‘I’m honored’: Janelle Monae on playing NASA’s first black woman engineer in ‘Hidden Figures’
Actress Janelle Monae is appearing in two best picture Oscar nominees, including the biographical drama “Hidden Figures.”
Monae stopped by “Good Morning America” to share what it means portraying Mary Jackson, the first black woman to be an engineer at NASA in the 1950s.
For her to become a NASA engineer, Jackson, who died in 2005, needed to take classes that were held at a then-segregated high school and, for that, had to petition a judge.
“First of all, I’m honored to just honor these women,” Monae, 31, said. “I had no clue who Mary Jackson was, who Miss. Katherine Johnson was, Dorothy Vaughan or any of the…