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hidden figures – Katherine Johnson wife,mom and NASA spaceflight Mathematician


Portrait of Katherine Johnson
Portrait of Katherine Johnson
Credits: NASA
When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module.

Date of Birth: August 26, 1918
Hometown: White Sulphur Springs, WV
Education: B.S., Mathematics and French, West Virginia State College, 1937
Hired by NACA: June 1953
Retired from NASA: 1986
Actress Playing Role in Hidden Figures: Taraji P. Henson

Being handpicked to be one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools is something that many people would consider one of their life’s most notable moments, but it’s just one of several breakthroughs that have marked Katherine Johnson’s long and remarkable life. Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1918, Katherine Johnson’s intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. By thirteen, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. At eighteen, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in Mathematics. Katherine graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia.

When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, West Virginia State’s president Dr. John W. Davis selected Katherine and two male students as the first black students to be offered spots at the state’s flagship school, West Virginia University. Katherine left her teaching job, and enrolled in the graduate math program. At the end of the first session, however, she decided to leave school to start a family with her husband.  She returned to teaching when her three daughters got older, but it wasn’t until 1952 that a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. Katherine and her husband, James Goble, decided to move the family to Newport News to pursue the opportunity, and Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953. Just two weeks into Katherine’s tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, and Katherine’s temporary position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight test, and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956.

The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history—and Katherine Johnson’s life. In 1957, Katherine provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official foray into space travel, and Katherine, who had worked with many of them since coming to Langley, “came along with the program” as the NACA became NASA later that year. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.

In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, from blast off to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine.  “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.

When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after thirty-three years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she says. In 2015, at age 97, Katherine Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.

Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly

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Thomas Jefferson’s Indian Removal Act of 1804


Map of Eastern Kansas - Page

Indian Removal Act of 1804

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, President Thomas Jefferson believed that American Indians could be moved from the East to lands in the new territory. This would free up lands in demand by white settlers. The plan was voluntary and was considered a failure—some tribes participated, others refused. The plan also did not account for the fact that other tribes with nomadic lifestyles already occupied this land. Twenty years later, President Andrew Jackson decided to push for the Indian Removal Act. Passed in 1830, the act allowed the U.S. government to move Indian tribes in the East to lands west of the Mississippi.

Indian leaders were pressured to sign treaties that would give up ancestral lands in exchange for much smaller parcels in the West. The removal policy was eventually refined into the “reservation” system, with tribes being confined to specific areas of land. The area that became Kansas was considered prime space for these “emigrant” American Indians who were forced to move west. Between the years 1825 and 1850, treaties were made with more than 25 tribes to “remove” them to the region that ultimately became Kansas. These included the Chippewa, Delaware, Iowa, Kansa, Kaskaskia, Kickapoo, Miami, Ottawa, Peoria, Piankashaw, Potawatomi, Sac and Fox, Shawnee, Wea, and Wyandotte as well as several other tribes.

This map in Kansas Memory shows the location of most of the Indian Reservations for the tribes.[http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/213048]

The move to Kansas was not the first for many of the tribes. For example, the Delaware originally lived on the East Coast in the area of the state of Delaware. In 1829 the tribe signed a treaty for two million acres in Kansas with permission to hunt buffalo on the plains beyond the land. The Delaware people farmed their land in Kansas and adopted a constitution and a set of tribal laws. When Kansas Territory opened to white settlement, the Delawares were forced to move one more time to Indian Territory (Oklahoma).

Not all tribes moved as a unit. Indian Removal policy often led to divisions within tribes. In 1800 the Potawatomi claimed land in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois. However, between 1836 and 1841, the tribe was forced to sell these lands and to be removed beyond the Mississippi River. A large number of those living in Indiana refused to move and eventually fled to Canada to avoid military conflict. Some of the tribe stayed in Michigan and Wisconsin and only a portion of the Potawatomis settled on a reservation in Kansas by 1846. In 1868 a number of the Potawatomi were removed to Indian Territory, and became known as the Citizen Band. Other portions of the tribe remained on a small reservation in Kansas, which still exists today, and is known as the Prairie Band.

No matter the experiences, the various tribes were all moved into environments different than their traditional tribal lands. The peoples from woodlands and Great Lakes regions had maintained lifestyles based on hunting or fishing. The resources they found in Kansas were foreign to them.

To deal with Indian Removal, the U. S. government created the Indian Office under the War Department. By 1824 it had become the Bureau of Indian Affairs with superintendents of Indian affairs for various regions. The Department of Indian Affairs with a commissioner, clerks, agents, and subagents was created in 1832. The Department of Interior was established in 1849 and the Bureau of Indian Affairs was transferred to it, though the War Department still had the responsibility of negotiating treaties with the tribes.

Portions from The Kansas Journey. (http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/indian-removal-act/16714)

Resource: usslave.blogspot.com  Youtube.com

~ Culture & History, ~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

The Origin of Redskin ~ a repost


March 26, 2006

Posted by Bill Poser

The controversy over the Washington Redskins trademark has attracted considerable attention, here and elsewhere. We have had quite a few previous posts about this. It began with a petition by seven American Indian activists led by Suzan Harjo in 1992 to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the US Department of Commerce requesting cancellation of the trademark on the grounds that the word redskin

was and is a pejorative, derogatory, denigrating, offensive, scandalous, contemptuous, disreputable, disparaging and racist designation for a Native American person

In 1998 the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board decided in favor of the petitioners and cancelled the trademark. Pro Football, Inc. appealed to the United States District Court, which in 2003 overturned the decision of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board and reinstated the trademark. It gave several grounds for its decision:

  • that there was an absence of evidence that the term redskin is disparaging in the particular context of the name of the sports team;
  • that the TTB did not sufficiently articulate its inferences and explain how it decided between competing pieces of evidence. In particular, the District Court was critical of the fact that the TTB ruled on the basis “of the entirety of the evidence” but did not review that evidence in any detail and made few findings of fact;
  • that the petitioners’ claim was barred by the doctrine of laches, which provides that a right or claim should not be enforced if the long delay in asserting it puts the respondent at an unreasonable disadvantage. In this case, the Court held that opposition to the mark should have been asserted when the mark was issued in 1967 or shortly thereafter and that the delay of twenty-five years was unreasonable.

The case was appealed to the Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia Circuit. In its 2005 decision, the Court of Appeal held that the doctrine of laches did not in principle bar the suit of one of the petitioners, Mateo Romero, the youngest, because he was only one year old in 1967 when the trademark was registered. (In US federal law, the clock for laches starts when the petitioner reaches the age of 18.) It therefore returned the case to the District Court for further consideration of whether laches should bar the suit on the part of Mateo Romero.¹ The Court of Appeal did not address the question of whether there was sufficient evidence that redskin is disparaging in the context of the name of the sports team because there is no need to decide that question if the suit is barred by laches.²

Although the main topic I want to discuss is a linguistic one, I’ve reviewed the legal history because I think that much of the discussion of the case has been rather misleading. To a large extent the decisions of the courts have focussed on the “technicality” of laches, not on the question of whether redskin is disparaging. The District Court did not simply ignore overwhelming evidence as some commentators suggest. Indeed, even in its holdings on the disparagement issue, the District Court’s criticisms of the TTB were that it did not sufficiently address the question of whether redskin is disparaging in the context of the name and that the TTB did not make sufficient findings of fact. And in overturning the District Court, the Court of Appeal made no judgment whatever as to whether redskin is disparaging. Its decision dealt exclusively with laches. In short, the decisions of the courts have been concerned largely with technical questions, not with the linguistic issues.

I think that it is well established that redskin is taken by most people today to be disparaging. What is more interesting is whether it has always been so, as Harjo et al., as well as various others, claim. One interesting piece of evidence is the origin of the name Washington Redskins. In 1933, George Preston Marshall, the owner of the team, which was then located in Boston, renamed it the Boston Redskins in honor of the head coach, William “Lone Star” Dietz, an American Indian.³ When the team moved to Washington in 1937 it was renamed the Washington Redskins. George Marshall clearly did not consider the name disparaging.

The term redskin of course goes much farther back than 1933. The details of this history have recently been explored by Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian Institution, in a paper conveniently available on-line. Some of the evidence is available in greater detail on Goddard’s web site. You can read speeches by the Meskwaki chief Black Thunder and the Omaha chief Big Elk in which the expression redskin is used, and early nineteenth century examples of the Meskwaki usage of terms meaning redskin and whiteskin.

I won’t review the evidence in detail because Goddard’s paper is short enough and accessible enough that if you are interested you should read it yourself. I’ll just summarize it. Goddard shows that the term redskin is a translation from native American languages of a term used by native Americans for themselves. Harjo’s claim that it “had its origins in the practice of presenting bloody red skins and scalps as proof of Indian kill for bounty payments” is unsupported by any evidence.⁴ The term entered popular usage via the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. In the early- to mid-nineteenth century the term was neutral, not pejorative, and indeed was often used in contexts in which whites spoke of Indians in positive terms. Goddard concludes:

Cooper’s use of redskin as a Native American in-group term was entirely authentic, reflecting both the accurate perception of the Indian self-image and the evolving respect among whites for the Indians’ distinct cultural perspective, whatever its prospects. The descent of this word into obloquy is a phenomenon of more recent times.

The response to Goddard’s paper is disappointing. Other than reiterating the unsubstantiated and implausible theory that the term owes its origin to scalping, Harjo and others have merely waved their hands, asserting that as Indians they know differently without presenting any evidence whatsoever. A typical example is found in this Native Village article, which quotes Harjo as follows:

I’m very familiar with white men who uphold the judicious speech of white men. Europeans were not using high-minded language. [To them] we were only human when it came to territory, land cessions and whose side you were on.

The only point here that even resembles an argument is the bald assertion that Europeans never spoke of Indians other than disparagingly. This is not true. Evidence to the contrary is explicitly cited by Goddard. What is more disturbing is that Harjo’s primary response to Goddard is ad hominem: that as a white man what he says is not credible. Whether he is white, red, or green is of course utterly irrelevant, as thinking people have known since at least the Middle Ages. Goddard presents his evidence in detail, with citations to the original sources. You can evaluate it yourself, and you need not rely on his statements of fact but can, if you are willing to devote some time and effort, check out the sources yourself. Furthermore, without the slightest evidence Harjo imputes to Goddard not merely bias but racism, a charge which, based, as her own words reveal, entirely on racial stereotyping, merely reflects back on herself.

So, there you have it. On the one hand an utterly unsubstantiated and implausible theory advocated by Suzan Harjo, who exhibits no knowledge of the history of English usage of redskin, of American Indian languages, or of the early history of relations between Indians and Europeans. On the other hand a detailed account with numerous explicit citations to original documents by Ives Goddard, who has dedicated his entire life to the study of American Indian languages and the documentation thereof. It is always possible that some new evidence will be brought to bear, but for the present I don’t think that there can be any ambiguity as to which is the more credible account.

Notes:

¹ The District Court held that Romero’s suit was not barred by laches simply as a matter of the length of time that had elapsed since the cancellation petition was filed only seven years from the date of his majority, but might nonetheless be barred by laches if the delay of seven years put Pro Football at an unreasonable disadvantage. For this reason it is important to understand that laches is distinct from the doctrine of statute of limitations. A suit is barred by the statute of limitations if there is legislation setting such a time limit. In contrast, laches is an equitable doctrine and is based on the principle that too long a delay is unfair to the respondent, not on any particular time limit.

² Similarly, the District Court never addressed Pro Football’s arguments that section 2(a) of the Lanham act, under which Harjo et al. sued, is an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right of free speech and the Fifth Amendment right of due process because it overturned the TTB’s decision on other, non-constitutional, grounds.

³ Harjo et al. question this story of the origin of the name, but as the Circuit Court noted (p. 13, footnote 6), they provide no evidence whatever to the contrary and give no convincing reason to disbelieve the primary source, a newspaper article presenting the account by Marshall’s grand-daughter. Some authors have also claimed that Dietz was not an American Indian. The articles cited, however, do not cite their sources, so it is difficult to evaluate their claims. It is, however, undisputed that Dietz presented himself as an American Indian and that George Marshall publicly presented him as one. George Marshall surely thought that Dietz was an American Indian, which is really what counts here.

⁴ A point that has not, as far as I know, been mentioned in this context is that scalps or other body parts presented as evidence of kills would not, in general, have been red. As I can attest from personal experience with the processing of animals killed by hunters, mammalian blood is bright red when fresh but darkens quickly as it oxidizes. When dried it retains a dark red tinge if thin but in any thickness is black. Under most circumstances bounty hunters did not present their trophies for payment until days or weeks after the kill, by which time the blood would have been more black than red. The suggestion that such trophies would give a primary impression of red is due either to a false idea that they would usually have been presented when fresh or to a lack of familiarity with dried blood. A further difficulty with Harjo’s hypothesis is that, although whites did indeed collect Indian trophies as evidence of kills, the popular image of scalping was and is that it was an activity engaged in primarily by Indians who mutilated the corpses of their white victims. There was therefore no reason to associate bloody trophies, red or not, with Indians. If anything, the association would have been with the white victims of scalping.

Posted by Bill Poser at March 26, 2006 06:42 PM

politics,pollution,petitions,pop culture & purses