As her biographer Margot Lee Shetterly put it, it was a time “when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 35 than even finish high school.” This all happened in the days of Jim Crow laws about segregation. People would calmly bet their lives on her way with numbers, even though one human error could get them killed. “If she says the numbers are good, I’m ready to go,” he explained. “IF SHE SAYS THE NUMBERS ARE GOOD, I’M READY TO GO.” As he was going over his final trajectory, he asked Katherine Johnson to double-check the arithmetic. John Glenn was the first astronaut to orbit the Earth in his Mercury space capsule, Friendship 7, back in 1962. One story says it all about Katherine Johnson. She was the last surviving member of about thirty black women with jobs as human computers at the space agency. Katherine Johnson stands out not just for being a woman in the STEM fields way back then but also because she was African-American. She was one of a few hundred women who worked at the NASA Langley Research Center as human computers. Henson in that film, has just passed on at 101. I’m bringing up Hidden Figures because human computer Katherine Johnson, the real-life woman played by Taraji P.
BLACK WOMEN WORKED AS NASA HUMAN COMPUTERS
#KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA BUILDING MOVIE#
The movie had three nominations, including for Best Picture, but went home with no awards.
The same feeling came back to me in 2017 when the landmark film Hidden Figures got shut out of the Oscars. In, 1999, I was disappointed when when Life is Beautiful won the Grand Prix at Cannes but then got passed over for Shakespeare in Love. I haven’t always found the Oscars so open-minded. Parasite was the first international feature film to win the Best Picture Oscar. I watched the Academy Awards a couple of weeks ago, and I was thrilled that the winner for best picture was groundbreaking. Find out more about her remarkable NASA career. Katherine Johnson, the real life human computer portrayed in the film Hidden Figures has passed on at 101.
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