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" Our next-door neighbour taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother's sorority, and electrical engineers sat on the board of my parents' college alumni associations. "

Margot Lee Shetterly

Mother

College

Leadership

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" Without imagination, I don't think there's any progress. "

" For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity. "

" We want the big stories, of course, of the great men, but there's as much drama and interest and lessons to be learned in actions that people like us take on a daily basis. "

" A lot of times, when you have a story of minorities in America, it's always this super, oppositional thing. It's segregation, it's the racism, and those are the hard facts of the story. "

" I was surprised how little I knew about the significant contributions to aviation that had happened right there in Hampton, Virginia. "

" Every time you go to an airport and get on a plane, you are basically taking advantage of the work that was done at Langley. Between World War I and World War II, they did just tremendous amount of fundamental research into basically making airplanes safer, making them more stable. "

" You need to decide that you're going to use a story to enlighten and inspire people in the modern day. "

" A lot of times, we talk about black people as if being black is all they are. They get up, go to work... and are as complex and interesting and variable as any other group of people. We don't often capture that or write about it. "

" As much as I think it is necessary and desirable for white people to have an expanded view of the black American experience, it's probably even more important for black people to have that expanded view. "

" The Russians had got a real head-start into space; America was playing catch-up. "

" It has been very rare to see a black woman as a protagonist. And also as three-dimensional people - mathematicians, mothers, wives, complicated people, not perfect. "

" You can't change history. These things happened the way they did. What you can change is how you look at it and how you understand that it takes the good moments and it takes the difficult moments to move forward. "

" Katherine Johnson actually integrated the public university in West Virginia. And Mary Jackson had to petition state courts to be allowed to attend an all-white college to get the qualifications needed to become an engineer. At every turn, these women were involved in the Second World War, the Cold War, the civil rights movement. "

" The black experience isn't exclusively slavery/civil rights/Obama. "

Margot Lee Shetterly

Black

Experience

" I feel like, in a lot of ways, 'Hidden Figures' is the book that I wrote and have been waiting to read since I learned to read. "

" You don't get the good without the bad, but you really do have to see it all in order to make progress. "

" I guess it's inevitable that I would become somebody who would write about scientists. "

" History happens as soon as I pick up my coffee cup - it happened 30 seconds ago. It's history. "

Margot Lee Shetterly

Cup

Coffee

" The success of 'Hidden Figures' proves that people are interested in, hungry for, stories about transcendent human experiences. "

" I want to keep telling stories of ordinary people. "

" My dad worked at NASA his whole career; he's a research scientist. "

Margot Lee Shetterly

Scientist

Career

" That's what 'Star Trek' was: We don't know how to make an ideal society, but we're going to portray that, and then we're going to work backward. I think that's why science fiction - despite the dystopian parts - comes out of this super ideal that, eventually, we will get to some better place where we actually live up to our ideals. "

" During World War II, hundreds of thousands of people actually - and among them many African-American - migrated to the Hampton Roads area because of the job boom that was happening. It was a place where you could get stable war jobs. "

" I knew a lot of black scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and female mathematicians and engineers, women of all backgrounds. So this idea that anyone could be an engineer, a mathematician, or whatever, was something that I had grown up with and thought was really normal. "