In a perfect world there would be no black history, no women's history... it would just be history. But the sad truth is that history is always written by the winners and in the case of western civilization that meant blacks and women as well as other minorities were omitted, distorted or maligned. Because February is Black History Month we are celebrating our black brothers and sisters with a series that features some familiar names and some not so well known.
Due to the commercial success of the popular movie HIDDEN FIGURES, people are coming to know the names of three black women: Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson.
The role of Katherine Johnson is played in the movie by Taraji P. Henson. The Hollywood history of her story is reasonably accurate: she was a math genius, she did graduate high school and college in West Virginia with highest honors, she was among the first three blacks to integrate West Virginia State's graduate program and she was widowed (1956) when her husband died of cancer. It was also her friend Dorothy Vaughn who assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division of NASA where she would spend four years analyzing data until the Russians launched Sputnik and America's priorities changed.
She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard's May 1961 mission Freedom 7 and became the first woman to to receive credit as an author of a research report (it laid out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified). She was instrumental in the orbital mission of John Glenn in 1962 which is what the movie focuses on and what she is best known for. She maintained that her greatest contribution to space exploration are the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo's Lunar Lander with the moon orbiting Command and Service Module but she also is credited with 26 research reports related to space exploration.
She and her colleagues, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson crossed all gender, race and professional barriers at a difficult time in America's history. In recognition of her many contributions to her profession and American society, as well as 33 years of service at Langley, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Born in 1918, she is still alive.
Katherine Johnson