NASA Honors Black Female Mathematicians By Renaming Street

The US space agency NASA has changed its headquarters street into Hidden Figures Way to honor black female mathematicians that took an important role in its most celebrated missions. These women, in fact, didn’t gain the corresponding respects in the past.

In the early Apollo missions, they faced lots of harsh gender discrimination and racial segregation. Most of them were considered as ‘human computers’.

The Hidden Figures Way is now the name of the street in front of NASA’s headquarters. With this move, the space agency wants to honor three African American female mathematicians including Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Katherine Johnson. Their stories are the inspiration for the US non-fiction writer Margot Lee Shetterly to write Hidden Figures in 2010. After that, the film director Theodore Melfi made a film based on the book.

The event of the historic street renaming took place on June 12 with the participation of Shetterly, Ted Cruz the Chairman of the Committee’s subcommittee on Aviation and Space, Christine Darde, an ex NASA mathematician, and Jim Bridenstine who now serves as the administrator of NASA.

The US space agency is planning to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of one of the most memorable events in human history – the Apollo XI mission. For those who forgot, this mission marked the moment when humans first stepped onto the moon. However, at that time, all of the astronauts (11 people) were white men.

During the 1950s, mathematicians who worked for NASA were referred to as computers, while the words “colored computers” were used to mention African American mathematicians.

Compared to white colleagues, these women and men had to face clear racial segregation in their own jobs such as calculating orbit trajectories for the space missions. Some of those missions included launching the first American Alan Shepard into space and helping the first American John Glenn to orbit the Earth.

According to many reports, the US Senator Ted Cruz first saw the film Hidden Figures in 2018 with his family, and then decided to push for putting an inscription sign in front of NASA’s headquarters to honor these black women.

More especially, the idea got the approval from the Washington DC council and the US Senate before local authorities passed it. At the beginning of 2019, NASA honored Katherine Johnson by renaming one facility in Fairmont, Vermont. Back to four years ago, the former president Barack Obama awarded Johnson the presidential medal that is considered as the most prestigious civilian honor of the United States.

NASA plans to have another trip to the Moon in the upcoming time. Also, the agency reveals that women must be present in this Artemis mission.

According to Jim Bridenstine as the administrator of NASA,