Transcript
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Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
La Brega Podcast Narrator (1:33)
La Brega is back. This season we're spending time with the people and symbols that represent Puerto Rico.
Katie Charlwood (History Harlowt) (1:39)
We're proud boricuas. And what does that mean? And we are still in a fight.
La Brega Podcast Narrator (1:47)
We're telling stories about champions from a place worth fighting for. Stories that will inspire you no matter where you're from.
Katie Charlwood (History Harlowt) (1:56)
Wow.
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This is La Brega Campeones. Listen early and ad free with Futuro Plus.
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Katie Charlwood (History Harlowt) (2:26)
Hello delicious friends, and welcome to who did what Now. The history podcast. That is not your history class. With me, your host, Katie Charlwood, History Harlowt and reader of book books. So here's the thing. Complaints on my videos aren't new. Like, they happen all the time, Whether you've got 10 followers or 100,000 followers or whatever, right? And I, I get complaints and people have issues all the time. And some of them fair enough, others a bit weird, right? And I've noticed the same issue crop up a couple times, like over the last month specifically, which is weird. I don't know why so many people would have an issue regarding Black history during Black History Month. Now, apart from the fact that some people can't grasp that specific concept, which I feel like out of everything is the easiest part out of this. Now what the issue seems to be quite a lot recently. The the complaint that people are making is that in my videos, I'm talking about the Past events and people that have happened many years away from now. Like back the way right now. I don't like to call people stupid, you know, because I think it's a wee bit redundant. However, I do wonder, like, how smooth does your brain have to be for you to be upset that a historian is talking about the past? Like, what part of a historian discussing history like, doesn't make sense to you? Like, where. Where does that compute? Like, I don't. I don't get it. Anyway, anyway, I thought I'd share that with you. But anyway, that's not the point. Let's talk about someone amazing today. Listen, did you really think I was gonna go through Black History Month without talking about amazing women? As if. Okay. And of course I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Katie, quit your jibble jab of in fact me. Infact you I will. But first, next we've got to get our source on. Our sources are Black Women Scientists in the United States by Winnie Warren. Human Computers the Women in Aeronautical Research by Beverly Gilemba. Katherine Johnson by Shirley Malcolm. Katherine Johnson. The Girl who Loved to Count by Yvette Smith. The woman the Mercury astronauts couldn't do without by Margot Lee Shetterly. And of course, of course, Hidden the American Dream and the Untold Story of the black Women Mathematicians who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly. My Remarkable Journey by Katherine Johnson. And of course we have our old favourites, smithsonian.com and history.com are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then let's begin. Some of you may have seen the Inspired by a True Story 2016 movie. Hidden Figures like this is what Cold War era, specifically the space race where the USA and the USSR were competing to be the first to get a man well into space onto the moon. So on and so forth. Hidden figures focused primarily on three black women from the NASA program that successfully launched John Glenn into orbit and brought him back home again. Now it is a wee bit white savory, but other than that the performances are stellar. Like it's a good movie. I mean, from my very white perspective. So these three amazing women are Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and of course Katherine Johnson. And I'm going to focus on Katherine Johnson today. Now I am going to go back and talk about the other two at some point. But today we are going to celebrate Katherine Johnson. Criola Kathryn Coleman was born on 26 August 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, USA. She was the youngest of four children to Joylette Roberta Lowe, who was a teacher and Joshua McKinley Coleman a handyman, a farmer, a lumberjack, and later he would work at the Greenbrier Hotel. According to the 1910 census, Joshua owned the farm he worked on as opposed to being like a sharecropper, which effectively is tenant farming and is. So, yeah, sharecropping is basically being a tenant farmer where you would grow a certain amount of crops, you would give a lot of these crops to the landowner and you would make like a teeny weeny bit of money off it and you couldn't save any of the seeds, you couldn't do anything like that. And it was basically a way to kind of keep you sort of indentured, you know, I mean, anyway, he was not a sharecropper according to the census. So Catherine had three older siblings, Horace, Margaret and Charles. Please can we bring back the name Horace? It's just old names are fun. Let's bring them back. Horace. Cheltenham Primrose. These are all good. They're good names. I don't give a fuck. They're good names. Now it can be easy to dismiss someone with a sort of blue collar job, you know, a farmer, a plumber or whatever, and assume that because their jobs are physical, because it's manual labor, that they lack mental acuity. However, Catherine's father, Joshua had a mind for mathematics, something that Catherine seemed to have an inherent talent for. Sidebar. Yes, we're already on a sidebar. So my papa, so my maternal grandfather, he left at 14. He left the country, he went and started working like he worked in coal mines, he worked in irrigation. So like he literally was the person who laid pipe. And so at one point he was working for like gas lines for gas piping and he had made his way up like the council, like he'd made his way up, you know, he worked his way up effectively and he always did physically demanding jobs his entire life. But that man's mental arithmetic. I have never met anybody before or since who was that quick and like, not only that, he wasn't just like quick with maths, he was quick witted and clever and witty and dear God, what I would give to be that sort of quick and intelligent and funny. Like, it's just. Anyway, he was amazing and one of the most compassionate men like ever. And that's why I have fucking standards, yo. That's what I was raised with. And he was the only person who never made fun of me for struggling to eat certain foods. So yep, also we can all blame him for the reason that I love potatoes, because he used to just give me a big bowl of mash with ridiculous amounts of butter in it. So we can blame him for that. So back to Catherine. As a toddler, she took to numbers, counting everything she came across, right? Plates, cups, stars in the sky, everything. And like with three older siblings, you know, they're practicing their mathematics homework and things like that. So it's not surprising that as a child, like, she would practice with them, like, she would pay attention, she would take it on board. So she already had a better baseline for going in to apply this sort of natural talent to. And being the era that it was, the education system, well, it was segregated like everything else. And Greenbrier county, it did not have public schooling for African American students beyond eighth grade. So that's like 13, 14, isn't it? It is, it is. So Catherine, she excelled in school. Like, she was tip top in all of our subjects, but she really, really excelled in maths, in mathematics. So the Colemans, they had arranged for their children to attend. Like the Coleman children, they were attending a school on the campus at the West Virginia State Institute, which is like just outside Charleston. So the West Virginia State Institute was an all black college of which there were very few in the region, especially on the east coast. So, yeah, there is a school on the campus of the wvsc and the children were at the institute, like during the school year, and then they went back to White Sulphur Springs during the summer. So Catherine, she goes through all this and she graduates high school at 14. Then she attends the WSVC where she takes every single maths course that is available. Like, they actually added courses just for her, including analytic geometry in space. Yeah, so she's got like calculus, geometry, the other ones, the geometry in space, long division algebra. I don't. I'm not a mathematician. I would never claim to be. Maths is not my strong suit under any circumstances. I'm really good at counting money, though. For some reason, you put coins in front of me and I'm like. I'm like one of those coin counting machines. I'm like, good. That can't do anything else. Sorry about the sidebar, but if there's a practical application, I might be fine otherwise. No, so. So she's doing this, right? And she is excelling, unsurprisingly, like passing every single one of these courses with bells on. So she actually joins like a sorority when she's going through college as well. And so she just has, like a really good educational experience. And she graduated summer cum laude in 1937, at the age of 18, with degrees in mathematics and French. And so she was ready to make her way in the world. Everybody encouraged her to pursue a career in teaching, even though she was a black woman in the South. Wait, it is the South? Let me check. Yes, the Southern United States. Virginia and West Virginia are both in that. So okay, geography is also not my strong suit. You're thinking, Katie, how did you pass school? I was like, with great determination. So she is facing discrimination, right? Very open discrimination from supervisors and principals. Because not only is she in the south, but you're still, you know, in the midst. Like you're coming near the end of it, but you're still in the Great Depression. You know, it's not easy for anybody, let alone a black woman in the South. So she goes to the Marion Weth county in Virginia, where she got a job at Carnegie High School teaching maths and French. Oui, oui. While in Marion, Catherine met James Francis Goble and they fell in love and secretly got married. Now this may shock you, but the law wasn't just racist, it was sexist as well. Racism and misogyny. Best friends who knew see Virginia law and U.S. law prohibited married women from having teaching careers. Because of course you can have many flavors of discrimination. Granted, this law would be overturned in 1964, which is well over 25 years later, but it does get overturned. So Catherine ends up leaving teaching anyway to go to graduate school. Catherine was the first African American woman to attend graduate school at the previously all white West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. Basically, there was a Supreme court ruling in 1938, Missouri X Rail Gaines v. Canada, that required states to provide higher education to black students if it was already providing it to white students. This meant that universities would either have to integrate or the states would have to establish black colleges or universities. So they had two choices. They either integrate or they build more like spirit, specifically for black people. But unfortunately when more are built, they just put less funding into it. You know, they deliberately try prevent them from succeeding. Catherine was one of only three African American students to attend the university. And she was also the only black woman to attend. Now she only stays there a year. Now in her defence, she discovers that she's pregnant and so she leaves at the end of the summer session and for a while was a full time wife and mother. She and James go on to have three children together. Joylette is born in 1940, Constance in 1943, then Catherine in 1944. So this was a household. Like James, he was also like a science student. That's how they met. So they're both educated, they both love the sciences, they both love maths, and Catherine loves maths more than he does. But that's neither here nor there. But they are, they're happy together. But the house isn't like strictly an academic house. Like they, they love music. It's a very musical household. Like they play instruments. You've got like the violin, the cello, the piano and the organ. Like it's, you know, there's music, there's joy and you know, for the time that's in it, it's, you know, quite a happy household. Now for those of you who are good with dates, you may have clocked that this period of time is during World War II. Germany invaded Poland in 1939, setting off a chain reaction of alliances and attacks, right? So you've got the Axis powers versus the Allies. So you've got Germany, Italy, other ones. And then you've got the Allies, which is us, uk, France and Russia eventually. Cuz like Russia takes a wee while to actually like join the fight, but that's neither here nor there. Another group involved in this are Japan. So Japan, historically a country known to strike fast and strike harshly, had attacked Pearl harbor in 1941. And so that was really when the US like pumped up the gills and really jumped into the war. So large scale events like wars, although absolutely horrible and, you know, devastating, they breed necessity, right? So, so the First World War had led to a great leap forward in women's suffrage. So for some women, not all women, let's just make that clear, but it was still like a big step in the right direction. The Second World War was seen as an opportunity to make life better for black citizens in the usa, right? So you've got these leaps, like if everyone's involved, you're showing your patriotism, you're helping your country succeed, then you should be rewarded for that. So this would all in all make an opportunity for Catherine an opportunity for her to have a career as a professional mathematician. So Catherine had returned to teaching in 1944, teaching mathematics at a black school in Morgantown, West Virginia. So she had been teaching there for about eight years when her husband James's brother in law, so her sister in law's husband, he approaches her at a wedding to inform her that the government was hiring black women to work as mathematicians at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. So the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, naca, the precursor to NASA, were hiring both black and white mathematicians for Their guidance and navigational department, like that's what they were hiring for. And so this man in law, he knew that Catherine had studied and was teaching maths. And he also knew Dorothy Vaughan. So Dorothy, she had a good few women working for her at the West Area Computing Section at naca. She and her family lived in Newcombe park and this dude was the director of the Newcombe Park Community Centre. Now, this work opportunity, it was a no brainer, right? So for Catherine, she loved teaching, but this may shock you, but an African American teacher salary in the 1950s wasn't exactly breaking the bank. Catherine and James, they were struggling to stay afloat with both of their paychecks. And so they take this opportunity, they move to Newport News and joined the community in Newcombe park. And Catherine applies for the job at naca.
