Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.