
Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.

She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer.

I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured.

She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. But

Surely she had never traveled a greater emotional distance

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Center. I rode shotgun in our 1970s Pontiac,

Sometimes, she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions.

It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians.

Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.

Insatiably curious about the world.

As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did. My

she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions. It

Future generations would take the advances for granted

West Virgina never left Katherine's heart, but Virginia was her destiny.

So many ways to screw the pooch, and just one staggeringly complex, scrupulously modeled, endlessly rehearsed, indefatigably tested way to succeed.

At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible.

a lifetime of stories

black people frequently disqualified themselves even without the WHITES ONLY sign in view