She was born in a working-class family in
Savannah,
Georgia, with three sisters and a brother. She attended school at Moses Jackson, in a segregated neighborhood. Very early, she fell in love with mathematics, and credits this love to her 7th grade maths teacher, Walter B. Simmons. She graduated class valedictorian from high school at
Thompkins High School in 1963. and assumed that her degree would lead her to become a teacher. According to Lee, Boeing was a diverse place. In an interview for 1010 WINS' with Larry Mullins in 2018, she said: "You had a lot of people there - a lot of people from all different cultures - and we all worked together." After two years working for Boeing/NASA, Johnson then went to work at Pfizer, Inc., where she became Project Leader for the Corporate Information Technology Division. She is married to J. Frank Johnson, the owner of an accounting, tax, audit, and advisory services company, with whom she has three children. == References ==