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.
Katherine Johnson is the most recognized of all the NASA human computers, black or white. The power of her story is such that many accounts incorrectly credit her with being the first black woman to work as a mathematician at NASA, or the only black woman to have held the job. She is often mistakenly reported as having been sent to the “all-male” Flight Research Division, a group that included four other female mathematicians, one of whom was also black. One account implied that her calculations singlehandedly saved the Apollo 13 mission.
That even Katherine Johnson’s remarkable achievements can’t quite match some of the myths that have grown up around her is a sign of the strength of the vacuum caused by the long absence of African Americans from mainstream history. For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity. The power of the history of NASA’s black computers is that even the Firsts weren’t the Onlies.
No one is more in agreement with this point of view than Katherine Johnson. It was from her descriptions to me in interviews of the West Computing office that I first had an inkling of just how many black women might have worked at Langley. I first heard Dorothy Vaughan’s name from Katherine, and no one—not even the brainy fellas—merited more of Katherine’s admiration than Dot Vaughan. Of Margery Hannah, West Computing’s first supervisor, who eventually joined Katherine’s branch, she said, “She was extremely smart, and she didn’t get half the credit she deserved.” She enjoyed bragging about Christine Darden’s accomplishments more than she wanted to talk about her own work. “I never go into a school without mentioning Christine,” she told me. She is generous in her appreciation of other people’s talents in the way of someone who is in full command of her own gifts. As much as Katherine Johnson’s technical brilliance, it’s her personal story and her character that shine on us like a beacon. What could be more American than the story of a gifted little girl who counted her way from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to the stars? That along the way she equaled the prowess of an electronic computer, becoming a brainy, female John Henry, only served to burnish her myth. She is charismatic and self-possessed, cool under pressure, independent-minded, charming, and gracious. Her unencumbered embrace of equality, applying it to herself without insecurity and to others with the full expectation of reciprocity, is a reflection of the America we want to be. She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.