About Katherine Johnson at the Oscars 2017 and why you should educate your children to follow their dreams
The woman who refused society expectations on gender and race
Last night Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson joined Stars on Oscars Stage. Her story inspired “Hidden Figures”, directed by Theodore Melfi and candidated to the Best Movie 2017 category. She’s a warrior, first and a scientist who loves count and data. So we have to talk about this amazing woman.
Katherine Johnson was born in 1918 and you’ll know the entire date at the end of this article. Anyway, she lived in an era where African-Americans can’t continue their study carreer after the eight grade school, but her parents strongly wants their children have an instruction, so the family moved from Greenbier County, to the West Virginia, in Kanawa County. She loved math and she early showed her talent. At college her teacher added maths courses just for her. She graduated at 18. When Barak Obama gives her the National Medal of Freedom in 2015, she said:
“I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.”
She lived years when graduated African-American only can begin teachers, and so she did first, but when a relative said her NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, today NASA) was hiring mathematicians Afro-Americans as well as whites, she decided to try. She worked in a team of women, but she was talented, so was involved in a project with male colleagues and thanks to her knowledge of analytic geometric, she remained in the male pool. She ironically said they forgot her: at that time, women only had to read data from black boxes and they only were involved in some specifical math tasks. But Katherine was different. She loved her work despite every hurdle and she knew she can: she was determined to use her knowledge and her passion in her work, so she asked to be included in meetings because she was part of the work. Katherine became the first woman to be involved in NASA bosses and men colleagues meetings. That woman wasn’t to be only a “computer with skirt”. She was a NASA researcher, a woman of science and she struggle for her right: becoming who she want to be. NASA declared: “Her calculations proved as critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landing program and the start of the Space Shuttle program, as they did to those first steps on the country’s journey into space.” Thanks to her computations, Alan Shepard became the first American in space: NASA used Katherine Johnson knowledge for the mission and despite NASA started using computers, John Glenn (the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times) wanted her revision on the electronic computers results. In a world where girls have pink toys and pink stuff, and boys play with Lego, we strongly need to remeber theese stories. She’s African-American. She was a woman in 1950’s and despite this, her figure was critical to first achievements of the space. In Italian the film name is: “The right to count” and her Birthday is on August 26: Women’s Equality Day.
Call to action
Let play your children with computers, and “masculine toys” and let studied what they want. Protect their dreams: teach them they can become who they want to be.
