"Dr. Jemison embodies self-determination, creativity and the importance of giving back to one's community," says museum president Christy Coleman. "She's about living a legacy, but also about creating a legacy through her foundations and other efforts."
'COURAGE, ENERGY & DRIVE': African American Museum honoree Mae Jemison tells how she found success
February 19, 2003
BY CASSANDRA SPRATLING
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
There's no one route to success, but a big part of it involves believing in yourself, expecting it and preparing for it, says Dr. Mae C. Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space.
"If you think about your intentions, you'll figure out a way to make it happen," Jemison says. "If you doubt yourself, your doubts have a niggling way of becoming magnified."
Instead of dwelling on obstacles, focus on doing things in spite of obstacles, she advises.
"I always assumed I'd go into space," she says. "As far as I knew I always would." But Jemison's accomplishments neither begin nor end in the sky.
For her many achievements, Jemison is this year's Ford Freedom Scholar -- part of an annual celebration of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History that honors a living legend by paying tribute to one who is deceased. The deceased honoree receives the Ford Freedom Award.
This year's Ford Freedom Award will go to Daniel (Chappie) James, the first African American in U.S. military history to achieve the rank of four-star general.
Today a brass plaqueengraved with James' name will be placed in the museum's floor of fame, called the Ring of Genealogy, with other distinguished African Americans, including the former Detroit mayor Coleman Young and poet Langston Hughes. On Thursday Jemison will give a lecture in James' honor.
"Dr. Jemison embodies self-determination, creativity and the importance of giving back to one's community," says museum president Christy Coleman. "She's about living a legacy, but also about creating a legacy through her foundations and other efforts."
Jemison doesn't recall exactly when she learned of James.
"It seems I've known of him from when I was little," she says. "In our home, we always knew about black history. My mother saw to that." Not so much with sit-down-and-listen lessons, but as part of the everyday conversation in their Chicago home where she grew up with an older sister and brother.
While she never met James -- he died in 1978 -- Jemison suspects they had some experiences in common.
"He probably had to deal with some of the same issues of stereotyping I've had to deal with. People asking, "What does space have to do with us?' "
"I'd say, 'We're a part of this, too. We have to be involved in every facet of this world.' "
She believes she was prepared to reach her dream of going into space by growing up in a home where learning and service were expected and encouraged.
"We were expected to do well," she says. "Just like you expect your child to walk."
Excelling academically seemed to come naturally because she enjoyed it. Among her achievements:
# At age 16 she entered Stanford University, where she earned a degree in chemical engineering and enough credits for a degree in African and African-American Studies.
# She earned her medical degree from Cornell University in 1981 and from 1983 to 1985 served in the Peace Corps in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
# In 1992 she became the first African-American woman to fly into space. Aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, she served as the science specialist conducting numerous experiments.
Currently, she runs a summer space camp in Houston for children and heads her own company, the Jemison Group. One of its primary projects is developing medical devices that enhance people's abilities to improve their own health and physical performance.
Jemison resists being put on the role model pedestal. She says the term has been overused and misused. It gives public figures more credit than they deserve for influencing youths and others.
"You learn success or failure from the adults around you," she says. "Children do not learn from public figures how to finish their homework. It can be reinforced by public figures. But the real gut of who you are generally comes from the folks around you."
The folks around her who were Jemison's greatest influences were her mother -- a schoolteacher -- and her father, a carpenter, and teachers who encouraged and challenged her to do things outside the regular curriculum.
Much of what she learned from her parents and teachers came from their actions more than their words.
Her mother, Dorothy Jemison, once worked cleaning other people's homes but went on to earn her bachelor's and master's degrees while raising three children. Jemison also remembers her mother staying up late nights before Christmas wrapping gifts for her students.
"I learned that what you give comes back to you," she says. "If we're members of society, we have to support that society. These are things I learned by example."
By hanging out with her father, Charlie Jemison, and his male friends she inadvertently learned that gender doesn't determine what a person does or doesn't do.
"We hunted and fished and played Bid Whist (a card game), together," she says. "Some girls are taught to be quiet and mannerly and those traits don't hold you in good stead in every situation. And my father plaited my hair and cooked.
"Because of my dad, it was easy for me to feel I have a right to be where I am later on."
Not that public figures don't matter. Jemison always loved dancing, but at one point in her life she thought she was too tall -- she's 5 foot 10 -- to pursue dance.
"When I saw Judith Jamison, that was very helpful to me," Jemison says. Jamison is close to 6-feet tall.
Jemison studied dance through early adulthood. She still dances, but mostly privately in the dance studio in her Houston home.
Others she admires include Bessie Coleman, Nichelle Nichols and Linus Pauling.
Coleman was the world's first black person licensed to fly a plane.
"She had to go to France to get her license, but she did what she had to do," Jemison says. "Do you know how much courage, energy and drive that took?"
Nichols, starred as Lt. Uhura on the "Star Trek" series. But it's not Nichols' on-screen role that most impresses Jemison. Without pay, Nichols recruited women and African Americans to the space program.
Although Nichols didn't recruit Jemison, the two later became good friends. Jemison later starred in an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Pauling is the only person to have ever won two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and the other for peace efforts.
Jemison admires Pauling for the way he used scientific knowledge for humanitarian purposes.
Overcoming her fears
Jemison's hunger to learn and do things sometimes had to override her fears. She recalls that as a child she was afraid of heights. But she desperately wanted to take dance classes. To get to classes, she had to take an el train, which meant climbing up steps to board it.
It's one of many experiences she wrote about in a book about her life, "Find Where The Wind Goes: Moments From My Life," (Scholastic, $4.99). Whenever she faced challenging moments in space she called upon the image of the little girl who overcame her fears to get to what she wanted.
"I said if she can do it, I can too," she says. "It's a level of fortitude."
But being on the Endeavour was not the most challenging experience of her life.
"There were aspects of it that were challenging," she says. "But you have to remember, by the time I was chosen I had already been a doctor in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where I was on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and I didn't have ready access to many conveniences." This month's explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia left her numbed and saddened, she says. All seven crew members aboard were killed. But in no way should it stop space exploration, she says.
"Everybody on board wanted to be there," she says. "There are few times in your life when you get to be exactly where you want to be. You know you are risking your life for your country and human advancement when you sign on."
Despite her own tremendous success, Jemison hesitates to give prescriptions for success.
"Everybody wants a nice simple path in life to point to and say, 'Oh, here's how it's done,' " she says. "They don't want to use wisdom and judgment. Experience comes from falling, falling and smiling and picking yourself up and moving on," she says.
Contact CASSANDRA SPRATLING at 313-223-4580 or spratling@freepress.com
