Late 1950's | My Site

Katherine Johnson

Mathematician and computer scientist Katherine Johnson was born on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a farmer and janitor. From a young age, Johnson enjoyed mathematics and could easily solve mathematical equations. She attended West Virginia State High School and graduated from high school at age fourteen. Johnson received her B.S. degree in French and mathematics in 1932 from West Virginia State University. At that time, Dr. Schiefflin Claytor, the third African American to earn a Ph.D. degree in mathematics, created a special course in analytic geometry specifically for Johnson. She was one of the first African Americans to enroll in the mathematics program. In 1953, she was assigned to the all-male flight research division. Her knowledge made her invaluable to her superiors and her assertiveness won her a spot in previously all-male meetings. Leaving The Flight Mechanics Branch, Johnson went on to join the Spacecraft Controls Branch where she calculated the flight trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space in 1959. Johnson also verified the mathematics behind John Glenn’s orbit around the Earth in 1962 and calculated the flight trajectory for Apollo 11’s flight to the moon in 1969. She retired from NASA in 1986. She received the NASA Langely Research Center Special Achievement Award in 1971, 1980, 1984, 1985, and 1986. Johnson has co-authored twenty-six scientific papers and has a historically unique listing as a female co-author in a peer-reviewed NASA report. In 2006, Johnson was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science from Capitol College of Laurel, Maryland. Johnson then passed away on February 24, 2020.

Claudette Colvin

Colvin was born on September 5, 1939, in Montgomery, Alabama. Growing up in one of Montgomery's poorer neighborhoods, Colvin studied hard in school. On March 2, 1955, Colvin was riding home on a city bus after school when a bus driver told her to give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused, saying, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right." Colvin felt compelled to stand her ground. "I felt like Sojourner Truth was pushing down on one shoulder and Harriet Tubman was pushing down on the other—saying, 'Sit down girl!' I was glued to my seat," she later told Newsweek. After her refusal to give up her seat, Colvin was arrested on several charges, including violating the city's segregation laws. For several hours, she sat in jail, completely terrified. "I was really afraid because you just didn't know what white people might do at that time," Colvin later said. Much of the writing on civil rights history in Montgomery has focused on the arrest of Parks, another woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus, nine months after Colvin. While Parks has been heralded as a civil rights heroine, Colvin's story has received little notice. Some have tried to change that. While her role in the fight to end segregation in Montgomery may not be widely recognized, Colvin helped advance civil rights efforts in the city. "Claudette gave all of us moral courage. If she had not done what she did, I am not sure that we would have been able to mount the support for Mrs. Parks. She is still alive today.

Shirley Chrisholm

Shirley Chisholm born November 30, 1924, in Brooklyn New York. She was an American politician, the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress. She grew up in Barbados and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1946. While teaching nursery school and serving as director of the Friends Day Nursery in Brooklyn, she studied elementary education at Columbia University and married Conrad Q. Chisholm in 1949 (divorced 1977). An education consultant for New York City’s day-care division, she was also active with community and political groups, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and her district’s Unity Democratic Club. In 1964–68 she represented her Brooklyn district in the New York state legislature. In 1968 Chisholm was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, defeating the civil rights leader James Farmer. In Congress, she quickly became known as a strong liberal who opposed weapons development and the war in Vietnam and favored full-employment proposals. As a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. president in 1972, she won 152 delegates before withdrawing from the race. Chisholm, a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus, supported the Equal Rights Amendment. She wrote the autobiographical works Unbought and Unbossed (1970) and The Good Fight (1973). After her retirement from Congress, In 1993 she was invited by President Bill Clinton to serve as ambassador to Jamaica but declined because of poor health. Chisholm was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. She died on January 1st, 2005.

Edomonia Lewis

Edmonia Lewis, named Wildfire at birth, was born in either Ohio or New York in either 1843 or 1845. Both of her parents had died before she had reached the age of 5, and she was left in the care of her mother’s nomadic tribe until she was 12. Her brother, Sunrise, left to become a gold miner in California before later using his money to help fund Edmonia with her pursuits. He paid for her to attend Oberlin College in Albany in Ohio, 1859. It was around this time she changed her name to Edmonia. She was later accused of poisoning two of her white roommates but was proven innocent shortly before she was accused of theft of art supplies and was not permitted to graduate. She left Oberlin in 1863 and moved to Boston with her brother’s financial assistance. There, she met Edward Brackett who taught her to sculpt and she began her sculpting career. She used the money from the sales of her portrait busts to fund her first trip to Europe, where she visited London, Paris, and Florence. She settled in Rome and rented a studio in the winter during 1865 and 1866. She visited the US in 1872 to attend an exhibition of her work in the San Francisco art association. After this point, around 1875, information began to become conflicting and confusing. She died alone with no children or spouse in 1907 despite later being reported to be alive in Rome as late as 1911. Unfortunately, most of her sculptures did not survive to modern-day.