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The group of Black female mathematicians whose work for NASA in the 1960s inspired the Oscar-nominated movie Hidden Figures were awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.
Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan were recognized posthumously with the Congressional Gold Medal for helping pave the way for the first American astronaut to successfully orbit the Earth.
It was thanks to Johnson’s hand-written calculations that John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. Vaughan went on to become NASA’s first Black supervisor and Jackson is counted as NASA’s first Black female engineer.
Their families attended the Capitol Hill ceremony to accept the awards on their behalf. Christine Darden, who was also recognized for her sonic boom research, watched the ceremony from her Connecticut home.
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House Speaker Mike Johnson delivered opening remarks during the ceremony. According to ABC News, he described the women as “giants on whose shoulders all of those astronauts actually stood at a time … when our nation was divided by color and often by gender.”
“These women dared to step into the fields where they had previously been unwelcomed. They excelled in science and math and made groundbreaking contributions in aeronautics. But these women didn’t just crunch numbers and solve equations for the space program,” Johnson said. “They actually laid the very foundation upon which our rockets launched and our astronauts flew and our nation soared.”
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Wednesday’s ceremony came nearly five years after the passage of the Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act, which was introduced by the late Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson in 2019.
“Acknowledging the many women who have not been given the recognition they deserve for their contributions to technological advancement and competitiveness in the US has become one of my greatest privileges as a Member of Congress,” Johnson, who died December 23, 2023, said in a statement at the time.
Congratulations!