95 Quotes by Margot Lee Shetterly

West Virgina never left Katherine's heart, but Virginia was her destiny.

They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons, warding off the presumption of inferiority because they were Negro or female.

As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.

It had always been Katherine Goble's great talent to be in the right place at the right time.

But having the independence of mind and the strength of personality to defend your work in front of the most incisive aeronautical minds --- that is what got you noticed.... That's what marked you as someone who should move ahead.

At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible.

For twelve school years, every morning, she had turned left out the front door to get to work. Now the taxi turned right, spiriting her off in the opposite direction.

You can't leave the show," King told Nichols. "We are there because you are there." Black people have been imagined in the future, he continued, emphasizing to the actress how important and ground breaking a fact that was. Furthermore, he told her, he had studied the Starfleet's command structure and believed that it mirrored that of the US Air Force, making Uhura --- a black woman! --- fourth in command of the ship.

The black female mathematicians who walked into Langley in 1943 would find themselves at the intersection of these great transformations, their sharp minds and ambitions contributing to what the United States would consider one of its greatest victories.