Mae Jemison, First African-American Woman in Space

Just like every kid, I loved space. An African proverb says, no one shows a child the sky. And so I remember very much growing up in the 1960s on the south side of Chicago. And I would stare up at the stars always and imagine that I would go there. But I grew up during this time that was incredible in terms of the work and the effort, the activities that were going on. Because every day, they were breaking speed records, whether it's on the land, or ground, or track, or field. Every day, it seemed like there was a new particle being discovered. Growing up in the 1960s, I played with Barbie dolls. I loved chemistry, original series Star Trek thing. And I also pondered the concepts of Infinity and the Big Bang. I wanted to go into the sciences. But I also wanted to be a dancer. I loved Judith Jameson, Lola Falana, Jerome Robbins. All of those things are part of my life. And also remember the riots in Chicago in 1968 following Martin Luther King's assassination and the Democratic National Convention had been held in Chicago that year. And I remember how everyone always talked about the 60s as being anarchic. It was anarchy. But the reality is there were so many things we thought we could change and do. I was a little too young to be really involved in it. But there were so many things we thought we could change and do. And the world wanted, people wanted to be a part of it. So I'm really of that generation that thinks that there's so much more we can do. And I always assumed that I would go into space, even though at that time there were no women in space, except for Valentina Tereshkova. But I would assume that I'd go there. So these are my for-proof-of pictures. So we know that I was there. But the reason why I'm doing this, the reason why I want to tell you this and where we're going to, is because people talk about the good old days and the 1960s and Apollo, which was an incredible time. But Frantz Fanon, who was a Martinican psychiatrist in the 1950s and 60s, he said, each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. We can't have the same mission that we had in the 1960s, whether it's social, cultural, whether it's environmental, or whether it's in space.