Trailblazing star
A black womawoman working in a segregated unit at NASA put John Glenn into orbit and brought hhim home again. Now she’s finally shootinshooting to fame in her own right
ON July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, taking “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” But he got there thanks to a woman, Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician who calculated Apollo 11’s trajectory to the moon and back. Johnson was one of many African-American women who advanced the space race but whose fingerprints on history had been all but buried in moon dust — until recently. In “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” (William Morrow), journalist Margot Lee Shetterly unearths the heroic true tale of the women who worked at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory at a time when “computers” referred not to machines but to humans, and NASA, then called NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), had segregated computing units: the East Area was for whites, the West Area for blacks. Back in September, Shetterly’s book was an instant best seller, and on Christmas Eve, the movie of the same name starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe lands in theaters.
Originally from Hampton, Va., aka “Spacetown, USA,” Shetterly grew up hearing about these female space pioneers, many of whom studied at the historically AfricanAmerican Hampton University. Her father was among the first black NASA engineers and scientists, giving her an inside view into the women’s lives — and telling their story has been nothing short of a personal mission. “What I wanted was for them to have the grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved,” Shetterly writes in her prologue, “not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.”
As a result, the story spans decades and cultural landmarks, from the launch of Sputnik to the debut of “Star Trek.” It begins in 1943, when Langley started recruiting black women mathematicians and engineers into its ranks during the war, despite pervasive Jim Crow laws. One of those women was Dorothy Vaughan (played by Spencer in the film), a married mother of four who started commuting to Langley from Farmville, Va., at the height of the war, a la Rosie the Riveter, eventually rising to become the head of the West Area Computing Unit.
As NASA’s first African-American manager, Vaughan pulled other black women up the ladder with her, including Johnson (played by Henson in the film), but gaining a foothold took courage and conviction. Despite their good jobs, the West Area women were reminded of their inequality every time they ate lunch in the cafeteria and saw a stenciled sign reading “Colored Computers.” One brave employee defiantly removed the offending sign, only to see it replaced by a new, identical one soon after.
The West Area women faced a similar injustice, and a similar sign, every time they went to “their bathroom.” In one instance, the straightshooting Mary Jackson (played by Monáe in the film) is temporarily sent to work in the East Area. Despite having an employee badge and a better education than some of her white counterparts, she is humiliated when she asks directions to the restroom — and the East Area women refuse to help her. (In the film, this scene is portrayed as having happened to Johnson.)
“How would they know where to find her bathroom?” Shetterly writes. “It was the proximity to professional equality that gave the slight such a surprising and enduring sting . . . In the moment when the white women laughed at her, Mary had been demoted from professional mathematician to a second-class human being, reminded that she was a black girl whose piss wasn’t good enough for the white pot.”
BY 1958, segregation had ended at Langley, soon making the West Area a relic of the past. The same year, NASA initiated Project Mercury, the five-year effort to launch man into orbit, observe his behavior in space, and guarantee his safe return to Earth. Johnson was confident in her ability to get the job done. “Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up,” she once said.
Sure enough, in 1962, astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth — relying on Johnson’s calculations (done by
hand to verify the work of electronic computers) to get him there and back in one piece.
Johnson told The Post earlier this month that she wasn’t nervous while Glenn was in space, because “we had a set of coordinates that we used, and if they used the same ones we did, there it was.”
The mission made Glenn a national hero amid tensions of the Cold War. (After he died earlier this month, aged 95, it was announced he will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.)
And yet, even as the space race hurtled into the future, America failed to make the same kind of progress in the fight for civil rights. African-Americans hoping to see black faces in space would have to settle for watching the TV show “Star Trek,” which debuted in 1966. (Martin Luther King Jr. was an early Trekkie.)
Johnson got the recognition she deserved in November of 2015, when President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Still, the women of NASA were always about the work, first and foremost. “Their goal,” Shetterly writes, “wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent.”
With Glenn’s mission in mind, Johnson had simple words of wisdom for encouraging girls today to study math.
“There will be so many more things being done,” she said, “and you will be there to see them done.”