Women's History Month: Katherine Johnson

If you've watched Hidden Figures, it depicts a scene where Katherine Johnson (Goble at the time) comes into her new office and is handed a trashcan from a white engineer with the order to empty it the next time. The following excerpt from the book describes the incident very differently with much less drama than the big screen, but it gives insight into Katherine's character.

The room hummed with pre-lunch activity as Katherine surveyed it for a place to wait for her new bosses. She made a beeline for an empty cube, siting down next to an engineer, resting her belongings on the desk and offering the man her winning smile. As she sat, and before she could issue a greeting in her gentle southern cadence, the man gave her a sideways glance, got up, and walked away.

Katherine watched the engineer disappear. Had she broken some unspoken rule? Could her mere presence have driven him away? It was a private and unobtrusive moment, one that failed to dent the rhythm of the office. But Katherine's interpretation of that moment would both depend on the events in her past and herald her future.

Bemused, Katherine considered the engineer's sudden departure. The moment that passed between them could have been because she was black and he was white. But then again, it could have been because she was a woman and he was a man. Or maybe the moment was an interaction between a professional and a subprofessional, an engineer and a girl...

The vicious and easily identifiable demons that had haunted black Americans for three centuries were shape-shifting as segregation began to yield under pressure from social and legal forces. Sometimes the demons still presented themselves in the form of racism and blatant discrimination. Sometimes they took on the softer cast of ignorance or thoughtless prejudice. But these days, there was also a new culprit: the insecurity that plagued black people as they code-shifted through the unfamiliar language and customs of an integrated life...

[T]he insecurities, those most insidious and stubborn of all the demons, were hers alone. They operated in the shadows of fear and suspicion, and they served at her command. They would entice her to see the engineer as an arrogant chauvinist and a racist if she let them. They could taunt her into a self-doubting spiral, causing her to withdraw from the opportunity that Dr. Claytor had so meticulously prepared her for.

But Katherine Goble had been raised not just to command equal treatment for herself but also to extend it to others. She had a choice: either she could decide it was her presence that provoked the engineer to leave, or she could assume that the fellow had simply finished his work and moved on. Katherine was her father's daughter, after all. She exiled the demons to a place where they could do no harm, then she opened her brown bag and enjoyed lunch at her new desk, her mind focusing on the good fortune that had befallen her.

Within two weeks, the original intent of the engineer who walked away from her, whatever it might have been, was moot. The man discovered that his new office mate was a fellow transplant from West Virginia, and the two became fast friends.

Katherine chose, in my words, to love her neighbor when she could have thought the worst. She saw her coworker as another human being instead of the "other." This dignity of character won the respect of her colleagues. She didn't need a white savior to knock down the segregated bathroom sign or invite her into closed-door meetings. She just ignored the bathroom segregation. Her intelligence, vital contributions to the team effort, thirst for learning, and persistence opened the door to the editorial meetings and to being the first woman to author a research report from the Flight Research Division. This is why Katherine Johnson is one of my heroes.

Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly, William Collins, 2016, pp. 122-124.
Photo Credit: Katherine Johnson at NASA Langley Research Center in 1980 By NASA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons