ERACISM MINUTE 3/8/2020

Creola Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson

Good morning! I’m Lauralee Carbone, here to present an E-Racism Minute, a moment of consciousness raising organized by BUF’s Black Lives Matter Ministry Action Team.

Following up on last week’s theme of the intersectionality of race and gender, today’s eRacism minute, written by Amoret Heise, is about Katherine Goble Johnson, who died on February 24 at the age of 101. Although living to that age is a notable achievement, it is far from what she is best known for.

She was born in a small town in West Virginia, the youngest of four children. Although her father had only a 6^th grade education, he was known to be a math whiz, and she showed similar talent as a young girl. While a student at West Virginia State College, she was fortunate to have excellent African-American math professors. After graduating summa cum laude at the age of 18, she was one of only three African-Americans, and the only woman, selected to integrate West Virginia State College’s graduate school after the 1938 US Supreme Court ruling that states providing public higher education to white students also had to provide it to black students. She chose to marry and raise a family rather than complete the graduate program, a decision she never regretted.

Although she had previously worked as a teacher, when Johnson looked for work again after her children were older, she aspired to something more challenging. She learned in 1952 that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring mathematicians to work at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, and they hired African-Americans as well as whites. She got a job there and continued to work for them later as the agency was superseded by NASA.

As an African-American, and a woman, she had to be careful reporting the results of her work in the segregated lab, especially when review of an engineer’s calculations showed an error. She asked if the calculation might not be correct, which brought the desired acknowledgment, math being exact and not a matter of judgment or debate. Over time her work became so respected that before John Glenn’s 1962 orbit around the earth, he refused to fly until she had manually verified the computer’s calculations.

Katherine co-authored 26 scientific papers, although women’s names didn’t go on the reports then, so she didn’t get recognition in the usual way. Belatedly, NASA named a building after her, and in 2015, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. A book and movie, both named Hidden Figures, were written about her and other African-American women who worked behind the scenes in the Mercury space program, making sure the trajectories would get the astronauts where they were supposed to go and, even more importantly, bring them safely home.

Katherine Johnson is a hero because of her confidence and passion, two traits that enabled her to rise above the limits of segregation and discrimination, and become an inspiration for other female mathematicians of color.