The Legacy of a Hidden Figure
The stories of black women at NASA were once buried so deep that it felt like a revelation when they were brought to light.
In 1958, not long after the pivotal launch of Sputnik, American engineers were preoccupied with spaceflight. Every day, engineers at the Langley laboratory at Virginia contemplated orbital mechanics, rocket propulsion, and the complicated art of leaving Earth—they needed to catch up with the Soviet Union. Katherine Johnson’s job was to prepare the equations and charts for this work. But she wasn’t allowed inside the room where any of it was discussed.
“Why can’t I go to the editorial meetings?” Johnson asked the engineers, as Margot Lee Shetterly wrote in the book Hidden Figures.
“Girls don’t go to the meetings,” her male colleagues told her.
“Is there a law against it?” she replied. There had been, in other
