You probably won’t recognise the names Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan. I, like too many of us, couldn’t have told you who these incredible women were before hearing about the film Hidden Figures. Why? Because sadly these three black women who played integral roles in NASA’s early successes were pretty much left out of the history books.
In an interview with Deadline, Taraji P. Henson who plays Katherine Johnson in the film, admitted that she didn’t know these women’s story before she got the script, despite going to a ‘historically black university’ where Ron McNair (a NASA astronaut who died in a Space Shuttle launch) also attended.
She said: ‘I actually studied electrical engineering. I failed, but I was there. And this man has a building named after him. If it wasn’t for Katherine Johnson, there would have been no Ron. But hey who am I? Never heard of her. I was annoyed. I was mad. And this became my passion project. I was like, “I have to do this movie”’.
And thank god they did. Hidden Figures has reaped success after success this awards season. It’s nominated for Best Screenplay at the BAFTA’s, it passed hotly tipped favourite ‘La La Land’ to be 2017’s highest grossing Oscar nominee and the cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
In her brilliant SAG Award acceptance speech, Henson said: ‘The shoulders of the women that we stand on are three American heroes: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. Without them, we would not know how to reach for the stars’.
So, let’s get to know these women.
Katharine, Mary and Dorothy are three African-American mathematicians known as ‘computers in skirts’ who worked at NASA in the 1950s,specifically in the segregated West Area Computer division of Langley Research Centre. They were each wildly intelligent women who helped put John Glenn into orbit (he was the first American to do so). And if you’re wondering why this specific occasion is so important, this went down when the Space Race – the post World War II competition between the U.S and the Soviet Union to get man on the moon first – was really heating up. And they did that while tackling the racial and gender discrimination of mid-20th century America. Did we already say they were incredible? They’re incredible.
Who is the real Katherine Johnson?
Katherine, born in West Virginia in 1918, started working at NASA back in the 1950s. Her brilliant mind was used to check complicated calculations made by a computer before they launched the Friendship 7 (the spacecraft used to orbit Glenn around earth) in 1962. Yes, a mind so fantastic that it was enlisted to check the workings of a computer. As personally requested by Glenn, might we add.
She raced through school and was ready to head off to high school at just ten years old, then went on to graduate from West Virginia State College when she was 18. Fast forward a few years after spending time as a teacher and then as a stay-at-home mother, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (basically, NASA before actual NASA existed) had started hiring African-American women after an executive order that barred racial discrimination in the defence industry during WWII.
When the war ended though, they kept women on and eventually Katherine went on to work for NASA in the Langley Research Centre. She was a big deal. As well as the John Glenn orbit Katherine worked on the Redstone, Mercury and Apollo space programmes and prior to that, calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
She worked at NASA until 1986 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama back in 2015. A NASA computational research facility in her hometown was also named in her honour. Katherine is currently 98 years old.
Who is the real Mary Jackson?
Mary was NASA’s first black female engineer, which is obviously a huge deal. She was born in Virginia in 1921 and also went to Langley after spending some time working as a teacher, a bookeeper and an army secretary, according to NASA.
She fought hard to be able to study alongside her white peers and join a training program that allowed her to progress from mathematician to engineer, which she did in 1958 after studying at the University of Virginia alongside her work.
Later, Mary took a job in NASA’s Equal Opportunity office, working to effect change for female employees until she retired in 1985. Mary died in 2005.
Who is the real Dorothy Vaughan?
Dorothy was became NASA’s first African American manager which, again, huge deal. She was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1910 and graduated from Wilberforce University at the age of 16. Dorothy also spent time as a teacher but according to NASA, but left that job during World War II to work at Langley.
Like the other women, she stayed on after the war and was asked to head the segregated West Computing Unit after the passing of Jim Crow laws which, if your GCSE history is a little fuzzy, meant that African-Americans had to be separated from white-Americans. She stayed at the helm between 1949 and 1958 when she then was part of an integrated division and became an expert programmer. Dorothy died in 2008.
It feels a little bittersweet to be one of the many only learning about these women's lives now, but it's also fantastic to see how their story is been so well recieved through a Hollywood film that puts them fully in the spotlight. Octavia Spencer who plays Dorothy Vaughan told Deadline: ‘I thought it was fiction. But its an embarrassment that these women were omitted from the annals for history. I’m excited because the world will finally know these names. They will no longer be obscure.’
The film is based on the book _Hidden Figures: the American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians who helped win the Space Rac_e by Margot Lee Shetterly and is in cinemas from Friday 11 February 2017
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.