Jim Crow was walking around and women teachers were often fired if they got married because the Board decided for them that home life was more important than their career. Katherine Johnson was making these moves in the days when Black folk and women had more hurdles than they do today. Oppression is a bitch, but it ain’t a brick wall. She ended up giving Katherine an opportunity to work in the most important department in NASA, the one that did the calculations to get the country’s first successful space mission.Ĥ. Got to NASA and one of her old college friends worked there. She joined a church where she met a local AKA sorority chapter, and those women turned her on to the NASA job. She and her family moved to Newport News after her brother-in-law suggested that he could get them good jobs. It was called Analytic Geometry of Space, and she had NO CLUE what it had to do with her life, but it made a difference. One of her professors created a class just for her and TOLD her that she would take it. Her father could do big math problems in his head, and she took after him. Know that everything been been lining up for you. So she turned down the opportunity (and let down her mentors), but becoming a research mathematician was meant to be a part of a story and so it was.ģ. Before even talking to her husband about it, she said yes. I think it was two of her former professors who approached her one day with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to earn a PhD in mathematics. It wasn’t and she got in.Ģ. Trust that what’s for you can’t not be for you. When her all-white-men NASA co-workers said she couldn’t join a particular meeting because girls weren’t allowed, she asked if it was against the law. Even outside of school, she asked the hard questions. She even recalled times she’d ask questions in class for her friends because, although she understood, she knew they didn’t. She recalled asking a million questions as a kid and kept it up as an adult. 5 aha moments I nodded to while reading the memoir of Katherine Johnson: The book, by the way, is called: My Remarkable Journey. I bought her memoir to get to know more about Katherine Johnson-including and beyond her work at NASA. She also shared that the movie, as all movies based on real life do, embellished her life a little and left out a lot. As she said in her memoir, less than 1% of the human population lives to see an entire century. Born in 1918, she passed away on Februat 101 years old. But because she was Black and a woman, her achievements weren’t broadcasted until she was in her 90s. Her calculations helped sent astronauts into outer space. The movie Hidden Figures made Katherine Johnson famous.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |