By Luke Parker
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
Mae C. Jemison, a doctor and engineer who became the first woman of color to go into space, stressed the importance of diversity and inclusion in scientific and societal innovation while speaking to an enormous, enthusiastic crowd recently at the Enoch Pratt Central Library in Baltimore.
“When we talk about the global challenges that we face in the world today…we have a lot of capability,” Jemison said Wednesday evening. “You can look over and over again and see how it wasn’t until we got more people involved that we got the world changed.”
Jemison, a NASA astronaut who boarded the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992 and whose career has since included engineering, education and entrepreneurship, was the latest guest speaker to headline the library’s Brown Lecture Series. The ongoing program, sponsored by the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Foundation, serves Baltimore by hosting prominent African American voices and broadcasting them on the stage.
Meghan McCorkell, the library system’s director of marketing and communications, said Jemison was a “natural fit” for the series, one who sparked instantaneous and uproarious enthusiasm from members of the community.
The overflowing audience, which awarded Jemison with two standing ovations and many interruptive bouts of applause throughout the night, included several young children dressed in astronaut suits, many of whom proceeded to wrap themselves around the library hall for 90 minutes after the presentation just to get a picture with her.
“She’s such a groundbreaking person in terms of science and art,” explained Caroline Appel, an art teacher and parent whose first-grade daughter Sofia sat quietly on her lap throughout the presentation. “As a female, it’s really wonderful to have somebody for Sofia to look up to.”
Having grown up in Chicago, where she played with chemistry sets and Barbie dolls and first watched the original “Star Trek” television series, Jemison decided early in her childhood that she was going to go to space. She excelled in high school and entered Stanford University at the age of 16. Admittedly “arrogant,” Jemison said she was thrown aback when her professors discouraged her from pursuing a career in science.
“I never had teachers who did that before,” Jemison explained in an interview following the lecture. “If they’re looking at who’s going to be a professor or a researcher, they’re looking for people that look like them…and we really need to start changing that. That’s an expectation that goes deep within science itself.”
That expectation was similarly placed upon Jemison’s former employer, NASA. According to the agency’s Astronaut Fact Book, as of 2017, only one graduating class of trainees had equal representation among men and women, and even then, it was only comprised of four men and four women. In addition, in terms of interactional achievement, while the first all-female spacewalk at the International Space Station was accomplished last October, no woman has yet stepped foot on the moon.
Jemison introduced her 100 Year Starship initiative, a project dedicated to ensuring that capabilities exist for human travel to extend beyond the solar system within the next 100 years. She mentioned the significance of other women of color in the field like Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Katherine Johnson, women whose underappreciated work as NASA mathematicians was adapted in 2016 into the Oscar-nominated film “Hidden Figures.” She added the names of Jeanette Epps, and Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman to go to space.
When originally proposing the ambitious interstellar project, which has since been funded through a competitive grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Jemison said she made sure that the first word of her vision reflected the intrinsic value she finds in diversity: “inclusive.”