'You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job.and play bridge at lunch. 'I didn't feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research,' says the real Katherine G. Al Jazeeraĭid Katherine Johnson feel the segregation of the outside world while working at NASA? On their table in the cafeteria was a sign that said 'colored computers,' which sort of sounds like an iMac or something, right, today? But this referred to the black women who were doing this mathematical work.' They were essentially human computers. 'Even though they were just starting these brand new, very interesting jobs as professional mathematicians, they nonetheless had to abide by the state law, which was that there were segregated work rooms for them, there were segregated bathrooms, and there were segregated cafeterias. 'At the time the black women came to work at Langley, this was a time of segregation,' says Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly. Katherine proved to be so smart that she skipped several grades, graduating high school at age 14 and from West Virginia State College at 18. He did this for eight years, so that each of his four children could go to high school and college. He rented a house for the family to stay during the school year and journeyed back and forth to White Sulphur Springs for his job at a hotel. Katherine's father, Joshua, was determined to see his children reach their potential, so he drove the family 120 miles to Institute, West Virginia, where blacks could pursue an education past the eighth grade, through high school, and into college. In her hometown of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, school for African-Americans normally stopped at the eighth grade for those who could afford to attend. She was fascinated with numbers and became a high school freshman by age 10. Johnson's impressive intellect was evident from the time she was a child. NASA Katherine Johnson Documentaryĭid Katherine's father really move the family 120 miles each school year so that she and her siblings could continue their education? For her accomplishments, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 24, 2015. She calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard's groundbreaking 1961 spaceflight (America's first human in space), she verified the calculations for John Glenn's first American orbit of Earth, she computed the trajectory of Apollo 11's flight to the moon, and she worked on the plan that saved Apollo 13's crew and brought them safely back to Earth. Over the course of her three decades at NASA, Katherine Johnson's biography includes an impressive list of accomplishments.

Hidden figures