Tuesday, March 14, 2000
Jemison held onto dreams and reached dazzling heights
BY PERRY BROTHERS
The Cincinnati Enquirer
As a black girl growing up in the '60s, Dr. Mae Jemison would lie under the stars on Chicago's South Side and wonder what it would take to reach them. The least of her hurdles was her fear of heights.
But even as that little girl, she could envision herself among those stars and, eventually, Dr. Jemison, 44, reached them aboard the space shuttle Endeavour. She was the first woman of color to go into space.
On Monday night, she challenged a sellout crowd of 2,800 at the Aronoff Center for the Arts to use each second to take risks and make choices to create the lives they want.
“One might ask where did I get the audacity to think that I could go into space? How could I see myself in space when most of the children in public schools in Chicago thought that an engineer was the guy who drove the El train?” she said to the crowd.
The answer: She held onto that “determined, smiling little girl” and wasn't afraid to make tough choices.
That determination led her at age 16 to Stanford University, where she received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and an associate's degree in African and Afro-American studies. Before she was 25, she had graduated from Cornell University medical school. Two years later, she joined the Peace Corps and worked as a medical officer in West Africa before becoming a general practitioner in Los Angeles.
Dr. Jemison called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's switchboard in 1987 and asked how she could become an astronaut and a few years later, she was conducting medical experiments in the Earth's orbit.
“Really, what happens to us in any walk of life has to do with the choices we make in life,” Dr. Jemison said. “We all get to choose, in a certain sense, what we want to be.”
Her parents, Charles and Dorothy Jemison, gave her the power to envision what she wanted and to go after it, she said, regardless of the risks and obstacles.
When she resigned from NASA in 1993 to start a small advanced-technology company, Dr. Jemison relied again on the strength that her parents instilled and that determined little girl inside of her.
“We have to risk something that's unknown to us,” Dr. Jemison said. “Usually, the danger that we face is not a danger to us physically, it is a danger to our ego.”
With all that she has accomplished, the small steps are her most prized, she said.
As for reaching the stars?
“Everybody wants me to say going into space,” Dr. Jemison said, “but you just sit on the rocket and somebody else pushes the button.”
Dr. Jemison was the second of five speakers in this years Unique Lives & Experiences Women's Lecture Series. The series is sponsored in part by The Cincinnati Enquirer and presented by TriHealth. The next speaker in the sold-out series will be Barbara Bush on April 3.
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