Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of stories about Warsaw Community Schools students who advanced to National History Day national competition June 9-13 at the University of Maryland’s campus in College Park, Md.
The 2016 movie “Hidden Figures” inspired the National History Day project for two Edgewood Middle School eighth-graders.
The biographical drama, loosely based on the nonfiction book of the same name, is about black female mathematicians who worked at NASA during the space race between the United States and Russia.
For their junior group website project, which got them to nationals for the first time, Keely Roe and Abigail Stapleton are focusing on one of the mathematicians, Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson.
“She’s a lady from the ‘Hidden Figures’ movie that helped with space landing,” said Stapleton.
Roe said, “She was a human computer, and then she also worked in the flight division during the space race to help calculate launch numbers and other stuff.”
NHD offers year-long academic programs that engage over half a million middle- and high-school students around the world annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest. The largest NHD program is the NHD Contest that encourages students to conduct historical research on a topic of their choice. Students enter these projects at the local and state levels, with top students advancing to the national contest at the University of Maryland. The theme for this year’s competition is “Triumph and Tragedy in History.”
Stapleton said they picked Johnson because they wanted to know more about segregation at NASA, the history, “and why she chose to do what she did and how her life went and it impacted other people.”
“Originally, we were going to do the entire ‘Hidden Figures,’ all four of the women. But that was kind of a lot and we didn’t have enough words for that, so we just chose Katherine because I was already writing an essay about her so we already had background information about it,” Roe said.
“She just had a very interesting story in how she progressed through her life.”
Stapleton said some of the movie matched up to Johnson’s life, but the movie made segregation more of an issue than Johnson felt there was.
“She said she didn’t really feel it. She said it just felt like normal, like they were all working for the same purpose so it didn’t really matter they were segregated,” Roe said.
For Stapleton, Johnson was an inspiration and a hero. “She inspired women to go into more of the STEM workfield, and she was a hero to her fellow black people who opened up doors for many women,” she said.
Roe said Johnson dealt more with sexism in the workplace than racism. “Actually, she said that. Every week they would have case conferences for the space race to go over what they just worked on, and women weren’t allowed to go into the meetings. She just kept asking why she wasn’t able to go into the meetings and why she couldn’t know what was going on because she was working on it, too, but she was the only woman in her department. She ended up getting to go in there because she just asked so much,” Roe explained.
Stapleton said the biggest takeaway she got from doing the project was to “push for what you want, never let someone tell you that you can’t do something.”
Roe agreed.
“She went through the death of one of her husbands, and she had three kids and she had a family life, and then she was also black and female and worked in male-dominated profession, so she just had to push through there. She still got awards and stuff, she still does today,” Roe said.
In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson – who turned 100 on Aug. 26, 2018 – the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
