If you want to get to NASA, you’ll have to go by Hidden Figures Way.
Three black, female mathematicians were instrumental in supporting early NASA missions, but few people knew their names until several years ago. Then, in 2016, Margot Lee Shetterly wrote Hidden Figures, and an Oscar-nominated movie followed shortly afterward.
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson waited for dozens of years to have their stories told. Now NASA itself is honoring the women it almost forgot.
On Wednesday, Shetterly joined NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Aviation and Space, to unveil Hidden Figures Way.
The renaming of the portion of E St. outside NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., “serves to remind us, and everyone who comes here, of the standard that was set by these women, with their commitment to science and their embodiment of the values of equality, justice, and humanity,” Shetterly said at the unveiling.
Vaughan and Jackson both died a few years ago, and Johnson, who now lives in Virginia, is 100 years old. In their absence, their family members attended.
“I think it’s important to recognize everybody’s contributions,” Cruz told the Guardian. “Women and men across every racial and ethnic line have contributed to this incredible journey we’re on, and I think it is also vitally important that we send the message to little girls and little boys that there is no limit to what you can accomplish.”
The D.C. City Council unanimously voted in December to rename the street after a bill was drafted “to honor the historic women scientists and mathematicians who contributed to NASA’s mission despite adversity.”
Johnson, a “computer,” as NASA called its mathematicians, helped send Alan Shepard to space in 1961 and John Glenn into orbit the next year. All the while, she, Vaughan, and Jackson had to use a bathroom labeled “Colored Girls.”
It took almost 60 years, but Johnson was honored for her service in 2015, when President Barack Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The “hidden figures” of NASA are finally getting more attention, and Hidden Figures Way is one more step in making the seldom-recognized leaders of American history a little more visible.
