The reason she was hidden was not because the air where she grew up in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va., smelled like spoiled eggs. No. The reason she was hidden was the pungent reality she would experience racial segregation for coming into the world Black.
She became a brilliant scientist who remained hidden despite being born during the "Purple Death," a name for the 1918 Influenza pandemic that killed millions across the globe and close to 700,000 in the United States. Her birth also coincided with the "Red Summer," which engulfed several states with intense race riots. It was the culmination of the return of Black WWI veterans to a nation still struggling with racism.
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She was 11 when the Great Depression darkened the United States. Yet, unbeknownst to some, the Great Depression did not affect just Whites. More than half of working Black Americans became unemployed, according to the Library of Congress. In the northern states, Whites demanded that Blacks be fired to increase job opportunities for white job seekers. In the South, lynching of Black people resurfaced from beneath the never-drained swamp of racism.
She was a precocious child and also a math whiz. She started high school at 13 and graduated from college with the highest honors at 19.
True, Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson was born Black, but she did not just survive. She excelled.
But all this remained hidden to many until the movie "Hidden Figures" came out in 2016.
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We know now that at age 21, Johnson became one of the first Black graduate students to attend West Virginia University, which was doing low-key experimentation with racial integration.
We know now that Johnson was not just a mathematician, a student, a teacher. She was also a mother and a wife. Her role in raising her family required taking a break from academia and being there for her husband, who had cancer. Despite her husband succumbing to cancer, leaving her to raise her children on her own, she remained stellar.
We know now that Johnson did not lose her genius from being a single parent or her math skills from the grief of losing her husband. She should have shined brighter in 1953 when she started working in the computing department of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics' (NACA's) Langley laboratory, whose employees were all women and predominantly Black.
But the 1950s were not marked just by racial upheavals like the killing of Emmet Till and protesting the integration of Little Rock's Central High School. The era also witnessed the beginning of the heated race between the United States and the Soviet Union to put men into space.
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The Soviets placed the Sputnik satellite in space in 1957. The subsequent year, NASA launched a space program dubbed Project Mercury "to orbit a human spacecraft around Earth, to investigate a person's ability to function in space, and to recover both the astronaut and spacecraft safely." In 1961, the Soviets launched Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the Earth, which made it seem like the United States was faltering in the space race.
The Soviets' success propelled then-President John F. Kennedy to marshal the United States to place humans on the moon in 10 years. Yet JFK's shot to the moon would not have hit its target without complex mathematics and engineering.
Johnson made her mark in the history of U.S. space endeavors by landing a spot in NASA's Flight Research Division, where she worked with space engineers analyzing space flight test data for Project Mercury.
We know now that Johnson's trajectory analysis enabled Alan Shepard to catapult into space in 1961 and John Glenn to become the first American to orbit Earth in 1962.
We know now that Johnson's mathematical prowess did not end with Project Mercury. Her calculations enabled the syncing of Apollo's Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module in 1969.
We know now that despite the brilliance of the Flight Research team, which before Johnson was all-White and all-men, JFK's moon shot would have remained a shot too far.
Yet despite her superior math skills, because of racism and sexism, Johnson was deemed unworthy of occupying the same space with her white male coworkers. She was forced to walk half a mile from her workspace to be able to use the bathroom designated for Blacks.
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Racism and sexism forced Johnson to remain hidden, yet, without her genius, the Odysseus, might not have overcome gravity in 2024 to become "the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon in 50 years."
Yet down here in America, the gravity of racism and sexism still prevents our nation from ascending to a more perfect union. This harms everyone.
"As long as you pretend you don't know your history, you're going to be the prisoner of it," said James Baldwin, a Black author and activist.
To be free is to embrace true equality. To be free is to teach the United States' true history.
Sadly, some choose to shackle our children's minds by preventing them from learning that history.