Johnson is survived by two of her three daughters, six grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, said Reavis, the family attorney. In 1953, she started working at the all-black West Area Computing unit at what was then called Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton. She left after the first session to start a family with her first husband, James Goble, and returned to teaching when her three daughters grew older. Johnson taught at black public schools before becoming one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools in 1939. Va., for high school and college on the campus of the historically black West Virginia State College. The small town had no schools for black children beyond the eighth grade, she told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1997.Įach September, her father drove Johnson and her siblings to Institute, W. Johnson was born Katherine Coleman on Aug. Jackson and Vaughan had died in 20, respectively. In 2017, Johnson was brought on stage at the Academy Awards ceremony to thunderous applause. The film was nominated for a best picture Oscar and grossed more than $200 million worldwide. Johnson was portrayed in the film by actress Taraji P. The “Hidden Figures” book and film followed, telling the stories of Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, among others. But in 2015, President Obama awarded Johnson - then 97 - the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Johnson and her co-workers had been relatively unsung heroes of America’s space race. She also worked on the Space Shuttle program before retiring in 1986. Her calculations helped the lunar lander rendezvous with the orbiting command service module. Johnson considered her work on the Apollo moon missions to be her greatest contribution to space exploration. “She gave us a new way to look at black history, women’s history and American history.” “The wonderful gift that Katherine Johnson gave us is that her story shined a light on the stories of so many other people,” Shetterly said Monday. Shetterly told the AP that Johnson was “exceptional in every way.” “It took a day and a half of watching the tiny digits pile up: eye-numbing, disorienting work,” Shetterly wrote. “Katherine organized herself immediately at her desk, growing phone-book-thick stacks of data sheets a number at a time, blocking out everything except the labyrinth of trajectory equations,” Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in her 2016 book “Hidden Figures,” on which the film is based. “Get the girl to check the numbers,” a computer-skeptical Glenn had insisted in the days before the launch. The next year, she manually verified the calculations of a nascent NASA computer, an IBM 7090, which plotted John Glenn’s orbits around the planet. In 1961, Johnson did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 Mission, the first to carry an American into space.
IMAGES OF KATHERINE JOHNSON NASA HOW TO
“You tell me when and where you want it to come down, and I will tell you where and when and how to launch it.” “Our office computed all the trajectories,” Johnson told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2012.
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