Evolution occurred in scientific progress as it happened in nature: a positive trait was passed along, then proliferated; obsolete characteristics withered away, and the technology and the organization evolved into something new.
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.
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.
I remember 'The Norfolk Journal and Guide,' which is a black newspaper that still exists, but it was really influential, as you can imagine, in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. But all of their archives are online and digitized, and it was a really great resource.
I was surprised how little I knew about the significant contributions to aviation that had happened right there in Hampton, Virginia.
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.
Five of my father's seven siblings made their bones as engineers or technologists, and some of his best buddies - David Woods, Elijah Kent, Weldon Staton - carved out successful engineering careers at Langley.
History happens as soon as I pick up my coffee cup - it happened 30 seconds ago. It's history.
How do we fill the need for technology workers, people who have computer skills and math and science skills? How do we get a more diverse science workforce? These are all issues - I would look at these documents that were from the '50s and '60s and '70s, and you'd swear they were written two weeks ago because the issues are the same.
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.
You need to decide that you're going to use a story to enlighten and inspire people in the modern day.
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.
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.
Growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.
As a callow 18-year-old leaving for college, I'd seen my home town as a mere launching pad for a life in worldlier locales, a place to be from rather than a place to be.
My dad joined Langley in 1964 as a co-op student and retired in 2004 an internationally respected climate scientist.
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.
My dad worked with Mary Jackson very closely at one point. I knew Katherine Johnson as well. They were all part of this group of black engineers and scientists within this larger NASA community.
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.
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.
