LAUSR

“Lady Mathematician Played Key Role in Glenn Space Flight” splashed across the front page of The Pittsburgh Courier on March 10th of 1962, just a little over a week after nearly 3,500 tons of ticker tape confetti showered upon John Glenn in a presidential caliber parade with thousands of attendants in New York City. While the world celebrated Glenn as a national hero, one of the most influential Black newspapers in the United States with a circulation of a quarter of a million people, praised Katherine Johnson as “one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the present era”; a mother, wife, and career-woman whose work in trajectory analysis played a crucial role in the safe return and extraction of John Glenn during his mission as the first American to orbit the Earth. When Margot Lee Shetterly released her 2016 text Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, which inspired the award-winning film, Katherine Johnson’s story was catapulted to the forefront, no longer hidden from the greater American consciousness. It took a popular film, created 60 years after she had