KATHERINE JOHNSON
“I like to learn. That’s an art and a science."
Katherine Johnson was born as Katherine Coleman on August 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, U.S.A. Even when she was very young, it was apparent to her family that she had inherited her father’s brilliant mind for math.
By the age of ten, Katherine had begun attending high school. At the age of fourteen, she became a student at West Virginia State College, a historically black college. (“Historically black colleges and universities” were institutions of higher education in the United States that were established before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the intention of primarily serving the African-American community. This was because the overwhelming majority of predominantly white institutions of higher-learning disqualified African Americans from enrollment during segregation). In 1937, just eighteen years old, she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and French.
She then moved to Virginia to become a teacher. She was very happy as a teacher, but when she fell in love with and married James Goble, they had to keep their marriage a secret so that she could keep her job. In the 1930s, married women were not allowed to teach.
In 1940, Katherine became the first African-American student ever to enroll in West Virginia University’s graduate school. She attended their summer program that year, and continued to excel in her studies.
At the end of the summer, she found out that she was going to have a baby. At the time, that meant she would have to leave school to take care of her new child. Katherine and James eventually had three daughters. In 1944, she started teaching again at her local high school.
At a family wedding in 1952, she spoke to her husband’s brother-in-law, who had heard that the government was hiring mathematicians to work in the Guidance and Navigation Department at NACA, the National Committee for Aeronautics. In 1953, NACA hired her. From 1953 to 1958, she worked as a “computer” (a person performing mathematical calculations; before electronic computers became commercially available, teams of people were frequently used to undertake long and often tedious calculations). Alongside a group of other women “computers” she did complicated calculations by hand for NACA’s engineers.
These calculations could help them build planes that could fly better and