with many of the greatest achievements in space. I didn’t do anything alone but try to go to the root of the question and succeeded there.” “I was excited at something new, always liked something new, but give credit to everybody who helped. “You want my honest answer? I think they’re crazy,” she said. In a pre-taped video message, Johnson laughed when asked how she felt about a building being named in her honor. The 99-year-old cut the ribbon for the Katherine G Johnson Computational Research Facility at the Langley research center in Hampton, Virginia, where she was honored as a trailblazing “human computer”.
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