Katherine Johnson Quotes

“Even as a professional in an integrated world, I had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took for an African American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on the Moon.”

“Katherine gave in to the wonder of the moment, imagining herself in the astronauts’ place. What emotions welled up from the depths of their hearts as they regarded their watery blue home from the void of space? How did it feel to be separated by a nearly unimaginable gulf from the rest of humanity yet carry the hopes, dreams, and fears of their entire species there with them in their tiny, vulnerable craft? Most people she knew wouldn’t have traded places with the astronauts for all of the gold in Fort Knox. The men existed all alone out their in the void of space, connected so tenuously to Earth, with the real possibility that something could go wrong. But given the chance to throw her lot in with the astronauts, Katherine Johnson would have packed her bags immediately. Even without the pressure of the space race, even without the mandate to beat the enemy. For Katherine Johnson, curiosity always bested fear.”

“What she wouldn’t have given for her father to see her—to see his baby girl who used to count the stars now sending men to travel among them. Joshua Coleman knew as if from second sight that Katherine, his brilliant, charismatic, inquisitive youngest child—a black girl from rural West Virginia, born at a time when the odds were more likely that she would die before age thirty-five than even finish high school—would somehow, someday, unite her story with the great epic of America.”

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