Yahoo Autos Nasa’s DC headquarters renamed after ‘Hidden Figures’ engineer Mary Jackson
Nasa is renaming its DC headquarters to honour Mary Jackson, the administration’s first Black female engineers who was one of the inspirations behind the film Hidden Figures.
The headquarters naming ceremony will take place this Friday (26 February) at 1pm ET. It will be live-streamed on YouTube, as well as on the agency’s Twitter and Facebook accounts and on its app.
After the ceremony, the building will be known as the Mary W Jackson Headquarters Building. It was previously known as Nasa Headquarters.
Born in 1921 in Hampton, Virginia, Jackson first worked as a math teacher in Calvert County, Maryland. After several professional changes, she joined the segregated West Area Computing section of Nasa’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1951.
Looking to be promoted from mathematician to engineer, Jackson needed to complete graduate math and physics courses at a high school that was then segregated. As a Black student, Jackson had to obtain special permission from the City of Hampton to attend the classes.
