It was the first time a woman in her division received credit as an author of a research report. In 1960 she coauthored a paper with one of the group’s engineers about calculations for placing a spacecraft into orbit. That changed in 1958 when NACA was incorporated into the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which banned segregation.Īt NASA Johnson was a member of the Space Task Group. During this time, NACA was segregated, and the West Computers had to use separate bathrooms and dining facilities. The women, known as the West Computers, analyzed test data and provided mathematical computations that were essential to the success of the early U.S. In 1953 she began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)’s West Area Computing unit, a group of African American women who manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the program’s engineers. A photograph from the 1960s shows Katherine Johnson at work at her desk at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).He died in 1956, and three years later she married James Johnson. She studied math there but soon left after marrying James Goble and deciding to start a family. In 1939, however, she was selected to be one of the first three African American students to enroll in a graduate program at West Virginia University. She subsequently moved to Virginia to take a teaching job. In 1937, at age 18, Coleman graduated with highest honours from West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University), earning bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and French. Coleman’s intelligence and skill with numbers became apparent when she was a child, and, by the time she was 10 years old, she had started attending high school.