Katherine Johnson

• 1. Introduction

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  Katherine Johnson was the mathematician an astronaut asked for by name. NASA was using electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn's orbit of the Earth. Officials turned to Johnson to verify the machine's numbers, because Glenn had requested her and refused to fly unless she did. She was an African-American woman in the still-segregated South, doing work that history was slow to credit.

  How does a girl from West Virginia end up as the person a national hero trusts over a machine? What did her workplace let her do, and what did it refuse her? And why did it take so long for the wider world to learn her name?

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• 2. Early Brilliance

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  Katherine Johnson was born Creola Katherine Coleman on the 26th of August 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She was the youngest of four children. Her mother, Joylette Roberta, was a teacher. Her father, Joshua McKinley Coleman, worked as a lumberman, farmer and handyman, and also held a job at the Greenbrier Hotel.

  Greenbrier County offered no public schooling for African-American students beyond the eighth grade. So the Colemans arranged for their children to attend a high school in Institute, West Virginia, on the campus of West Virginia State College. Johnson enrolled at ten years old. The family divided its year, spending the school term in Institute and the summers back in White Sulphur Springs.

  She finished high school at 14 and moved straight into the college itself, a historically black institution. She took every mathematics course it taught. Angie Turner King, a chemist and mathematician, had guided her through high school and kept mentoring her. W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African-American to earn a doctorate in mathematics, added new courses just for her. In 1937, at age 18, she graduated summa cum laude with degrees in mathematics and French. She belonged to Alpha Kappa Alpha, and she took a teaching job at a black public school in Marion, Virginia.

  The year 1939 brought a different kind of first. After she married her first husband, James Goble, she left her teaching post and enrolled in a graduate mathematics program in Morgantown, West Virginia. A Supreme Court ruling of 1938, Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, had required states that offered public higher education to white students to offer it to black students as well. States could do that by building black colleges or by admitting black students to white universities. Through the college president, John W. Davis, Johnson became one of three African-American students, and the only woman, chosen to integrate the graduate school at West Virginia University. She was the first African-American woman to attend it. She quit at the end of the first session to focus on her family. Her three daughters would eventually grow up, and that would change her course.

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• 3. The Computing Pool

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  In 1952, a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, known as NACA, was hiring for its West Area computing section. Johnson had gone back to teaching after her daughters grew up. The agency's Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, hired African-American mathematicians as well as white ones for its Guidance and Navigation Department. Johnson accepted a job offer in June 1953, and her family moved to Newport News so she could take it.

  An oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project describes what she found. She joined a pool of women who did mathematical calculations by hand. Johnson later called them "computers who wore skirts". Their main task was reading data from the black boxes of airplanes and carrying out other precise calculations.

  Then she and a colleague were temporarily assigned to help an all-male flight research team. Her knowledge of analytic geometry quickly won over the men in charge. By her own account, "they forgot to return me to the pool". She asked to join editorial meetings where no woman had sat before. When people questioned her, she told them she had done the work and that she belonged there.

  From 1953 to 1958 she worked as a computer on problems such as gust alleviation for aircraft. Dorothy Vaughan supervised the West Area Computers section where she began. Johnson was later reassigned to the Guidance and Control Division of Langley's Flight Research Division, a unit staffed by white male engineers.

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• 4. Separate Facilities

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  The words "Colored Computers" labeled the office where Johnson and the other African-American women worked. Virginia's racial segregation laws required it, as did the federal workplace segregation introduced under President Woodrow Wilson. The women had to work, eat and use restrooms in facilities apart from their white colleagues.

  Johnson spoke about this in an interview with the television station WHRO. She 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."

  In 1958, NACA gave way to NASA, which adopted digital computers. The agency disbanded the colored computing pool. The installation was desegregated, but discrimination remained widespread. Johnson recalled that "In the early days of NASA women were not allowed to put their names on the reports".

  The turning point involved a report she was writing with Ted Skopinski. Skopinski wanted to leave for Houston, but their supervisor, Henry Pearson, kept pressing him to finish. Johnson described Pearson as "not a fan of women". Finally Skopinski told him, "Katherine should finish the report, she's done most of the work anyway." She finished it, and her name went on it. No woman in her division had been credited that way before. Over her career she would coauthor 26 scientific papers.

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• 5. Orbits and Return Paths

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  From 1958 until her retirement in 1986, Johnson worked at NASA's Spacecraft Controls Branch. On the 5th of May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, and she had calculated his trajectory. She also worked out the launch window for his Mercury mission. For astronauts, she plotted backup navigation charts to use if the electronics failed.

  Shepard's capsule, Freedom 7, was found quickly after it came down. The accurate trajectory she had established made that possible. Johnson later worked directly with digital computers, and her reputation for accuracy helped people trust the new technology.

  The Moon program brought new problems. She helped calculate the trajectory for the Apollo 11 flight in 1969. When the first steps on the Moon were broadcast, she was at a meeting in the Pocono Mountains. She and a few others crowded around a small television screen to watch. Her calculations also covered the rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module.

  In 1970 came Apollo 13. After the mission was aborted, her backup procedures and charts helped set a safe path for the crew's return. She created a one-star observation system that let astronauts determine their position accurately. Looking back in a 2010 interview, she said, "Everybody was concerned about them getting there. We were concerned about them getting back."

  Her later assignments included the Space Shuttle program and the Earth Resources Satellite. She also worked on plans for a human mission to Mars.

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• 6. Family and Faith

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  For 50 years, Johnson sang in the choir at Carver Memorial Presbyterian Church. Her home life was just as steady. She and James Francis Goble had three daughters. He died of an inoperable brain tumor in 1956.

  In 1959 she married James A. "Jim" Johnson, a United States Army officer and veteran of the Korean War. They stayed married for 60 years, until his death in 2019 at age 93. She had six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, and she lived in Hampton, Virginia.

  In her later years she urged students and her own grandchildren toward science, technology, engineering and mathematics. She died at a retirement home in Newport News on the 24th of February 2020, at age 101. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine called her "an American hero" and said "her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten."

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• 7. Hidden Figures on Screen

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  Author Margot Lee Shetterly argued that computing was once treated as women's work while engineering was left to men. She said that history has been slow to value the work women did, however necessary it was. She wrote a nonfiction book, Hidden Figures, published in 2016. The film of the same name followed in December 2016.

  The film follows Johnson and two other African-American women who worked as computers at NASA, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan. Taraji P. Henson plays Johnson. The NBC series Timeless also portrayed her in its 2016 episode "Space Race", where Nadine Ellis played the part.

  Johnson appeared alongside Henson at the 89th Academy Awards and received a standing ovation from the audience. Of the film itself she said, "It was well done. The three leading ladies did an excellent job portraying us."

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• 8. Honors and Namesakes

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  On the 24th of November 2015, President Barack Obama presented Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He said she "refused to be limited by society's expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity's reach." In 2016, NASA astronaut Leland D. Melvin gave her the Silver Snoopy Award. NASA says it goes to those "who have made outstanding contributions to flight safety and mission success". The BBC also placed her on its 2016 list of 100 Women. Congress awarded her the Congressional Gold Medal on the 8th of November 2019.

  The 5th of May 2016 was the 55th anniversary of Shepard's flight. On that day, NASA dedicated a 40,000-square-foot building at Langley Research Center as the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility. It opened on the 22nd of September 2017. A NASA official told the ceremony that millions had watched Shepard's flight without knowing who did the calculations that brought him into space and home safely. On the 22nd of February 2019, NASA also renamed its facility in Fairmont, West Virginia, the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility.

  Universities honored her too. The College of William & Mary gave her an honorary doctorate on the 12th of May 2018. The University of Johannesburg conferred one on the 29th of April 2019. West Virginia State University set up a STEM scholarship in her name in August 2018 and put a life-size statue of her on campus. Mattel announced a Barbie in her likeness that year, wearing a NASA identity badge. Science writer Maia Weinstock included Johnson in a prototype Lego set for women of NASA, though Johnson declined to have her likeness printed on the final product.

  Schools adopted her name as well. In August 2018 the DeSoto Independent School District in Texas opened the Katherine Johnson Technology Magnet Academy for kindergarten through fifth grade. After 85% of residents voted to rename it, the Fairfax County school board dropped the name of Confederate soldier Sidney Lanier. On the 2nd of November 2020, the school became Katherine Johnson Middle School.

  Her name has also gone into space. A satellite named "Katherine", ÑuSat 15, was launched on the 6th of November 2020. In February 2021, Northrop Grumman named its Cygnus spacecraft for the International Space Station the SS Katherine Johnson. In 2020 the United States Space Force named a GPS 3 satellite Creola Katherine Johnson. It was launched into orbit on the 30th of May 2025.

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