NASA has renamed its headquarters after Mary W. Jackson, the agency’s first Black female engineer

On Wednesday, NASA announced that the agency is renaming its headquarters in Washington, D.C. after Mary W. Jackson, a woman who stood against gender and racial discrimination to become NASA’s first Black female engineer. Jackson was an influential mathematician and aerospace engineer who become a program manager, a position she used to hire and promote NASA’s future female engineers.

“Mary W. Jackson was part of a group of very important women who helped NASA succeed in getting American astronauts into space,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a press release. “Mary never accepted the status quo, she helped break barriers and open opportunities for African Americans and women in the field of engineering and technology.”

Jackson was featured in Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, a book about the team of women who worked in the segregated area of NASA’s Langley Research Center during the 1930s through 1960s. These highly educated women were employed as “human computers” who did mathematics and calculations by hand in an era when electronic computers weren’t commonly used. But despite the importance of their work, Black female mathematicians like Jackson were segregated in the workplace and blocked from obtaining promotions or stepping into certain fields. Continue reading.