Her skills powered men into space... but the NASA maths genius had travelled nearly as far herself
As a black child in America’s south, Katherine Johnson survived segregated schools, race riots and ‘Jim Crow’ laws to achieve her dream
KATHERINE Johnson’s extraordinary life as a top NASA mathematician was told in 2016’s Oscarnominated hit movie Hidden Figures. A black woman in a space agency dominated by white men, she helped calculate the flight paths for America’s first manned space mission, its first Earth orbit, the Apollo 11 moon landing and even missions to Mars.
Yet the film told only part of her story. Johnson died last year aged 101, but her memoir My Remarkable Journey, published posthumously this week, reveals the appalling depths of racism and sexism she overcame to achieve an almost-impossible dream.
“My people were called ‘coloured’ and treated as second-class citizens, and white lynch mobs terrorised our communities throughout the nation,” she said. “I could not envision the life I would live.”
Working in obscurity for NASA, she was 97 before accolades flooded in. Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, received 13 honorary degrees, had four buildings named in her honour – including two at NASA – and her statue was erected at West Virginia State University,
“Not bad for a woman who didn’t own a pair of shoes until she went to school,” says her daughter Joylette Hylick, aged 80, who co-authored the memoir with her sister Katherine Moore.
“She overcame racism and sexism to get to NASA, and had to work twice as hard as everyone else to prove herself.”
Born in White Sulphur Springs, West
Virginia, in 1918, as white supremacists rampaged through black communities across America, Johnson attended an impoverished all-black school and lived in a black community.
“There were white riots when her school became integrated,” says Joylette.
Johnson experienced racism first-hand, from the so-called Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the southern states. “I grew up and was told by law that I had to sit in the back of buses, climb to isolated theatre balconies, and use coloured water fountains and bathrooms, because of my race,” she wrote.
She recalled travelling as a teen when her bus crossed the state line into Virginia, and all the black passengers were forced to move to the back. They were later ordered off the bus so that white passengers could ride
alone into town.Working at NASA and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, she had to overcome racism and sexism. Black mathematicians were segregated from whites at the space agency.
“The black mathematicians all had degrees and were experts at their work, whereas the white pool of mathematicians weren’t required to have degrees, and many got their jobs through nepotism,” says Joylette. “So the NASA engineers always preferred to have their theories and equations analysed by the black women mathematicians.”
In the movie Hidden Figures, in which Johnson was played by Taraji P Henson, she is seen having to run across the NASA campus in Langley, Virginia, to use a distant “Coloureds Only” toilet – but that’s not how it was for Johnson.
“There were humiliating times when black employees had to walk a long distance to a different building to find a designated bathroom to relieve themselves,” she wrote. “But in real life I didn’t follow the rules. I
figured I was as good as anybody else, so even after I realised there were ‘coloured’ restrooms, I just refused to use them.
“Was I able to get away with it because of my fair skin complexion? That’s possible. I’d overheard a few conversations that let me know some of my white counterparts weren’t quite sure of my race.That was their issue. I never tried to hide who I was.”
The male engineers at NASA treated the women as “computers who wore skirts”, she said. Yet Johnson’s mastery of analytical geometry forced the white men to accept her as one of their own.
“She demanded to be included in male-only meetings because she had done the work, and belonged there,” says Joylette, who like her mother also worked as a NASA mathematician. “She didn’t let anything stop her.” Johnson, the daughter of a teacher and a janitor, showed mathematical prowess at an early age. “I counted everything,” she recalled. “I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to the church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed... anything that could be counted.
“My father had grown up in the shadows of slavery and had been limited by his race.”
Her father, Joshua, left school at the age of 11. In an era when African Americans routinely ended their education at 13, Johnson’s family moved her 120 miles to attend high school at the age of ten, finishing school at 14 and then graduating from university at 18. She taught in high school, married and had three daughters before joining Langley’s research centre in 1953 as a mathematician running flight calculations, and, by 1959, for the nascent space programme as the US raced to beat the USSR to the moon. Johnson specialised in calculating trajectories for space flights. “I’d ask, ‘Where do you want them to come down?’ And they’d tell me the spot and I’d work backward from there.”
When the earliest electronic computers were used to calculate America’s first Earth orbit, astronaut John Glenn, one of the socalled Mercury Seven, didn’t trust the figures. He asked Johnson to double-check them, saying: “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.”
Later she worked on the Space Shuttle programme and on plans for a Mars mission, publishing 26 scientific papers in 33 years of service. “She said they did more research at NASA on what might happen if things went wrong than they ever did on how things could go right,” says Joylette. “She was forever learning, always looking for a challenge, and when she’d solved it she’d look for the next challenge. Her work was mostly secret, and she never spoke about it at home.
“When they landed on the moon she’d never say, ‘I helped them do that.’ And when she was belatedly showered with honours she’d say, ‘I don’t get it. I was just doing my job’.” Barack Obama, presenting her Presidential Medal of Freedom – America’s highest civilian honour – said: “Katherine was a pioneer who broke the barriers of race and gender.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Johnson. “What had I done to deserve such an esteemed award? Then I wished I could have shared the honor with my team.”
IN 2017 Johnson received a standing ovation from Hollywood’s A-List when she took the stage at the Academy Awards, where Hidden Figures was nominated for three statuettes.
“She didn’t want to attend the Oscars, but 20th Century Fox insisted,” says Joylette. “She was frail, and we worried the journey might kill her.”
The studio supplied a private jet, a NASA doctor, 24-hour medical care, and a week’s hotel accommodation for her entire family.
“They must have really wanted me there,” she said, while noting: “About 75 per cent of what was shown in the film was accurate.”
Even in her advanced years, Johnson wished she could have gone to space.
“She would in a heartbeat,” says Joylette. “She was fearless. Earlier this year a supply rocket to the International Space Station was named after her.They put a photo of her on a flag so when the spacecraft docked with the Space Station the first thing the astronauts would see was this picture of her.”
Wiping away a tear, Joylette smiles: “She got to go to space after all.”
‘She was forever learning, always looking for a challenge. When she’d solved it, she’d look for the next one’
●●My Remarkable Journey by Katherine Johnson(Amistad, £20) is out on Thursday