Okay but while that’s awesome, it doesn’t even scratch the surface of how amazing she is.
First of all she started at Stanford when she was sixteen. While she was there she had to put up with racist and sexist professors not taking her seriously and pretty much ignoring her but she was basically just too stubborn to let them stop her from majoring in BOTH chemical engineering and African and Afro-American Studies while choreographing dance productions and running Stanford’s Black Student Union.
Then when she finished college she was trying to decide whether she wanted to go to med school or become a professional dancer and she basically just went “Why not both?” and went to med school but kept dancing at the same time. She’s still a really big supporter of crossover between science and art.
ANYWAY when she graduated from med school she joined the Peace Corps as a Medical Officer and was in charge of the treatment of something like 400 other volunteers in Sierra Leon and Liberia. (Also one time everyone was saying a patient had malaria and she was like “no that’s meningitis” and had the patient flown to Germany for treatment and the Air Force was like “you don’t have the authority” and she told them “I don’t need anyone’s permission” and the patient lived)
SO THEN she was like “I knew that I wanted to go into space as a kid, why can’t I still do that?” so she applied to NASA and got rejected but she still wanted to be an astronaut so she applied again and got accepted. Her mission took place in 1992, and like OP said she was the first woman of color (FROM ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD) to go into space.
She resigned from NASA in 1993, which was also when she was contacted to be on Star Trek by LeVar Burton. The fact that she was the first astronaut to be on Star Trek is especially awesome because she credits seeing Nichelle Nichols on the original Star Trek as helping to inspire her to apply to NASA. (Also she would do stuff during the mission like start her communications with “hailing frequencies open” because if you’re in outer space you can’t really pass up the opportunity to make tons of Star Trek references)
Since being in NASA she’s been an advocate for getting minority students in STEM fields, started a company that deals with technology for everyday life, and founded the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence (named after her mom) which has an INTERNATIONAL summer camp for kids that has them working on solving global issues because kids can do awesome things if they are given the opportunity.
This got way longer than I planned but yeah: Mae Jemison is incredible and has done so many amazing things in her life. She is also by far my favorite astronaut (and as a space nerd I have quite a few).
To finish here’s a pic of her in space
