Hidden Figures Fact Check: Who Were Katherine Johnson’s Two Husbands?

Are hidden Figures Fact Check: Who Were Katherine Johnson’s Two Husbands a question on your mind? Find out key explanations in our feature story.

Before Katherine Johnson became a national icon, she was Katherine Coleman, an astonishingly gifted student from White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. In 1939, while teaching school in Marion, Virginia, she married James Francis Goble. Goble was a charismatic chemistry teacher who recognized his wife’s once-in-a-generation intellectual capacity from the day they met.

Their early married life involved steady sacrifices. When Katherine became pregnant, she stepped away from teaching and from her groundbreaking graduate studies at West Virginia University, where she had been selected as one of three Black students, and the only woman, to desegregate the graduate school. Together, the couple welcomed three daughters: Constance Goble, Joylette Goble, and Marion Goble. To support their growing family, James worked as a chemistry teacher and later took a position in a shipyard, prompting the family to relocate to Newport News, Virginia, in 1952.

That move altered the course of American scientific history. A relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA's predecessor agency, was hiring Black women mathematicians at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. Katherine applied, joined the segregated West Area Computers unit in June 1953, and quickly distinguished herself with her analytical speed. James Goble celebrated her appointments, encouraging her to push deeper into federal research despite the rigid Jim Crow barriers of the era.