Steven Moss (born 1962or1963 [1] ) is an American author and educator known for co-writing We Could Not Fail, a book covering the lives of the first ten black Americans who worked for NASA.
Moss was educated at Texas Tech University, where he wrote his master's thesis on race issues concerning NASA. [1]
Moss is an associate professor of English at Texas State Technical College. [1]
Moss collaborated with Richard Paul, a radio producer who was working to document the lives of early black NASA employees, to write a book covering the lives of the first ten black engineers and scientists who had worked at NASA. [1] [2]
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Liberty County is a county in the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2010 census, its population was 75,653. The county seat is Liberty. The county was created in 1831 as a municipality in Mexico and organized as a county in 1837. It is named for the popular American ideal of liberty.
Mae Carol Jemison is an American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut. She became the first black woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Jemison joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1987 and was selected to serve for the STS-47 mission, during which she orbited the Earth for nearly eight days on September 12–20, 1992.
The Space Age is a period encompassing the activities related to the Space Race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events, beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1 during 1957, and continuing to the present.
Hispanic and Latino Americans are Americans of Spanish or Latin American ancestry. More broadly, these demographics include all Americans who identify as Hispanic or Latino regardless of ancestry. As of 2019, the Census Bureau estimated that there were almost 60.5 million Hispanics and Latinos living in the United States.
John Hope Franklin was an American historian of the United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Katherine Johnson was an American
Duchess Harris is an African-American academic, author, and legal scholar. She is a professor of American Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, specializing in Black feminism, Law of the United States, and African American political movements.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement protesting against incidents of police brutality and all racially motivated violence against black people. While there are specific organizations such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network that label themselves simply as "Black Lives Matter", the Black Lives Matter movement comprises a broad array of people and organizations. The slogan "Black Lives Matter" itself remains untrademarked by any group. The broader movement and its related organizations typically advocate against police violence toward black people as well as for various other policy changes considered to be related to black liberation.
Alicia Garza is an American civil rights activist and writer known for co-founding the international Black Lives Matter movement. She has organized around the issues of health, student services and rights, rights for domestic workers, ending police brutality, anti-racism, and violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people of color. Her editorial writing has been published by The Guardian, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and Truthout. She currently directs Special Projects at the National Domestic Workers Alliance and is the Principal at the Black Futures Lab.
Jeffery Shaun King is an American writer, civil rights activist and co-founder of Real Justice PAC. King uses social media to promote social justice causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement.
Kerby Jean-Raymond is an American fashion designer and founder of the menswear label Pyer Moss.
Dorothy Johnson Vaughan was an American mathematician and human computer who worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and NASA, at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. In 1949, she became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers, the first African-American woman to receive a promotion and supervise a group of staff at the center.
Hidden Figures is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by Theodore Melfi and written by Melfi and Allison Schroeder. It is loosely based on the 2016 non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly about African American female mathematicians who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Space Race. The film stars Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan, and Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson. Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst, Jim Parsons, Mahershala Ali, Aldis Hodge, and Glen Powell featured in supporting roles.
Margot Lee Shetterly is an American non-fiction writer who has also worked in investment banking and media startups. Her first book, Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016), is about African-American women mathematicians working at NASA who were instrumental to the success of the United States space program. She sold the movie rights while still working on the book, and it was adapted as a feature film of the same name, Hidden Figures (2016). For several years Shetterly and her husband lived and worked in Mexico, where they founded and published Inside Mexico, a magazine directed to English-speaking readers.
Mary Jackson was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. She took advanced engineering classes and, in 1958, became NASA's first black female engineer.
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race is a 2016 nonfiction book written by Margot Lee Shetterly. Shetterly started working on the book in 2010. The book takes place from the 1930s through the 1960s when some viewed women as inferior to men. The biographical text follows the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three mathematicians who worked as computers at NACA and NASA, during the space race. They overcame discrimination there, as women and as African Americans. Also featured is Christine Darden, who was the first African-American woman to be promoted into the Senior Executive Service for her work in researching supersonic flight and sonic booms.
Ijeoma Oluo is a Nigerian-American writer. She is the author of So You Want to Talk About Race and has written for The Guardian,Jezebel, The Stranger, Medium, and The Establishment, where she was also an editor-at-large.
Clyde Foster was an American scientist and mathematician. He worked for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and then for NASA, and from 1975 to 1986 was the head of Equal Employment Opportunity at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He is credited with setting up training programs that allowed hundreds of African Americans to get the training necessary for positions and promotions at NASA in Huntsville, when Alabama was segregated and African Americans were denied those opportunities. To that purpose he also helped found a Computer Science program at his alma mater, Alabama A&M University, a historically black university, where he headed the Computer Science program while on loan from NASA. In 1981 he was awarded the Philip A. Hart Award for his "significant contribution toward improving urban and working environments".
Morgan M. Watson is an American engineer and Professor of Engineering at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1963, he became part of the first cohort of African American engineers to work at NASA in the Deep South, working on the Apollo 11 mission that sent the first man to the Moon.