My Remarkable Journey

by Katherine Johnson

  It had been decided from the start that a rocket booster would fire the ballistic capsule into space, like a bullet shot from a gun. For the initial suborbital flight, the capsule would go up into space, turn, and head right back down for a landing in the Atlantic Ocean. US Navy ships would be on standby to pull the capsule and our first space explorer out of the water and back to safety. Project Mercury’s ultimate goal, though, was to orbit the Earth, and that trajectory—a circular path around the planet—was far more complex. Ted knew more than practically anyone at Langley about how to figure out the trajectory for this. So he was tasked to write the report that would lay out the path of NASA’s first orbital flight. I wanted in on it, too.

  “Let me do it,” I suggested to Ted. “Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up.”

  He didn’t hesitate to let me run with it. We collaborated on the report, but much of the math was my work. So when Ted and Carl left our division to join John in the Space Task Group, Ted suggested to our boss, Mr. Pearson, that I should complete the report. Mr. Pearson wasn’t the most progressive fellow when it came to women in the workplace, but he agreed to let Ted move on and for me to finish what we had started. Just after Thanksgiving in 1959, I handed over the thirty-four-page report, full of all kinds of equations, a couple of launch case studies, tables with sample calculations, lots of charts, and reference texts. Entitled “Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite over a Selected Earth Position,” the research report went through the agency’s usual detailed process of review, analysis, and revisions before publication in September 1960. I was extremely proud of the work Ted and I had put into the research and even prouder that our work would be used to direct NASA’s first flights into space. So I had signed my new name—Katherine G. Johnson—to the report, just like the men. It was a rather assertive move at the time because women just didn’t do that, even though they often contributed significantly to the work. When the report was published, it was the first time a woman of any race in my division had been listed on the research paper as a coauthor.

  By the time the report was published, Jim and I were adjusting to life as newlyweds. He folded easily into my family, and the girls really liked him. He didn’t instantly try to take over and assume the role as their father. That wasn’t his way. He recognized that the girls and I had experienced the most devastating loss of our lives, and that while I had opened my heart to love again, it might take time for the girls to open their hearts completely to a new father figure. Jim was a good, patient man. The girls and I particularly enjoyed shopping for him. As a military guy, he hardly possessed any dress-up clothes aside from his formal military uniform. In a house full of women who enjoyed getting dressed up to go out, we wanted to vary his wardrobe a bit. It gave us an excuse to shop.

  In the fall of 1960, Joylette was in her junior year at Hampton, and Kathy and Connie were entering their senior year of high school at Carver. We had decided as a family that they would remain there to protect them from the chaos in schools across the state over court-mandated desegregation. Virginia governor Lindsay Almond shut down schools that were trying to comply with the US Supreme Court’s order to desegregate. Just across the water in Norfolk, about ten thousand students, more than half of whom were from military families stationed there, had nowhere to go. Schools in Front Royal and Charlottesville were closed, too. The schools in Newport News remained open because they remained segregated. Moving to the house on Mimosa Crescent had changed the school zones, putting us in the all-white Hampton High School district. But the school system was so determined to maintain the status quo that Negro families in white school zones were essentially paid three hundred dollars per child to send their children to Negro schools. The payments were disguised as “school fees,” but a similar practice of granting “scholarships” to Negro students to attend integrated white colleges and universities outside of their segregated states also enabled my sister Margaret to get a master’s degree from Columbia University and brother Charlie to earn his master’s from New York University. The states where they were living at the time—Sister in West Virginia and Charlie in North Carolina—paid their tuition at those prestigious New York universities.

  Connie and Kathy had wanted to stay at Carver anyway, and I was comfortable that they were getting a great education there from well-trained teachers, who always had their best interests at heart. Unlike when I had become the first Negro graduate student at West Virginia University decades earlier, the state of Virginia was actively resisting integration and whipping up a frenzy among residents in the process. Once I’d seen what those Negro teenagers experienced in Little Rock, I couldn’t unsee it. And I was content that my daughters were safe right where they were.

  Connie and Kathy graduated from Carver in June 1961 and for the first time went their separate ways. Kathy chose Bennett College for Women, a United Methodist women’s college for Negroes in Greensboro, North Carolina. Connie headed just a few miles away to Hampton Institute, where Joylette was entering her senior year. By then, Jim was already volunteering as alumni adviser to the army’s ROTC unit at Hampton Institute, a role he had assumed in February 1956, the month after he returned from active duty. He loved guiding young people who were planning a military career, and he jogged around campus with them once a week to stay in good physical shape. Jim spent almost as many hours on the Hampton Institute’s campus as paid faculty and staff. His presence there was a relief for me because when Joylette had first left for college a few years earlier, he was able to keep a distant eye on her. She had been first to leave the nest, and like any mother, I worried about her. Just as she had started to settle into college, Negro college students across the South were inserting themselves into the growing movement for civil rights and racial equality. I know my girls and just sensed that Joylette would want to be part of it all.

  Joylette was a sophomore on February 1, 1960, when four Negro students from North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro sat down at a “whites only” lunch counter at the downtown Woolworth store. The four guys were all college freshmen who had been inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and came up with their own plan to do something to combat segregation at the store. When a white waitress refused to serve them and asked them to leave, they politely refused and stayed seated for about an hour until the store closed. To their astonishment, they were not arrested. The next day, the four recruited more participants, and about two dozen students returned, were again refused service, and sat at the counter for about four hours. This time the protest drew major media attention. By the third day, the students had formed the Student Executive Committee for Justice and sparked a movement.

  The sit-ins began flowing like a wave to other cities in North Carolina and beyond. Students at Hampton and other Negro colleges began plotting, and Joylette mentioned to me that she wanted to participate. I discouraged her from joining the movement. That may not be popular to admit today, but at the time I was looking at that situation as a mother, concerned about my child’s safety and future. If Joylette got arrested, that would make finding employment after college, especially at NASA, very difficult. She had decided to major in math, like me, much to the disappointment of her high school music teacher, Mrs. Davis. Mrs. Davis had hoped that the many years of piano and organ lessons, competitions, and her musical gift would inspire Joylette to choose music as her major. I had not influenced her decision, but once she chose math, I couldn’t help thinking of how exciting it would be for her to join me someday at NASA. All of that hope might vanish if she could not pass the background check, and I expressed this to her. Nevertheless, just ten days after the first Greensboro sit-in, students from Hampton Institute became the first Negro college students outside North Carolina to conduct a sit-in at the local Woolworth. They endured the rudeness of the white waitress and the taunts of white customers and kept going back. Like so many of her peers whose parents had some misgivings about the sit-ins, Joylett
e joined a group of her friends and participated in one of them anyway, without telling me. Years later, she would open up about the terror she felt inside as she sat quietly sat at the counter, trying to pretend she didn’t hear the crowd of angry white hecklers calling the students derogatory names and screaming at them. But she felt gratified for being part of a movement that ultimately would desegregate lunch counters, restaurants, and department stores across the American South.

  Two years later, Kathy also joined the protests in Greensboro in her sophomore year at Bennett. She had missed the first wave of protests in Greensboro because she was still in high school, but those 1960 sit-ins had ended the summer after they began with the integration of lunch establishments inside a few downtown department stores. But by the time Kathy arrived on Bennett’s campus, students were growing frustrated again with the lack of more widespread progress. In 1962, students from North Carolina A&T and Bennett in Greensboro started a new round of protests, targeting about a dozen businesses that remained segregated. This time the protests were coordinated by a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), led by two North Carolina A&T students. Once again I tried to talk my daughter out of participating. And once again my daughter followed her own heart. She attended meetings where students were trained in civil disobedience, how to walk in picket lines with a guy between two girls, and how to continue marching and looking straight ahead, no matter what the mob of bullies that may surround them said or did. The freshmen and sophomores initially were allowed to play only supporting roles, for instance making sure the upperclassmen who were participating got their homework turned in, even if it meant typing papers for them. But Kathy said that when she finally had a chance to walk on the picket lines in front of the five-and-dime store in Greensboro, she “didn’t have sense enough to be scared.” That changed one day, though, when she and her roommate, Pat, somehow got separated among the protesters, and Pat ended up going to jail with the group of students who were arrested. Kathy later confided to me that she felt terrible about it because the girls had promised Jim and me, as well as Pat’s parents, that they would always look out for one another.

  The president of Bennett, Dr. Willa Beatrice Player, was a fascinating woman who played a critical role during the protests. She urged her “Bennett Belles” to follow their convictions if they wanted to take a stand for justice. She had become the first Negro woman named president of a four-year institution when she was inaugurated to the post in the fall of 1956. Nearly two years later, when the NAACP and a few Negro ministers invited Dr. King to speak in Greensboro just after the Montgomery bus boycott, some Negro churches and universities were reluctant to attract controversy by hosting him. But Dr. Player stepped up. “Bennett College is a liberal arts college where freedom rings, so King can speak here,” she announced. He later spoke to an overflow crowd in the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel there on February 11, 1958.

  Kathy remembers Dr. Player as a pretty, prim, and proper lady who always wore dark suits or dresses—the custom for all of the Bennett Belles at the time—and her hair pulled back into a bun. She had such a commanding presence that Kathy declares the yard parted like the Red Sea when she walked across campus from the president’s residence to the academic buildings. Greensboro police began arresting students in mass numbers between November 1962 and May 1963, and Dr. Player boldly stood up to them. On May 17 and 18 that year, about seven hundred protesters, mostly students, were arrested while picketing at several businesses that had rejected an integration proposal by the Chamber of Commerce and Merchants Association. The prisons filled quickly, and many of the protesters were bused to and held in an old polio rehabilitation center that had been condemned. Dr. Player demanded to see the students and defended their actions to faculty, staff, and students during a Friday chapel service. She explained that she had seen her girls and called their parents. She visited her jailed students daily, and while the city struggled to feed the masses of citizens arrested during the protests, Dr. Player helped arrange the distribution of mail, food, and class assignments to her Belles.

  About two days after Chapel, when the students found out that their schoolmates were being held in a moldy old building, they arranged for a bus to take them there. The bus got as close as it could, and the students walked the rest of the way. They then surrounded the old building, and a young Jesse Jackson, then president of the student body of North Carolina A&T, led them in a prayer vigil. State troopers stood guard, facing the students. Before praying, Jesse appealed to the officers, “We serve one God, will you please remove your hats.” Some of them reluctantly complied.

  The students who were jailed inside appeared at the windows and began shouting their names with the hope that their classmates would send word to their families that they were okay. Kathy was the one who called Pat’s parents, who lived in Houston, to tell them about her arrest. I’m sure that was one extremely difficult phone call. The federal government eventually stepped in, and the students were released.

  Of course, I knew none of these details at the time. Television news coverage then wasn’t nearly as widespread as it is today, so there was no way for me to know, until Kathy told me later. I suppose she didn’t want me to worry. But Kathy remembers fondly Dr. Player’s bravery and dedication to her students.

  In the middle of the student protests, NASA inched closer to human spaceflight with flight tests for Project Mercury. But one delay after another pushed the projected launch year from 1960 to 1961. Part of the challenge was that the engineers had to build a communications network that would enable the spacecraft to stay in contact with Mission Control in Florida as it orbited the globe. That meant building eighteen communications stations in different parts of the world so that the astronaut would never lose touch.

  On January 31, 1961, our space team launched into space a chimpanzee, nicknamed HAM for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, the New Mexico–based facility that prepared him for the flight. The suborbital flight (up into space and back down) was boosted by a Mercury Redstone rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Of all the previous test flights, this one was particularly crucial because the chimp’s physical structure was most similar to a human’s, and the animal had been taught to perform certain tasks in the spacecraft to test whether the weightlessness of space negatively impacted its ability to function. The flight also gave engineers a chance to work out any possible technical problems. The flight lasted sixteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds, and there were a few technical issues. The spacecraft moved faster and shot higher than expected. The capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean far off course and was filling with water by the time a rescue ship pulled the passenger to safety. HAM was still healthy and had been able to perform the basic functions he had been trained to do, which signaled that space had not disabled him. NASA sent up one more test flight without a passenger on March 24, 1961. Finally, we as an agency were ready. Before we could make our big move, though, the Soviet Union shot ahead of us again.

  On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet Air Force pilot and cosmonaut, became the first person to enter space, on a 108-minute flight that also circled the Earth. I knew it must have been crushing to our astronauts, who had been working so hard for the moment when one of them could turn the momentum in our country’s favor. My concern from the beginning of NASA was that the agency shared everything with everyone, and so the world knew what we were doing. However, as an agency we didn’t know what everyone else was doing, and once again we were blindsided. Fortunately, this time we weren’t far behind. Astronaut Alan Shepard, a US Navy test pilot and World War II veteran, was selected to become the first American in space, and on May 5, 1961, just three weeks after Gagarin’s flight, he took that journey before a live television audience. Millions of television viewers tuned in as NASA’s first-ever live launch broadcast showed the Mercury capsule boosted into space by a Redstone rocket for a suborbital flight that lasted fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. Shepard had named h
is tiny capsule (just six feet, ten inches high and six feet in diameter) Freedom 7 to honor the nation’s first seven astronauts. NASA called the mission Mercury-Redstone 3 (MR-3). The capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean about three hundred miles from its Cape Canaveral launch pad, and a rescue helicopter pulled it and Shepard from the water.

  Decades later, in a 2007 biography of his life, Shephard expressed his disappointment that the Soviets made it to space first. “We had ’em by the short hairs, and we gave it away,” he is quoted as saying.

  Though much shorter and less complicated than the Soviets’ first orbital flight, our first human spaceflight at least put us back in the race. Afterward I felt a huge sense of relief. I knew my numbers were right, but any small, technical thing could have gone wrong and caused a disaster. I had done my job well—calculating the trajectory and what is called the “launch window,” the time frame during which the launch had to occur to be successful. In case of electronic failure, I’d also plotted a backup navigation chart for the flight. We worked as a team behind the scenes, and no one’s job was more important than the other. Little did we know in those first moments after the success of MR-3 that the space program was about to get a much-needed jolt.

  The water was barely dry on the Mercury capsule when new US president John F. Kennedy made his historic speech about the space program on May 25, 1961, to a joint session of Congress.