My Remarkable Journey

by Katherine Johnson

  My family watched Skippy grow into a fine young man who was our shining star. He graduated from Huntington High School in 1956 and attended the University of Michigan, where he majored in aeronautical engineering. After two years, he enrolled in the cadet training program at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. By age twenty-three he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant in the US Air Force, and he was the first Negro pilot at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire to fly a B-47 jet bomber. Eric Jr. quickly became a rising star there, too, and had been selected as part of a topflight crew to represent the 509th Bomb Wing in the Strategic Air Command bombing competition the following month. He was copilot of the plane, which went down shortly after taking off from the base during a training mission. My nephew was just twenty-three years old—ten days shy of turning twenty-four (though all the newspapers reported that he was twenty-four). Two others also were killed in the crash: Captain Eugene S. Procknal, the thirty-two-year-old pilot, a married father of four, whose oldest child was just four years old; and First Lieutenant Edward R. Sowinski, twenty-five, the navigator, who left behind a young wife. Those two men actually lived with their families on the air force base where they died. All three seemed so full of promise. Witnesses reported hearing the jet take off and what sounded like the engine shut off just before the fiery crash.

  The news crushed our family. But after the tears, hugs, and words of comfort to one another, we decided we should still move forward with the reception for Joylette and Lawrence. Lawrence’s parents were on their way from New York, and other out-of-town relatives were on the road as well. Our hearts were heavy, but we painted on smiles and did our best to celebrate our family’s newest couple.

  Lawrence returned to Hampton in the fall, and Joylette continued to enjoy her job in the Reentry Physics Branch, where she worked mathematical equations from the engineers on data sheets and transferred them to a large stack of data cards. The cards were then read into the computer. Joylette worked in a different building, near the wind tunnels, and we never saw one another at work. We rarely even talked about work at home. But I was proud just knowing she was there.

  The next year, in early summer 1963, Kathy returned home to Newport News to transfer to Hampton Institute. She had planned to attend Bennett for just two years, and the experience gave her an opportunity finally as the youngest child to stretch out on her own and figure out who she was without her older sisters. Connie got married to a Hampton graduate named John Boykin, and they moved to New Jersey. My girls had grown into active, independent young women, and as they moved onto their individual paths, I wondered what kind of world would emerge around them.

  The summer of 1963 was such an uncertain time as racial protests intensified in the South, forcing us as a nation to decide who we wanted to be. Were we really a nation that could look away from the protests in Birmingham as police officers released their dogs on Negro children, beat the children with billy clubs, and as firemen turned hoses on them with a force that ripped off shirts and pushed bodies down the street? Those were the disturbing images that drew me into the events in Birmingham in early May 1963. There had been earlier civil rights marches in that city in defiance of a circuit judge’s ruling that had made such protests illegal. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., fellow organizers Ralph Abernathy and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, as well as other protesters had been arrested on Good Friday, April 12, 1963. But the national media hadn’t given the protests or the arrests significant attention. Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written in response to white ministers who criticized his presence in Birmingham, explained powerfully why Negroes could no longer wait for justice. But when I clicked on my television that first week in May and saw the attacks on children, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t believe the inhumanity of it. And as a mother, I could only imagine the terror, anguish, and anger their parents must have felt. I had disagreed with my own college students’ participation in the sit-ins, so I didn’t like the idea that even younger children’s lives had been put at risk during the Birmingham protests. But I’m sure no one could have imagined the horror those young people would face at the hands of the heartless police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, who had ordered such tactics. My heart bled for those children and their parents, and I couldn’t take my eyes off my television screen. Neither could the rest of the world. And, as it turned out, that made all the difference.

  A bit of history here . . . the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, as the demonstrations would come to be called, had been organized by one of the movement’s young stars, James Bevel, to bring attention to the struggle in one of the nation’s most staunchly segregated cities. Movement organizers debated whether to use children for the protests, but when Dr. King agreed, Bevel, and other young organizers came to town and began recruiting and training the youths in nonviolent resistance. Negro deejays helped spread the word, and on May 2, 1963, the day they were calling D-Day, hundreds of students walked away from their schools and made their way over to 16th Street Baptist Church. From there, the students marched out of the church, two by two, in groups of fifty at a time, singing freedom songs and moving across the street toward Kelly Ingram Park. The police arrested them, and one group kept replacing the other until about a thousand young people had filled the Birmingham jail to capacity. When just as many students returned to protest the second day, Connor tried a stronger deterrent: the vicious dogs and fire hoses. By then, the white news crews were watching and broadcast Connor’s shameful tactics for the world to see. Public outrage beyond Birmingham grew. The international embarrassment and public pressure pushed President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy to use their influence to nudge the white establishment in Birmingham to negotiate with the protest leaders. By May 10, Dr. King and Rev. Shuttlesworth announced a major victory with an agreement by local officials to desegregate public facilities, end discriminatory hiring practices over a period of ninety days, and to continue meeting with Negro leaders. The community had hardly been able to grasp the announcement fully when the next day a bomb ripped through the Gaston Motel, the Negro-owned business where Dr. King and other out-of-town movement leaders had been staying. Fortunately, they had left just hours earlier. The home of Dr. King’s brother A. D. King was also bombed. There were no major injuries or deaths in the bombings, but the battle for freedom was heating up, and the segregationists were making it clear that they were not conceding any ground without a fight.

  It was against this solemn backdrop that the US Department of Labor published a brochure recognizing the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in May 1963. It featured a photo of a little Negro boy wearing no shoes on the cover and comments inside from President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson about the strides Negroes had made in this country since the end of slavery. A photo of me at my desk was included, along with seven other men who also worked in the space program at NASA. The title of the brochure announced: “America Is for Everybody.” My parents certainly had raised me to believe that, but hateful forces were battling for a different kind of America.

  About a month after the brochure’s hopeful declaration, avowed segregationist governor George Wallace blocked the entrance to the University of Alabama’s auditorium as two Negro students attempted to complete their registration and desegregate the campus, which had been cleared by a federal court. The Kennedy brothers again were forced to intervene, sending a hundred troops to protect the two students. The same day, President Kennedy appeared in a televised speech to talk about the action he had taken in Alabama and explain to the American people why he had proposed perhaps the most comprehensive civil rights bill ever. I’d never heard a white man talk so eloquently about race as when he gave that speech.

  The same evening in Jackson, Mississippi, Myrlie Evers and her children had watched President Kennedy’s speech and were waiting for her husband, Medgar, to return home from an NAACP meeting about a half hour after midnight when they heard g
unshots. Myrlie rushed outside and found her thirty-seven-year-old husband shot in the back and near death on their front steps. He had been shot as he walked from his car to his home, and he staggered up to the steps before collapsing. Medgar Evers, who had been organizing protests and voter registration drives as the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, died within an hour. Our people were being targeted, intimidated, and killed across the South for demanding to live as equal citizens. And no matter where the rest of us happened to live in this country, every Negro felt the pain and frustration. That is surely what drove tens of thousands of Negroes and white supporters to the nation’s capital on August 28, 1963, for what was being called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The civil rights agenda for the march had been set primarily by the leaders of six prominent civil rights organizations, the “Big Six”—Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP; Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League; Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; John Lewis, president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); and A. Philip Randolph, organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

  It would become public in the years ahead that civil rights leader Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who was on the march’s organizing committee, and Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women, had to push to get even a puny recognition for the movement’s female leaders onto the program. Just one of them—Daisy Bates, the fireball who had advised the Little Rock Nine in Arkansas—got to say a few words. And even then, she had to pledge the women’s support for the men. The names of a few other women were called: Gloria Richardson, president of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), who led protests in Massachusetts; Rosa Parks, whose civil rights activism extended far beyond the Montgomery bus boycott; Diane Nash, a key organizer of the student sit-ins in Nashville in 1960 and a critical figure in many of the major protests afterward; Myrlie Evers, the widow of Medgar Evers, who had worked by his side and picked up his crusade upon his death; and Prince Lee, whose husband was murdered in Liberty, Mississippi, for his involvement with SNCC.

  I never marched like those brave women, but my heart was always with them and the movement. I’m a proud lifetime member of the NAACP, which was at the forefront of many of these important civil rights battles. I’d like to think that I did my part from the inside. Every time I did my job to the best of my ability and succeeded, just maybe I was proving to those who would discount women and Negroes that we were just as capable as anyone else—if not more. And every time I pushed to go where no woman or Negro had gone before and won, it was a victory for us all.

  Despite the celebrities who spoke and sang at the March on Washington that day, ordinary people made the event historic. An estimated 250,000 to 300,000 of them flowed from every crevice of the country into the District of Columbia and onto the National Mall—the largest demonstration for civil rights in the country at that point. As the people stood there, Negroes and whites together under the blazing sun, no one knew whether the moment would spark more violence or change. Lord knows, there had been too much violence already: the attacks on Freedom Riders who had been beaten in South Carolina and Alabama and their bus firebombed in May 1961 as they traveled south to force the desegregation of interstate travel; the bloody riots that broke out when James Meredith, a Negro US Air Force veteran, tried to exercise his right to register at the segregated, all-white University of Mississippi a year later; Bull Connor’s wickedness; Medgar Evers’s murder; and all the hate-inspired violence that never made it onto the media. Yet the people would not be stilled by fear. They marched on Washington and filled every space between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial with their hopes. Dr. King grabbed hold of that hope and electrified the crowd—those under the sound of his voice and those of us who watched later on television—with his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech. His dream and ours would require America to change. As it turned out, change was coming, but so, too, was more violence.

  On September 15, less than a month after that historic march, the 16th Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, the meeting place for many of the protests, was bombed. And four precious girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—were killed in the blast. I could not fathom the depth of hatred that would set in motion such an evil scheme. And I was haunted by the smiling faces of those pretty little girls. I thought hatred couldn’t get any worse than that. Then, on Friday, November 22, I got a call at work that I will never forget. It was Joylette, sobbing.

  “President Kennedy has been shot,” she said between her cries. He was dead.

  Joylette was home from work that day with her new baby girl, Laurie, my first grandchild. The news seemed to suck the air from the room and drain the blood from my face as I sat there, speechless. Someone had murdered the President of the United States? In my heart I knew why. The Kennedy brothers had been allies in our people’s fight for freedom. About 70 percent of Negroes had voted for President Kennedy in his 1960 presidential election, including Jim and me. I remembered the time when many of the Negroes I had known in West Virginia were Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln. But President Kennedy and his brother had intervened to protect civil rights leaders and protesters in some of the hardest-fought battles, and in the process they won Negro hearts. Now President Kennedy was gone. For a long while, the world just didn’t feel safe.

  The following January, my hope that Joylette would enjoy a long career at NASA burst when a frustrating job search for her husband pushed the two of them to relocate to New Jersey. Lawrence had graduated with a degree in accounting in June 1963, but after months of searching for a job in the Hampton Roads area, he got no offers. He sought assistance from the state employment agency but was told there were no jobs for Negro accountants. Lawrence decided to return to his native New York City, where there were more opportunities for Negro professionals. Even there, he had some disappointing racial encounters, like never hearing back from a company after scoring high on a required test. Lawrence ultimately landed an accounting position at a company in New Jersey through a listing in the Amsterdam News, a Negro newspaper based in Harlem. The bubble around me at Langley may have been just a bit more progressive, but Virginia was still the South, and it was upsetting that my college-educated son-in-law had to move north with my daughter and granddaughter in January 1964 to pursue the career of his dreams.

  The following summer, the civil rights struggle seemed to reach a crescendo in the Deep South as Negro leaders pushed forward with massive registration drives, only to experience more violence. Young adults from all over the country were recruited to travel to Mississippi to participate in a major campaign, called the Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, to increase voter registration among Negroes and provide literacy and other training in “freedom schools.” About seven hundred volunteers joined the Mississippi crusade, and there was trouble right away. When I heard on the news in June that three of the young volunteers were missing, I suspected the worst. Never had I been sadder to be right than when I heard the report two months later that investigators had found the dead bodies of twenty-one-year-old John Chaney, a Negro from Meridian, Mississippi; twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman and twenty-four-year-old Michael Schwerner, both of Jewish heritage from New York City. Goodman and Schwerner had been shot once in the heart, and Chaney had been beaten brutally before he, too, was fatally shot. They were buried together in an earthen dam just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, on a farm owned by one of the white supremacists involved in the murder. President Lyndon B. Johnson, the former vice president who had assumed the presidency after President Kennedy’s assassination, had dispatched the FBI to help find the missing volunteers and even the US Navy to dredge local swamps and waterways. While doing so, the investigators found the bodies of eight other Negroes, including two college students and a fourteen-year
-old boy, who all had disappeared mysteriously, as well as five others who were never identified. At the time, few people outside of Mississippi even heard about those happenchance discoveries because the national media barely even noted them. Why? Because they were not the two white civil rights volunteers. They were not the ones who really mattered then to an outraged public. That, too, was tragic. I lived far away from Mississippi, but the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner sent a chill up my spine. These young men were about the ages of my girls and probably had been full of the same idealism and hope. Their horrific end was the nightmare of every conflicted parent whose child had even thought about fighting for needed change in the trenches.

  The three freedom workers had yet to be found when President Johnson pushed forward with the civil rights legislation that had been proposed by his predecessor. The news reports and even a meeting with the parents of Goodman and Schwerner likely helped build support for the measure. Southern Democrats tried unsuccessfully to stop it with an historic filibuster, but Congress approved the groundbreaking legislation. Called the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it aimed to protect Negroes against the voter qualification tests that had routinely disqualified so many of us from voting; it outlawed discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and other public businesses involved in interstate commerce; it authorized the US attorney general to file lawsuits to force the desegregation of public schools; it authorized the withdrawal of federal funds from programs that practice discrimination; it banned discrimination in employment in businesses with more than twenty-five people; and it created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to review discrimination complaints. President Johnson signed the measure into law on July 2, 1964. I was hopeful that after so much turmoil the country would settle into a more peaceful and just place.