(18 Sep 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Washington DC – 18 September 2024
1. Various cutaway of Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony with officials and honorees arriving
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Rep. Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House:
"Congressional Gold Medal is the highest honor that Congress can bestow upon any group or individual, and we give it to show our national appreciation for the achievements and contributions of great Americans. Today, pursuant to H.R. 1396, we have the great pleasure of finally awarding this medal to the Hidden Figures."
++SEPARATED BY WHITE FLASH++
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Rep. Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House:
"At a time in America when our nation was divided by color and often by gender, these women dared to step into the fields where they had previously been unwelcomed. They excelled in science and math and made groundbreaking contribution in aeronautics. But these women didn’t just crunch numbers and solve equations for the space program, they actually laid the very foundation upon which our rockets launched, and our astronauts flew and our nation soared. And although we call them hidden figures, we shouldn’t think of them merely as supporting characters in the American story of space exploration. Exploration. They were the engineers and mathematicians who actually wrote the story itself."
++SEPARATED BY WHITE FLASH++
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator
"The pioneers that we honor today. These hidden figures, their courage and imagination, brought us to the moon and their lessons, 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 . Thanks to these people who are part of our NASA family, we will continue to sail on the cosmic sea to far off cosmic shores."
5. Various cutaway of Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony with Speaker Jeffries handing posing with family members of Katherine Johnson, Doctor Christine Darden, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan
STORYLINE:
The hidden figures of the space race were recognized with Congress’ highest honor at a medal ceremony on Wednesday.
The Congressional Gold Medal was presented to the families of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden at the U.S. Capitol. Darden watched the ceremony from her Connecticut home.
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.
The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – a precursor to NASA – hired hundreds of women to crunch numbers for space missions. The Black women hired worked in a segregated unit of female mathematicians at what is now NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.
Johnson’s hand-written calculations helped John Glenn become the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 – the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Vaughan rose to become NASA’s first Black supervisor and Jackson was NASA’s first Black female engineer. Darden is best known for her sonic boom research.
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