Katherine Johnson
liked to say that she
joined the space pro-
gram when “computers
wore skirts.” She was one of several
hundred women who performed
complex calculations for NASA’s
engineers—who, unlike John son,
were white and male—using little
more than slide rules and pencils.
Possessing a fine mathematical mind,
John son became the first black member of the
agency’s elite Flight Research Di vi sion. There,
she calculated the trajectory for the 1961 rocket
launch that made Alan Shepard the first Amer i-
can in space, and the following year helped John
Glenn become the first Amer i can to orbit Earth.
In 1969, her math got Neil Arm strong and Buzz
Al drin to the moon and back. Yet John son’s con-
tributions went largely unheralded until her story
and that of other black “computers” was told in
the hit 2016 movie Hid den Fig ures. She seemed
indifferent to the overdue attention. “I was just
doing my job,” John son said in 2017. “They
needed information, and I had it.”
She was born in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.,
to a teacher mother and a farmer father, said
The Wash ing ton Post. A math prodigy, Johnson
recalled counting everything as a child: “the steps
to the road, the steps up to church, the number ofdishes and silverware I washed.” Her
hometown’s segregated school system
ended at age 12 for black children,
so Johnson’s mother took the kids
125 miles to Institute, W.Va., where
Johnson graduated high school at- She entered West Virginia State
the next year, but after graduating
found there were few opportunities
“for black female teenage math-
ematicians,” said The New York
Times. She worked as a schoolteacher until 1952,
when she heard that Langley Research Center
in Virginia—then run by NASA’s predecessor
agency—was hiring black female “computers.”
Johnson and her black colleagues were told to use
separate offices and bathrooms “from their white
counterparts, until the birth of NASA in 1958,”
said The Guardian (U.K.). Despite such racist pol-
icies, Johnson thrived at the research facility and
became a vital part of its operation. Glenn refused
to fly his 1962 mission until Johnson verified a
trajectory produced by an electronic computer. “If
she says they’re good,” he said, “then I’m ready
to go.” Johnson would spend 33 years at Langley,
and in 2015 was awarded the Medal of Freedom
by President Barack Obama. Her formulas are
still in use today. “If we go back to the moon, or
to Mars,” said NASA’s chief historian, Bill Barry,
“we’ll be using her math.”
B. Smith broke a series
of color barriers to turn
her name into a lifestyle
brand. After starting
her career as a model, she became a
restaurateur with eponymous bistros
in New York City, Long Island, N.Y.,
and Wash ing ton, D.C. Smith spun
her success in the food world into a
syndicated TV show (B. Smith With
Style), a magazine, cookbooks, and a
home-product line—the first by a black
woman to be sold at a national retailer. Her multi-
faceted success led many to label Smith the “black
Mar tha Stew art,” a comparison she found well-
meaning but shortsighted. “Mar tha Stew art has
presented herself doing the things domestics and
African- Americans have done for years,” she said
in 1997. “We were always expected to redo the
chairs and use everything in the garden. This is the
legacy that I was left. Martha just got there first.”
Barbara Smith grew up in western Pennsylvania,
said The New York Times, where her father was
a steelworker and her mother a part-time maid
“with a flair for interior decorating that she had
once hoped to make her career.” From a young
age, “Smith was a whirlwind.” She delivered
newspapers, sold lemonade, and went door-to-door selling magazines with her
father, a Jehovah’s Witness. Barred
from joining the Future Homemakers
of America because of her race, “she
started her own home economics
club and named herself president.”
As a teenager, Smith took Saturday
classes at a modeling school— having
first convinced her father it was a
finishing school. Her big modeling
break came in 1969, when she joined
the Ebony Fashion Fair and went on
tour across the U.S. “Along the way she shortened
her first name to B.”
In 1976, Smith became only the second black
model “to appear on the front of Mademoiselle
magazine,” said The Wash ing ton Post. After
unsuccessful attempts to branch out into singing
and acting, she embraced her “longtime passion
for food” and jumped into the restaurant business.
The first B. Smith bistro opened in Man hattan in
1986, and quickly became a favorite spot of black
professionals. Her empire grew to include “house-
wares, bed linens, and even an At Home With
B. Smith furniture line,” said NPR.org. Smith, who
was diagnosed with Alz heimer’s in 2013, saw a
clear line running through it all. “Being a model is
about fantasy,” she said. “And so is entertaining.”Obituaries
B. Smith
1949–2020AP (2)
The ‘hidden figure’ who put astronauts in space
The trailblazing model who built a lifestyle empire
Katherine
Johnson
1918–2020 To a small band of critics
and fans, Charles Portis was
America’s greatest unknown
author. Equipped with a
deadpan sense of humor
and an appe-
tite for the
absurd, Portis
wrote five
novels popu-
lated with oddballs, kooks,
and con artists. He set the
tone with his 1966 debut
Norwood, a road-trip tale
featuring a circus midget and
a tic-tac-toe–playing chicken,
and found his greatest suc-
cess with 1968’s True Grit. A
Wes tern, it revolves around
Marshal Rooster Cogburn,
“an old one-eyed jasper that
was built along the lines of
Grover Cleve land.” True Grit
was made into a 1969 block-
buster starring John Wayne.
But Portis shunned the fame
it brought him, refusing to
be interviewed and living a
quiet life in Little Rock, Ark.
Portis had “the old-fashioned
notion that he said what he
had to say on the page,” said
journalist and acquaintance
Carlo Rotella.
Portis was born in El Dorado,
Ark., to a teacher father
and journalist mother. After
graduating high school,
Portis “signed up to the
Marines and fought in the
Korean War,” said The Daily
Telegraph (U.K.). He became
a reporter on his return to the
U.S., covering the civil rights
movement for the New York
Herald Tribune and serving
as the paper’s London bureau
chief for a year. But in 1964,
he quit journalism, moved to
a fishing shack in Arkansas,
and wrote Norwood.
His reluctance to talk to the
media may have been trace-
able to his reporting days,
“when intruding on people’s
lives was part of the job
description,” said The New
York Times. Portis likely used
Mattie Ross, the narrator of
True Grit, to voice his own
feelings on the press. “I do
not fool around with news-
papers,” Mattie says. “The
paper editors are great ones
for reaping where they have
not sown.”Charles
Portis
1933–202035
The elusive author
who found unwanted
fame with True Grit