Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.” She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Johnson has received many awards and honours for her work. Katherine Johnson retired from NASA in 1986, aged 68. This was one of the 26 research reports she had credit for in her career. This was the first time that a woman in her unit received credit as an author of a research paper. In 1960 Johnson wrote a paper, with one of the group’s engineers, about calculations for sending a spacecraft into orbit. She had an interview with the Fayetteville Observer in 2010 and said, “The guys all had graduate degrees in mathematics they had forgotten all the geometry they ever knew…I still remembered mine.” She stayed in this division for the rest of her career.
She helped calculate the aerodynamic forces on airplanes.
She was the only black member of staff and she quickly demonstrated that she had an invaluable asset. This division occupied a huge hangar on the Langley grounds. Johnson was ‘borrowed’ by the Flight Research Division only two weeks into her job. This finally changed in 1958 when NACA became NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which banned segregation. At this time, NACA was segregated and these women had to use separate dining facilities and bathrooms. They manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the program’s engineers and analysed test data, providing mathematical computations that were essential to the success of the early US space program. These women worked in the West Area Computing unit and were also known as the ‘West Computers’. If you have seen the Academy Award nominated film ‘Hidden Figures’ (if you haven’t then I strongly recommend watching it) then you’ll be aware that she was among a group of women who were described as the ‘human calculators’, who worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA aka NASA today). In 1952 Johnson heard that NASA was hiring black women as mathematicians and she joined at Langley. Gable died in 1956 and 3 years later she married James Johnson, hence Katherine Johnson. She was then occupied with teaching, motherhood and married life for over a decade.
She then left that position once she married James Gable and became pregnant with her first child. It was there where she studied for her masters in mathematics. However, in 1940, she was chosen to be one of the first African American students to enroll in a grad position at West Virginia University, the all white institution in Morgantown. She was able to secure a teaching job and moved to Virginia. She knew that finding a job was going to be difficult and unsurprisingly for the time, there were negligible research opportunities for young female black mathematicians. Something which Johnson thrived in, she greatly enjoyed her education, as she expressed when talking to The Associated Press in 1999, “I couldn’t wait to get to high school to take algebra and geometry.” She progressed through school quickly and had started to attend high school at only 10 years old and graduated from West Virginia State College at age 18, with bachelor degrees in mathematics and French.
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Here, the rules were different, so her and her siblings could receive a full education. Because of this, her father moved the family to a town called Institute 125 miles away, also in West Virginia. In her hometown of White Sulfur Springs, because of the segregated school system, black students couldn’t progress further than 6th grade. As a young girl Katherine’s high intelligence was clear and her skills with numbers apparent.
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