NASA’s “Hidden Figures” Awarded Gold Medals By US Congress

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

The Congressional Gold Medal was recently presented to the families of “Hidden Figures” scientists Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden at the U.S. Capitol.

The highest civilian honor was posthumously awarded to three of the four Black female scientists whose accomplishments were described in the 2017 film, “Hidden Figures.”  It was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and grossed more than $200 million worldwide. They worked in a segregated unit of female mathematicians at what is now NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.

The awards were awarded posthumously, due to the fact that Johnson died at age 101 in February 2020 of natural causes at a retirement community in Newport News. Vaughn died at age 98 in November 2008 in Hampton. Jackson died in February 2005 at the age of 83. Darden, age 82, watched the recent ceremony from her Connecticut home. Their families accepted the awards on their behalf.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who delivered opening remarks during the ceremony, 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.”

Johnson said, “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.”

Meanwhile, Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the book “Hidden Figures,” said, “By honoring them, we honor the very best of our country’s spirit.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who also spoke at the recent ceremony, said, “Their legacy will send us back to the moon, and then imagine, just imagine, when we leave our footprints on the red sands of Mars,” he said. “Thanks to these people who are part of our NASA family, we will continue to sail on the cosmic sea to far off shores.”

A medal was also given to all the women who worked as mathematicians, engineers and “human computers” in the U.S. space program from the 1930s to 1970s, according to news reports.

Johnson and her co-workers were relatively unsung heroes of America’s Space Race until President Barack Obama awarded Johnson – then 97 – the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor in 2015.

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The recent ceremony was held nearly five years after the passage of H.R. 1396 – the Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act. The legislation was introduced in 2019 by the late Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson,  who represented Texas’s 30th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1993 to 2023. Johnson died at age 89, after she contracted an infection at a Dallas rehabilitation facility, in January 2024, according to news reports.

Later, her family accused the facility of neglect. On Sept. 21 (about four months before her death in January 2024), her son found his mother lying in her own feces and urine at the rehabilitation facility, according to a news release. Kirk Johnson said later at a news conference that he had gone to the facility after his mother called to tell him she was getting no response from the call button. He said he arrived about 10 minutes later.

“Deplorable,” he said. “She was being unattended to. She was screaming out in pain and for help.”

Johnson, the late Congresswoman, introduced legislation that tasked Congress with awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to Johnson, Jackson, Vaughan, Darden and “all the women who served as computers, mathematicians, and engineers” at NASA and NACA “between the 1930s and the 1970s.”