The Story of： Mae C. Jemison ｜ Storytime ｜ Black Voices in STEAM

Hi everybody and welcome! This is Teacher Bia. I'm one of the teachers at the Lawrence Hall of Science and I'm going to be telling today's story. This week on Storytime we are focusing on telling the stories of some amazing Black scientists that so often in our history are erased or forgotten in light of some current events that our nation and the world are now having conversations about. So we wanted to take this time to really celebrate Black voices in STEAM and today I'm going to be telling the story of one of my biggest inspirations and an amazing scientist that is Mae Jemison. In the description below you'll also be able to find a list of resources that we compiled with a few books about Black scientists and innovators and engineers as well as children's books that discuss race and how to be anti-racist. We also compiled a list of Black-owned bookstores in our area as well as some articles and other resources for parents and caregivers and educators to have conversations about this topic. But let's get started with today's story, shall we? All right, so this is our story for the day. Our story is about the incredible Mae Jemison. Right here on our front page you can already see a picture of Mae and you notice that her feet are not really touching the ground. That makes me wonder where could she be? Somewhere her feet cannot touch the ground. Are there any places on earth where that is possible? Well, let's keep reading our story and we might find out. So Mae grew up in the south side of Chicago with her parents and two older siblings and from a very young age since she was a kid she knew she wanted to study science and go into space. She was really interested about science and very curious. She would look at the stars and know that someday she wanted to be a little closer to them and she was particularly inspired by Nichelle Nichols' character in the TV show Star Trek. She played a character called Lieutenant Uhura and that's who you see on this picture over here and this is actually very important. At the time Mae was growing up there wasn't anyone that looked like her that had gone to space before. No woman had gone into space and no black person had gone into space either by the time Mae was growing up and this was a great example of something called representation. Representation is when we see ourselves represented on the screen and by seeing someone that looked like her, another black woman, a lieutenant in a spaceship, Mae got inspired and knew that she herself could also accomplish the same. So Mae Jemison was really impressive and she's also proved that nobody's limited on doing only one thing throughout their lives. One person can accomplish many many things. Mae went to college at only 16 years old. She went to Stanford University and she graduated with two degrees. One in chemical engineering because she wanted to do something called biomedical engineering at the time and she also majored in African and African-American studies. She was also a choreographer for a show. She was a dancer and she choreographed a show in college and she was also part of the Black Student Union in her college. She was a very talented dancer and after college she had to decide if she wanted to go into medical school or become a professional dancer. Both options super valid for Mae and then she ends up deciding to go to medical school. She tells in an interview that she had a conversation with her mom. One of the things her mom says was you can always dance if you're a doctor but you can't really doctor if you're a dancer. So she ends up going to medical school and during her training she went to a lot of different places. She did some research in Cuba and she also worked at a Cambodian refugee camp helping folks in Thailand. After she graduated from medical school she also worked as a doctor with the flying doctors in West Africa in Liberia and Sierra Leone but she still wanted to go into space. She had that dream from when she was a kid so she decided to apply for NASA's astronaut training program and she was one of 15 folks that were selected from over 2,000 applicants and on September 12, 1992 Mae Jemison flew into space on the STS-47 mission in the space shuttle Endeavor. Mae was in space for 190 hours 30 minutes and 23 seconds. Here you can see a picture of her in her space suit and when she went to space she decided to take with her items that represented folks that weren't often included in endeavors like this. She took a poster of the dancer Judith Jemison performing the dance spry. She took a boonjoo statue representative of a woman's society in West Africa. She took a flag of the Alpha Kappa Alpha that is the oldest African-American woman sorority in the United States and she also took a picture of Bessie Coleman that is the first black and indigenous woman to have a pilot license in the United States and she thought that it was very important to take these items with her when she was leaving the earth and going on this amazing adventure. While she was in space she contributed to a lot of different research projects and did a lot of scientific experiments in there. So now if you think about the picture we saw in the beginning of our story when her feet weren't touching the ground now you know that the reason why her feet weren't touching the ground on that picture is that that picture was taken in space. Mae became an astronaut. So after her mission with NASA she resigned and then she came to appear in an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. If you remember in the very beginning of our story we talk about how she was inspired by Star Trek character Lieutenant Uhura and later she herself got to be a part of the Star Trek universe appearing in an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. And she also founded Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence. It was named after her mother and her foundation works on supporting advancements in science and discovery especially for those who are marginalized who are not often included in programs like this. One of the one of the projects that her foundation supports is called a 100 year starship project and it has the intention of advancing science in order for space exploration beyond our solar system to be possible within the next 100 years. And that is a very innovative and very exciting project that I'm sure it's very fun to be a part of. She also wrote a book and if you want to learn more about Mae Jemison coming from her own words that's one of the options of something that you can read it's called Find Where the Wind Goes by Dr. Mae Jemison. I will also include some links to interviews and talks with her on the description below so if you want to hear what Mae has to say from her own voice make sure to check the description below and look at some of the videos. I want to end today's story time by leaving you with a quote by Dr. Mae Jemison. She says don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, and your curiosity. It is your place in the world. It is your life. Go on and do all you can with it and make it the life you want to live. I think this quote is extremely powerful especially coming from Mae Jemison. As a Black woman she says that oftentimes she has heard from folks that her dreams were too big. Her dreams were not possible for her. She talks about having a certain arrogance and confidence that were very important for her to be able to block off those comments. Even though people would make comments in order to put her down she knew those things were not true and best of all she went on to prove everyone wrong by accomplishing her dreams. All right my friends thank you so much for joining me on hearing the story and learning about Mae Jemison. I'm very honored to be able to share her story with you. Make sure to subscribe to our channel so you never miss another video or having more story times like this celebrating other Black innovators and scientists and mathematicians coming up and make sure to check our resource list linked on the description. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time here at the Lawrence at Home.