Katherine Johnson in 1966 (Wikimedia)
Down the road from the Green Bank Telescope is the hometown of a person who helped pave the way for space exploration. NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs in 1918. Katherine would have to leave White Sulphur Springs to attend the West Virginia Colored Institute to earn her high school diploma at only 14. She then went on to earn her bachelor’s in Math and French from West Virginia State College, a historically black college.
Katherine spent summers during high school and college working with her family at the Greenbrier Resort. Her father worked as a bellman and Katherine worked ironing gowns. This is where Katherine first began learning french.
Katherine graduated from college with highest honors in 1937. She was 18 years old. After graduating, she began working at black public school in Virginia. At this time, it was expected for women to stop working when they got married. Katherine wanted to continue working and secretly married her husband, James Goble. Katherine then started a graduate program at West Virginia University. She was one of three black students selected to enroll at the university and one of the first black students at WVU. Katherine became pregnant with her first daughter after one year and left school. Katherine had three daughters before returning to teaching.
Historical marker in White Sulphur Springs (By By J. J. Prats/Historical Marker Database)
In 1953, Katherine Johnson accepted a position as a computer at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. An executive order passed by President Roosevelt in 1941 blocked discrimination in the defense industry, however Jim Crow laws in Virginia kept workplaces segregated. Katherine began working as a computer alongside other black women and was supervised by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughn. Computers were almost always women. Katherine said that “men didn’t have the patience” for the work. Katherine was invited to work with the space task force and was the only non-white, non-male member of the team who worked to get a man to space. Her work helped astronauts safely enter and return from space. She wrote over two dozen papers while working at Langley. Without her efforts, space exploration would not look the same as it does today. In 2015, she earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She passed away in 2020, although her legacy will continue to live on.
