Women's Day 2020 Memoriam of The Great Katherine G. Johnson
It’s bittersweet that as we start the celebration of Women’s History Month, we bid adieu to trailblazer Katherine Johnson. At the impressive age of 101, Katherine left her physical presence but leaves us with her many accomplishments and a legacy for Black women to upheld and pass on.
Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who worked for NASA during the Cold War. She was responsible for charting the trajectory calculations behind NASA’s space missions including the first mission to orbit around the earth in 1962 and the famed first moon landing in 1969. This was done all during a time when Blacks were fighting for equal civil rights and at the peak of the women’s rights movement. Needless to say, this was an enormous feat in the face of constant exposure to racism and sexism.
Born in 1918, Katherine was the youngest daughter of a schoolteacher and a farmer, who would grow up to become a famous mathematician that guided mankind into outer space. After working for years as a science, technology, engineering, and math aka "STEM school teacher, Johnson was hired by the then called the "Langley Research Center" in Hampton, VA in 1953. At the height of the Jim Crow era, Johnson began her career at NASA in a segregated facility where she would continue to work for three decades. Like many Black women working behind the scenes in society, her name was unknown to the masses until the release of the Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures in 2016 where she was portrayed by actress Taraji P Henson.
Actress Taraji P. Henson portrays Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures.
Before the film was released, Johnson had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 from President Barack Obama for her pioneering work in the fields of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). This is a tremendous honor given to an individual who is being recognized by the president. In 2017, NASA built and dedicated a building in her honor naming it the “Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility” in Hampton, VA.
In a world that had little to no representation of women of color in the media, in books or in any kind of spotlight, Katherine G. Johnson, you literally brought our world to the Moon.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month I implore us all to remember our sisters, ancestors, and all women of color who have faced and walked through the fire. Let’s pay homage to those women who were able to change the world as it was, and pay homage to their tremendous life achievements today.
