From the movie, Hidden Figures, one character stood out to me the most. Her name was Katherine Johnson. This movie is based off of a true story which made the entire movie even more interesting. Katherine Johnson is a passionate, outspoken Black mathematician who works in the Flight Research Division at the Langley Research Center. She had joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) as a “computer” under her friend, Dorothy Vaughan. Upon joining the segregated NACA workforce in 1953, she refuses to use the colored bathrooms or to allow prejudice to make her feel small. Though she comes up against racism more than once at the NACA, she maintains her bright personality and manages to charm everyone she comes into contact with; without losing sight of her dedication to her work and her community. One of my personal favorite scenes in the movie was when the astronaut, John Glen, asked Katherine to double check the numbers for his flight trajectory and landing. This was a key moment in the film because John didn’t trust the calculations performed by NASA’s new IBM computers, but trusted Katherine enough to provide the correct numbers; and she turned out to be successful. She distinguishes herself first as a computer for the Flight Research Team and later as an aerospace technologist. She became the first Black woman to publish a research paper on space flight. Katherine was also a part of the Space Task Group and is key to the success of Project Apollo’s first lunar landing in 1969.

Picture: The woman on the left is the real Katherine Gobble Johnson and the woman on the right is Taraji P. Henson who played Katherine in the movie Hidden Figures.