Joylette Hylick, daughter of the late “NASA human computer” Katherine Johnson, joined students at Moorestown High School for a special film screening to celebrate Black History Month.
Moorestown High School’s Black History Month celebrations continued Feb. 11 with a movie hosted by the Young Historians Club.
Students were treated to a screening of “Hidden Figures,” the 2017 film adaption based on the book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race,” written by writer, researcher, entrepreneur and author Margot Lee Shetterly.
A graduate of the University of Virginia, Shetterly is the founder of the Human Computer Project, an endeavor that is recovering the names and accomplishments of all women who worked as mathematicians, scientists and engineers at NASA and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) from the 1930s through the 1980s.
“Hidden Figures” tells the story of the Black female mathematicians at the leading edge of the feminist and Civil Rights movements, whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. Starting in World War II and through the Cold War to the space race, the book follows the accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden and the challenges they faced at NASA for nearly three decades, but also the alliances they forged, using their intellect to change their own lives, and the country’s future.
“Hidden Figures” the movie brings the story of Johnson, Vaughan and Jackson to life. Set in 1960s Hampton, Virginia, it chronicles how all three women use their mathematical skills to help the U.S. achieve one of the things it wanted most, a victory over the Russians in space. They did so while facing the barriers of racial segregation in the Jim Crow South and struggled for professional recognition from their male colleagues, according to the website for both the film and book.
Johnson’s daughter Joylette Hylick joined the students for the film screening at MHS.
“We were very pleased to have it come out and for people to find out more about mom,” she said.
She described her mother as humble, extremely smart, funny, talented, true to her interests and unselfish, a mother who was strict, but who was also the example. “ … Be curious, want to learn and have a hobby. Mom said if (you) have a hobby, that helps discipline you and keeps you on the up and up …
“Be determined, be disciplined, enjoy what you do, but always want to learn.”
Johnson was born in 1918 and began working at NASA in 1953. Her job included calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those for astronauts Alan Shepard, the first American in space; and John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.
She also worked on rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on flights to the moon, according to the Emerald Coast Science Center, a nonprofit that strives to inspire and grow a scientifically engaged community.
Johnson’s calculations were also essential to the beginning of the modern Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars. She was known as a “human computer” for her tremendous mathematical capability and ability to work with space trajectories.
Former president Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and four years later, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by Congress. Johnson was 101 years old when she passed away in 2020 and was inducted posthumously into the National Women’s Hall of Fame one year later.
“It always helps to help somebody else,” Hylick offered. “You can always learn from somebody else, and things will be much better if that’s the case … If you’re challenged, and you’re interested and you’re curious, you’ll be working forward. …
“If you don’t have something tangible to do, you will find something, and it might not be pleasant.”
