In the days leading up to the launch, two hundred protesters, led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, made their way to Cape Kennedy. Abernathy was Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest collaborator and had inherited the mantle of his Poor People’s Campaign, the second phase of the civil rights movement. Abernathy and his fellow activists came to the launch site riding a mule train, challenging NASA’s administrator, Tom Paine, on the worthiness of the space program when the poor and dispossessed in Watts and Detroit and rural Appalachia could barely put food on the table—assuming they had a house to put the table in. The Housing Rights Act of 1968, making it illegal to discriminate in the housing industry based on race, had lingered in Congress for years, vehemently opposed by legislators both in the North and the South. The bill only made it over the finish line in the wake of the 1968 assassination of Dr. King.
Katherine Johnson certainly knew all about the housing issue. Discrimination in housing remained the standard, but postwar economic mobility had given families like hers and Dorothy Vaughan’s the means to move out of once-vibrant developments like Newsome Park and into comfortable, leafy, all-black subdivisions. The exit of professional families ruptured the connection that the less fortunate had to the world of college and middle-class jobs. Newsome Park and the hundreds of neighborhoods like it around the country became increasingly volatile, desperate islands where housing, schooling, and every other state-supplied service were left to deteriorate.
The decision to prioritize a victory in space over problems on Earth was the most widespread criticism against the space program. But even those voices in the black community who expressed admiration for the astronauts, who supported the program and its mission, took NASA to the woodshed for its lack of black faces. No black television commentators, no black administrators, no black faces in Mission Control, and most of all, no black astronauts. Blacks were still smarting over the perceived mistreatment of Ed Dwight, an astronaut trainee who was given his walking papers before he could even report for duty.
Though groups like ACD and Reentry Physics still employed several of the former West Computers, Katherine and others found themselves the only black employees in their branch. They were maybe less visible at work now that segregation had been ended. But they were perhaps more invisible professionally in the black community. The white NASA folks tended to live in enclaves, carpooling together and barbecuing together and sending their kids to school together. They talked about work and imported the hierarchies and nuances of their work lives into their neighborhoods.
The black NASA people spread out among other black professionals, where they were better known as the sorority sister or the member of the church choir or the diehard Hampton Institute alum who never missed a football game. Their neighbors might know they worked at NASA but have no concept of exactly what they did, or how close they were to the headline-grabbing events of the day. Because of the overwhelmingly white public face of the space program, the black engineers, scientists, and mathematicians who were deeply involved with the space race nevertheless lived in its shadows, even within the black community.
Katherine was sensitive to the disconnect. She, like Mary Jackson and many of Langley’s other black employees, had worked hard for years to cultivate interest in math and science and space through the networks of their sororities and alumni associations and churches, with mixed results. In 1966, however, something had happened that looked like it might give them a tailwind.
Star Trek landed in American homes on September 8, 1966, an NBC network prime-time program. While NASA and the Project Gemini astronauts worked their way through twelve missions in the 1960s, in the fictional 2260s, the starship Enterprise set off from Earth on a peacekeeping and deep-space exploration mission, manned by a multinational, multiracial, mixed-gender crew. The corps, led by the suave, unflappable Captain James T. Kirk, included natives of an advanced United Earth, its history of poverty and war now in the past. Enemies in a former Earth Age labored side by side as colleagues and fellow citizens. Chekov, the Russian ensign; Sulu, the Japanese American helmsman; and the half-human, half-Vulcan first officer, Mr. Spock, added an interstellar touch of diversity. And there, on the bridge, a vision in a red minidress opened viewers’ minds to what a truly democratic future might look like. Lieutenant Uhura, a black woman and proud citizen of the United States of Africa, served as the Enterprise’s communications officer.
Lieutenant Uhura, portrayed by the actress Nichelle Nichols, executed her duties with aplomb, managing the ship’s communications with other ships and planets. When the first season ended in 1967, Nichols tendered her resignation to the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, so that she could spend more time tending to her Broadway career. The producer, who wanted to keep Nichols in the cast, refused her resignation, asking her to take the weekend to mull it over.
That weekend Nichols attended a celebrity NAACP civil rights fund-raiser in Los Angeles. One of the event’s coordinators let her know that “her greatest fan,” a fellow attendee, wanted to meet her. Expecting some eager, socially awkward adolescent, Nichols instead found herself face-to-face with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: King was a Trekkie! It was the only show that he and his wife, Coretta, allowed their children to watch, and he never missed an episode. Nichols thanked him for his effusive praise before mentioning almost casually that she had decided to leave the show. The words had barely escaped her lips before the Reverend interrupted her cold.
“You can’t leave the show,” King said to Nichols. “We are there because you are there.” Black people have been imagined in the future, he continued, emphasizing to the actress how important and groundbreaking a fact that was. Furthermore, he told her, he had studied the Starfleet’s command structure and believed that it mirrored that of the US Air Force, making Uhura—a black woman!—fourth in command of the ship.
“This is not a black role, this is not a female role,” he said to her. “This is a unique role that brings to life what we are marching for: equality.” The rest of Nichols’ weekend was a fog of anger and sadness: what right did Dr. King have to upend her career plans? Eventually, she moved from resignation to conviction. Nichols returned to Gene Roddenberry’s office on Monday morning and asked him to tear up the resignation letter.
How could Katherine not be a fan? Everything about space had fascinated her from the very beginning, and there, on television, was a black woman in space, doing her job and doing it well. A black person and a woman both, but also just Lieutenant Uhura, the most qualified person for the job. Katherine, in fact, thought science—and space—was the ideal place for talented people of any background. The results were what mattered, she told classrooms of students. Math was either right or wrong, and if you got it right, it didn’t matter what color you were.
Star Trek was set in 2266, but it wasn’t necessary to wait three centuries to see what America’s finest minds could do, given free rein. The Apollo mission was happening now. In the Hillside Inn, among the group of her sorority sisters. Katherine gave in to the wonder of the moment, imagining herself in the astronauts’ place. What emotions welled up from the depths of their hearts as they regarded their watery blue home from the void of space? How did it feel to be separated by a nearly unimaginable gulf from the rest of humanity yet carry the hopes, dreams, and fears of their entire species there with them in their tiny, vulnerable craft? Most people she knew wouldn’t have traded places with the astronauts for all the gold in Fort Knox. All alone out there in the void of space, connected so tenuously to Earth, with the real possibility that something could go wrong. Given the chance to throw her lot in with the astronauts, Katherine Johnson would have packed her bags immediately. Even without the pressure of the space race, even without the mandate to beat the enemy. For Katherine Johnson, curiosity always bested fear.
The Eagle, the lunar lander, issued forth from the Apollo command module at 4:00 p.m. The touchdown caused a collective shiver. The crew was close, so close. The world waited for the door of t
he crab-like mechanical contraption to open. It took four hours. Then, finally, at 10:38 p.m.: sighs, applause, exuberance, dumbstruck silence, from all corners of the Earth, as Neil Armstrong planted his foot on luna firma. The actual landing had been the one part of the mission that had been impossible to rehearse prior to the actual moment—and the most dangerous. The Apollo 11 astronauts had given the mission only a middling chance of success: though Neil Armstrong handicapped the odds of returning to Earth safely at 90 percent, he thought they had only a 50-50 chance of landing on the Moon on the first go. Katherine Johnson had confidence: she knew her numbers were right, and she assumed that everyone else—Marge Hannah and the fellas there in her office, Mary Jackson and Thomas Byrdsong and Jim Williams, everyone from the top of NASA to the bottom—had given their all to the mission.
Besides, Katherine always expected the best, even in the most difficult of situations. “You have to expect progress to be made,” she told herself and anyone else who might ask. It had taken more than a decade of data sheets and plotting, IBM punch cards and long days and nights in front of the Friden calculator, delays and tragedies and most of all numbers; at this point, there were more numbers than even she could count. All on top of the long and monotonous years spent learning the basics of the machine that had given birth to the space program.
The trajectories of so many people had influenced hers along the way: Dorothy Vaughan and the women of West Computing. Virginia Tucker and all the women who had helped revolutionize aeronautics, with their work and their dogged presence at the NACA. Dr. Claytor and his enthusiastic preparation. John W. Davis from West Virginia State. Even A. Philip Randolph and Charles Hamilton Houston. Of course, it couldn’t have happened without her parents. What she wouldn’t have given for her father to see her—to see his baby girl who used to count the stars now sending men to travel among them. Joshua Coleman knew as if from second sight that Katherine, his brilliant, charismatic, inquisitive youngest child—a black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school—would somehow, someday, unite her story with the great epic of America.
And epic it was. Katherine allowed the moment, with all its implications, to sink in. There were still challenges ahead. She watched the men in the dust of the Moon and thought of the orbiting command service module, out of view of the camera, circling the Moon every ninety minutes. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon would have a brief window to get back into the lunar lander and reconnect their dinghy with the mother ship above. After that, it would be three long days on the highway back to Earth, then through the fire of the atmosphere and into the terrestrial ocean below. Each leg carried the specter of the unknown; only after their landing matched the numbers of her equations, when they had been plucked from the ocean and cosseted in the waiting navy ship, would she be able to exhale.
But even then—only for a moment. Apollo still had six missions to go. And there was nothing like the thrill of the next thing. Katherine and Al Hamer had already started thinking about what it would take to plot a course to Mars; their colleagues Marge Hannah and John Young would look even farther into the cosmos, dreaming up a “grand tour” of the outer planets. It was built on the same idea as the rendezvous in the orbits of Earth and the Moon, where a spaceship doing a flyby of one planet used the planet’s gravity to slingshot it on ahead to the next. The nimble minds in 1244 were already hopping from Mars to Jupiter and on to Saturn, like stones skipped in a glassy lake. One day, perhaps, the rest of humanity would follow them. Then, Katherine Johnson would really discover what was out there. It would be simple, she thought, just like sending a man into orbit around Earth, just like putting a man on the Moon. One thing built on the next. Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.
EPILOGUE
It’s the question that comes up most often when I tell people about the black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA: Why haven’t I heard this story before? At this point, more than five years after I first began the research for what would become Hidden Figures, I’ve fielded the question more times than I can count. Most people are astonished that a history with such breadth and depth, involving so many women and linked directly to the twentieth century’s defining moments, has flown below the radar for so long. There’s something about this story that seems to resonate with people of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, and backgrounds. It’s a story of hope, that even among some of our country’s harshest realities—legalized segregation, racial discrimination—there is evidence of the triumph of meritocracy, that each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us.
The greatest encouragement along the way has come from black women. All too often their portrayals—our portrayals—in history are burdened with the negative imagery and vulnerability that come from being both black and female. More disheartening is how frequently we look into the national mirror to see no reflection at all, no discernible fingerprint on what is considered history with a capital H. For me, and I believe for many others, the story of the West Computers is so electrifying because it provides evidence of something that we’ve believed to be true, that we want with our entire beings to be true, but that we don’t always know how to prove: that many numbers of black women have participated as protagonists in the epic of America.
Katherine Johnson’s passion for her work was as strong during the remainder of her thirty-three-year career at Langley as it was the first day she was drafted into the Flight Research Division. “I loved every single day of it,” she says. “There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work.” She considers her work on the lunar rendezvous, prescribing the precise time at which the lunar lander needed to leave the Moon’s surface in order to coincide and dock with the orbiting command service module, to be her greatest contribution to the space program. But another set of her calculations stood at the ready during the 1971 Apollo 13 crisis, when the electrical system of the spacecraft carrying astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise was crippled by an onboard explosion, making it impossible to run the guidance computer as programmed.
An astronaut stranded hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth is like a mariner from a previous age, adrift in the most remote part of the ocean. So what do you do when the computers go out? This was precisely the question Katherine and her colleague Al Hamer had asked in the late 1960s, during the most intense preparations for the first Moon landing. And in 1967, Johnson and Hamer coauthored the first of a series of reports describing a method for using visible stars to navigate a course without a guidance computer and ensure the space vehicle’s safe return to Earth. This was the method that was available to the stranded astronauts aboard Apollo 13.
Before the crisis was over, however, even Katherine and Al’s backup calculations would require a backup: from inside the spaceship, the glinting debris field from the damaged capsule was indistinguishable from the actual stars, making the method specified in Katherine’s report impossible to use. Astronaut Jim Lovell used an even simpler calculation to tack his spaceship toward home, lining up the ship’s optical sight with Earth’s terminator, the line dividing the side of Earth that was in daylight from the shadow side, in nighttime. It was serendipitous that Lovell had taken the technique for a test run on Apollo 8 and knew how to make the calculations. What seemed like a routine check on a previous mission would save the crew’s lives this time around. No one knew better than Katherine Johnson that luck favored the prepared.
Katherine Johnson worked with Al Hamer and John Young for the rest of her years at Langley, developing aspects of the space shuttle and the Earth resources satellite programs. But it is Katherine’s connections to the most glorious and glamorous days of the space program that brought her to the public’s attention. Every year since 1962, when John Glenn took to orbit, acclaim for Katherine Johnson’s achievement grew. The black press—the
Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Amsterdam News, Jet Magazine—embraced her even before John Glenn left Earth. Of NASA, Amsterdam News editor James Hicks wrote: “They are loud in their praise of a young West Virginia–born Negro girl who has prepared a science paper that was not only a key document in the flight of Commander Shepard into outer space but which will actually become ‘THE’ key document if and when we are able to put an astronaut into orbit.” Over time, articles began to appear in the peninsula’s Daily Press and in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Katherine’s name became a necessary entry in any book detailing the accomplishments of black or female (or black female) scientists and engineers. Since the 1960s, she has been invited into classrooms to inspire students with the stories of how mathematics has defined her life. In recent years she has become too fragile to make the trips to visit students; on August 26, 2016, she will be ninety-eight years old. Now the students come to her, making pilgrimages to see her in the retirement residence where she lives. Her contributions to the space program’s signature epoch earned her NASA Group Achievement Awards for Project Apollo and the Lunar Orbiter Project. She has received three honorary doctorates and a citation from the state of Virginia. And a charter high school in North Carolina has launched a STEM institute bearing her name. In 2015, President Obama awarded Katherine Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor that astronaut John Glenn received in 2012.
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