Posted on 02/24/2020 8:45:32 AM PST by yesthatjallen
Pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, whose calculations played a major role in the development of the Space Shuttle program, died Monday at the age of 101, NASA confirmed.
Johnson was part of NASA’s “Computer Pool” team in the 1960s, which was largely composed of black women who processed data by hand. They provided the calculations for several of the first successful manned space missions, including Alan Shepard’s in 1961 and John Glenn’s in 1962, when he became the first American to orbit the earth.
Johnson also became the first woman to write a technical report in NASA’s flight research division with a 1960 paper, “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position,” co-authored with Ted Skopinski. Johnson worked with NASA for nearly three decades before her retirement in 1986.
She was later portrayed by Taraji P. Henson in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures” and accompanied Henson to the 2017 Academy Awards.
Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, by President Obama in 2015 and received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2019.
“We're saddened by the passing of celebrated #HiddenFigures mathematician Katherine Johnson. Today, we celebrate her 101 years of life and honor her legacy of excellence that broke down racial and social barriers,” NASA tweeted.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
I have some sympathy when non-political folks are deceived by mass media propaganda.
I have less sympathy when Freepers (who should know better) haven’t done their homework before stating the mass media party line.
That doesn’t seem to be the case.
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But Katherine herself said that she was only part of large teams to do hand calculations in a time of limited computer capability. And there were large teams to check the other teams. That the movie tries to portray that Katherine was a key figure in the program is extremely misleading.
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Only in Movieland is it true!
An honest women, part of the TEAM that got us in space!
I applaud her above honesty as much as I do her technical contribution!
Substitute “the movie” for “them movie”!
I really wish you could edit posts!
Brilliant women.
My family in July of 1969, when I was in the third grade, we took our first and only real family vacation. My dad woke us up in the wee hours of the morning and drove us pretty much non-stop from Camp Hill PA to Myrtle Beach SC, a full week at a nice hotel right on the beach. Our first stop was in Salisbury MD at a diner for a quick breakfast where, not knowing what it was, I ordered “grits” – not a fan BTW.
We also made a quick roadside stop somewhere in NC to eat a bologna sandwich and use a Porta Potty and saw a sign stating the rest stop was “Whites Only” but I had to ask my dad what that meant as I naively thought it might have to do with the color of your vehicle.
When we got to the hotel just a bit after noon that Friday, it was well before the 3PM check in and we were the first guests of the week to arrive, but the manager let us check in early and took us on a tour.
When the hotel manager showed us the hotel’s swimming pool there was a Black woman sitting pool side and her two children in the pool, two kids about the same age I was.
The manager started yelling and cursing at them to get out and then profusely and repeatedly apologized to my parents, saying that he sometimes let his head house keeper and her kids us the pool before, but usually long before any guests arrived and he also assured my parents that he used lots of bleach and other chemicals to keep the pool clean and hygienic and that we wouldn’t be in any danger of catching anything from “them” like lice or “anything else those folks have” and further assured my parents that “I don’t rent rooms to niggers just so you y’all know and neither does anyone around here, in fact they aren’t even allowed on the beach or in any of the restaurants ‘round here, so don’t worry.” And the woman also apologized to “Mr. Jim” and to us saying she “over stayed her time” and that it wouldn’t happen again. My parents were sadly OK with this, but I didn’t understand.
But I will never forget the look on those two kid’s faces as they were told to get out of the pool because the “white folks” were here and as they walked by me - a look of both embarrassment and of resentment.
In truth when I saw two kids around my same age in the pool, I didn’t see them as “black”, I saw them as potential playmates.
A few days before we left on our vacation, that Wednesday, Apollo 11 launched and that Sunday while in Myrtle Beach, we landed on the Moon and I remember all of us glued to the TV watching the coverage.
Ironically, Katherine Johnson, a brilliant mathematician who among her many accomplishments, helped calculate the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, wouldn’t have been allowed to stay at this Myrtle Beach hotel in 1969 nor would she or her children be allowed to be in the pool after the “white” guests arrived or on the beach or to the same restaurants or even on the beach as us white folks.
I didn't see the movie but I haven't gone out of my way to watch any contemporary Hollywood films in years. I long ago got tired of seeing politically correct themes shoehorned into most films along with 'rainbow' casting when the source material didn't have such characters (cultural appropriation of white characters is not only accepted but required by film studios).
I read an article when HF came out. It was a basic fact-check article. According to the article, during the 60's, black leaders had complained blacks weren't represented in NASA.
The writer went to JET magazine to see if any of these black women had been featured. JET made no mention of these women who would have, at the time of the civil rights movement, been held-up as black heroes in the movement.
I can't help but suspect liberties were taken with the book and the film and few people want to be the one asking questions or clear-up misconceptions.
Hollywood is modern myth-making.
Good post. Thanks for sharing that with us.
So, using our slave charts and tables, exactly how much “colored” blood does it take to be white.
And the last time I looked...all of our blood is red.
//sarcasm
The moon landing is the first thing I can really remember as a kid history wise, I was very small. I do remember in the late 60’s going to visit my grandmothers brother who lived in Huntsville Alabama. When we got there, a car load of hillbillies from Kentucky we were introduced to the fact there was some demonstration going on somewhere in the town and some violence had occurred. We were like why is this happening and some of the neighbors who had come out to introduce themselves and who were quite concerned, explained the blacks were protesting about something and fighting with the police. You could hear sirens and commotion in the distance.
In our little town in the mountains we had integrated our little league team in the early 1950’s and our high school integrated in the mid-60’s. There was racism left over but our little town had managed to avoid protests and violence altogether, we didn’t understand the violence that was happening. They probably did exist at one point and time but I never seen a sign for Colored Only in my small mountain town. My grandmothers brother had a house on a nearby lake and we ended up staying there for the trip and fishing. This was the extent of my brush with the civil rights era.
So sad! What a treasure
One of the many many lies of this movie is that the heroine “passed” as white and therefore was not discriminated against because she was black.
To the extent she was discriminated against, it was because she was a woman in a man’s world!
WTH? You evidently never watched the same movie I did.
I am talking about the real Katherine Johnson, not the fake movie character!
This movie was fiction pretending to be fact-based.
Worse, it was propaganda, and many many folks (who should have know better) fell for it.
If you have an Amazon Prime account, please watch “Outlier – The Story of Katherine Johnson”.
She wasn’t a mere number cruncher but a very brilliant mathematician who overcame great odds, as a woman, and as a black woman but her work during her some +30 year at NASA can’t be ignored or dismissed.
No, the movie is in some part fiction, but Katherine Johnson’s real story is so much more interesting and much more inspirational.
If you had the time I would be happy to give you a point by point rebuttal of that link.
Some of the points have already been made on this thread.
This is propaganda, my FRiend.
NASA was a team operation—everyone worked as part of a team. To select one individual out for special recognition is unfair to all of the others who made similar contributions.
If you are really interested in this subject you should get up to speed on how NASA calculations were done in the early days of computers.
The computers crunched numbers, and then teams of people checked the computers because in those days they didn’t trust them!
Also, look at the pictures of this lady—and pretend you just met her as a stranger. Does she look black to you?
She does not look black to me, and she did not look black to her fellow NASA employees.
If you dig further you will find quotes from her where she can’t figure out what all the fuss is about and acknowledges the importance of everyone else on her team.
She seems like a good lady, but the propaganda that has been created around her (including NASA naming a building after her) is totally and completely insane—and an insult to everyone who ever worked at NASA—political correctness at its wackiest.
I have only the film to go by. It portrayed her and others as walking an outrageous distance to get to a Colored Only restroom, through all kinds of weather. It also showed her “superiors” belittling her and browbeating her when she told them things they didn’t like. So she was a sweet lady, a team player and “knew her place”. That doesn’t excuse how she and others were treated. I am not a bleeding heart. I think the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al should have been exposed and put in their place long ago. But honest, diligent people are a whole different category.
Except almost none of that was true!
Here is one article about the historical fraud of “Hidden Figures”:
Another article documenting the fraud:
http://gulfcoastcommentary.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-movie-hidden-figures-is-fake-history.html
"Coder", when used as slang for a programmer, is one of my pet peeves. Sorry to trigger one of yours.
That’s ok.
I apologize for overreacting a bit.
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