Then one day, Katherine (and a colleague) were temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team. 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 black boxes of planes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks. “At first she worked in a pool of women performing math calculations. In 1953, the Guidance and Navigation Department at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics(what would later become NASA) offered Johnson a job.Īccording to oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project: In this ruling, states could satisfy this requirement by allowing blacks and whites to attend the same school or creating a second school for blacks. In 1938 she enrolled at West Virginia University where she became the one of three black students, and the only female, to integrate the graduate school after the US Supreme Court ruled that each state which provided a school for white students had to provide in-state education to blacks as well. In 1937, at 18 years old, she graduated summa cum laude from undergrad and moved to Virginia to teach French and math at a grade school. ![]() ![]() Schiefflin Claytor, the third African American to receive a PhD in math and they added extra math courses to the department just so that Johnson could take more. She enrolled at West Virginia State College where she took every math course that the school offered. Henson, was born on August 26th, 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, Greenbrier County, West Virginia and is currently an active member of the Lambda Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha.īecause the county Johnson lived in did not offer schooling for blacks past the 8th grade, her parents sent her to school in Kanahwha County, West Virginia where she graduated from high school at the age of 14. ![]() Katherine Johnson, the main character in the movie who is played by Taraji P. Before the title of computers came to refer to the laptops, desktops and calculators that we use today, these women, who did the math by hand were known as “computers.”Īnd while few know the story of how these three black women helped the US win the space race, even fewer know that all three of these women were members of the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three Black female mathematicians who began working for NASA in the 1950s and charted the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit during the Space Race from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia during segregation. The film tells the stories of Katherine G.
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