Katherine Johnson

Creola Katherine Johnson (née Coleman; August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020) was an American human computer whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform tasks previously requiring humans. The space agency noted her "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist".

Johnson's work included calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those for astronauts Alan Shepard (the first American in space) and John Glenn (the first American in orbit), and rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on flights to the Moon. Her calculations were also essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a human mission to Mars.

In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the Silver Snoopy Award from NASA astronaut Leland D. Melvin and a NASA Group Achievement Award. She was portrayed by Taraji P. Henson in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. In 2019, the United States Congress awared Johnson the Congressional Gold Medal. In 2021, she was posthumously inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Early life

Katherine Johnson was born Creola Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to Joylette Roberta (née Lowe) and Joshua McKinley Coleman. She was the youngest of four children. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a lumberman, farmer, and handyman. He also worked at the Greenbrier Hotel.

Johnson showed strong mathematical ability from an early age. Because Greenbrier County did not offer public schooling for African-American students beyond eighth grade, the Colemans arranged for their children to attend a high school in Institute, West Virginia, on the West Virginia State College (WVSC) campus; Johnson enrolled when she was ten years old. The family split their time between Institute during the school year and White Sulphur Springs in the summer.

After graduating from high school at age 14, Johnson matriculated at WVSC, a historically black college. She took every mathematics course the college offered. Several professors mentored her, including the chemist and mathematician Angie Turner King, who had guided Coleman throughout high school, and W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African-American to receive a doctorate in mathematics. Claytor added new courses just for Johnson. In 1937, at age 18, she graduated summa cum laude with degrees in mathematics and French. Johnson was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha. She took a teaching job at a black public school in Marion, Virginia.

In 1939, after marrying her first husband, James Goble, she left her teaching job and enrolled in a graduate mathematics program. She quit at the end of the first session to focus on her family life. She was the first African-American woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. Through WVSC's president, John W. Davis, she became one of three African-American students, and the only woman, selected to integrate the graduate school after the 1938 United States Supreme Court ruling Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada required states that provide public higher education to white students to also provide it to black students by establishing black colleges and universities or by admitting black students to formerly white-only universities.

Career

After her daughters grew up, Johnson returned to teaching. In 1952, a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring for its West Area computing section. At the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, based in Hampton, Virginia, near Langley Field, NACA hired African-American mathematicians as well as whites for their Guidance and Navigation Department. Johnson accepted a job offer from the agency in June 1953. For Johnson to take the job, her family moved to Newport News.

According to an oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project:

At first she [Johnson] worked in a pool of women performing mathematical calculations. Katherine has referred to the women in the pool as virtual "computers who wore skirts". Their main job was to read the data from the plane's black boxes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks. Then one day, Katherine (and a colleague) were temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team. Katherine's knowledge of analytic geometry helped make quick allies of male bosses and colleagues to the extent that "they forgot to return me to the pool". While the racial and gender barriers were always there, Katherine ignored them. Katherine was assertive, asking to be included in editorial meetings (where no women had gone before). She simply told people she had done the work and that she belonged.

From 1953 to 1958, Johnson worked as a computer, performing calculations for topics like gust alleviation for aircraft. Originally assigned to the West Area Computers section supervised by mathematician Dorothy Vaughan, Johnson was reassigned to the Guidance and Control Division of Langley's Flight Research Division. It was staffed by white male engineers. In keeping with the State of Virginia's racial segregation laws and federal workplace segregation introduced under President Woodrow Wilson, Johnson and the other African-American women in the computing pool were required to work, eat, and use restrooms in separate facilities from those of their white colleagues. Their office was labeled "Colored Computers". In an interview with WHRO-TV, Johnson said she "didn't feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research. You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job [...] and play bridge at lunch." She added: "I didn't feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn't feel it."

NACA disbanded the colored computing pool in 1958 when the agency was superseded by NASA, which adopted digital computers. Although the installation was desegregated, forms of discrimination were still pervasive. Johnson recalled:

We needed to be assertive as women in that days—assertive and aggressive—and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be. In the early days of NASA women were not allowed to put their names on the reports—no woman in my division had had her name on a report. I was working with Ted Skopinski and he wanted to leave and go to Houston [...] but Henry Pearson, our supervisor—he was not a fan of women—kept pushing him to finish the report we were working on. Finally, Ted told him, "Katherine should finish the report, she's done most of the work anyway." So Ted left Pearson with no choice; I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something.

From 1958 until her retirement in 1986, Johnson worked as a computer for NACA's successor, the Spacecraft Controls Branch. She calculated the trajectory for the May 5, 1961, space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space. She also calculated the launch window for his 1961 Mercury mission. She plotted backup navigation charts for astronauts in case of electronic failures. When NASA used electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn's orbit around earth, officials asked Johnson to verify the computer's numbers; Glenn had asked for her specifically and had refused to fly unless Johnson verified the calculations.

Author Margot Lee Shetterly wrote, "So the astronaut who became a hero looked to this black woman in the still-segregated South at the time as one of the key parts of making sure his mission would be a success." She added that, in a time when computing was "women's work" and engineering was left to men, "it really does have to do with us over the course of time sort of not valuing that work that was done by women, however necessary, as much as we might. And it has taken history to get a perspective on that."

Johnson later worked directly with digital computers. Her ability and reputation for accuracy helped establish confidence in the new technology. In 1961, her work helped to ensure that Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 Mercury capsule was found quickly after landing, using the accurate trajectory that had been established.

She also helped to calculate the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon. During the Moon landing, Johnson was at a meeting in the Pocono Mountains. She and a few others crowded around a small television screen watching the first steps on the Moon. In 1970, Johnson worked on the Apollo 13 Moon mission. When the mission was aborted, her work on backup procedures and charts helped set a safe path for the crew's return to Earth, creating a one-star observation system to allow astronauts to determine their location accurately. In a 2010 interview, Johnson recalled, "Everybody was concerned about them getting there. We were concerned about them getting back." Later in her career, she worked on the Space Shuttle program, the Earth Resources Satellite, and on plans for a human mission to Mars.