Katherine Johnson by Randy S.

 

Did Katherine Johnson overcome adversity? Yes, she did, since it was 1918- 1950, and woman were not doing the job that Katherine Johnson was doing, especially black woman. Katherine was one of those black women that worked at NASA/NACA.

First of all, in Katherine Johnson’s early life, she loved math so much. It even says this “What Did She Study in College,” paragraph 2, it states “She counted everything from the number of steps she took to get to the food to the numbers of forks and plates she washed when doing the dishes.” She loved math so much that even from a young age, she was always eager to go to school. She did amazing in school that she was in high school at the age of 10 and went to college at the age of 15 years old. That is a huge accomplishment. Being a young minority, during a time of racism, she was able to achieve a lot.

Second, while Katherine Johnson was working at NASA, she would get treated differently than others at her workspace. For example, on paragraph 10, it says “women were not allowed to attend meetings with the male engineers and scientists.” Johnson wanted to go to the meetings to learn more about the projects, so she went anyway. So, they wouldn’t allow women to those meetings the male engineers and scientist went to. In the trailer for Hidden Figures, we can see that she was mistaken for a cleaning lady. By attending meetings, she eventually she gained respect from the men and all those men viewed her as a leader and relied on her for many things. This was great for her, being a African American woman in the 1950s having all those men viewing her as a leader and the way she was getting treated at her workspace at NASA /NACA got tremendously better.

Finally, the way Katherine got accepted to NASA is marvelous. It says in paragraph 1, “when Johnson was 34 years old, she applied for a job…. In the early to mid-1950s, NACA was just beginning its work on studying space. NACA was hiring women, including African American women…. The first time Johnson applied, all of the jobs were already filled, but then she had called again another time, and they answered her phone call and gave her a job to be a human computer. A human computer made calculations without special devices or technology. This was amazing for the time she was living in. She did this as an African American woman.

Finishing off everything, these are the things Katherine Johnson did in her early life, the ways she got treated when working at her workspace, and the ways she got accepted to work as human computer at be NASA.  So yes these are all the things that happened in her life. She faced adversity and became successful. To this day, many people look up to her.