Black History Month 2020: Katherine Johnson
This year for #BlackHistoryMonth I’m going to celebrate a different person each day. Sometimes they will be people that most of us have heard of, sometimes they may be people very few of us have heard of. Each have created or achieved something that taught me, moved me, changed me, filled me.
Who else can we honor today but NASA physicist and mathematician Katherine Johnson? She died today at the age of 104, having lived a truly remarkable life.
Embarrassingly, many of us only know Ms. Johnson’s name because of the 2016 movie Hidden Figures, and many of us might have been picturing Taraji P. Henson when we heard about Johnson’s death today. (Not me, to be clear, but wouldn’t be surprised if it were many.)
The term Hidden Figures is now part of our lexicon, to denote any group of un- or under-sung people who were the real actors behind famous accomplishments. Most hidden figures are bound to be women, especially women of color.
Johnson didn’t just work on the very first missions into space (which would be sufficient for accolades, don’t get me wrong), she was at NASA for decades, continuing to contribute.
It’s a rare hidden figure who gets their moment in the spotlight while still living. All too often we learn more about hidden figures once they are gone and no longer…
