Political Quotes

“Today I wish to honor a White Sulphur Springs native who not only completed groundbreaking work at NASA during the space race, but who also broke the barriers of race and gender during a critical time in our Nation. Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson was blessed with a natural talent for mathematics which far exceeded that of her peers. By the age of 13, Katherine was already attending high school on West Virginia State College's campus where, in 1937, she received a B.S. in both mathematics and French. In 1939, when West Virginia began to integrate its graduate schools, West Virginia State's president, Dr. John Davis, personally selected Katherine and two male students as the first African-American students to attend West Virginia University. After starting a family, Katherine found work at the West Area Computing section of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics' Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite, Sputnik, changed history--and Katherine's life. Her work on the equations to describe an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the a spacecraft is specified led to Katherine being the first woman recognized as an author of a report from the flight research division.…”