If you haven't met Topper Carew yet, you've likely seen this Boston native's mark on your screen. He produced and sometimes hosted WGBH's "Say Brother.”"The early days of public television was so cool," says Carew. He produced 1980s films like “D.C. Cab," the '90s animated comedy film “Bebe's Kids” and was the co-creator and producer of the hit show “Martin,” which is still in syndication today. “Cultural phenomenon still to this day!” says WCVB’s Jessica Brown. “Thirty-three years on the air,” says Carew.Carew says it was an exciting time in Hollywood, he was managing talent and producing shows and he says finding Martin happened by chance.There was the first Black comedy club in the country opened in South Central, and the emcee was a guy named Robin Harris. Harris had a tooth-chipped, bloodshot eyes, was overweight, funny, funny.And he kept saying to me, you got to pay attention to this kid. I met, named Martin. I said, man, I'm trying to help you.So, I got into the management business as a justice thing because I felt that nobody that talented should be denied. And that was Robin okay, so Martin was a complete accident. I said, okay, I'll take him. And so, I had Martin, and he became a management client, and then he got hot, because of the House Party movies.He said to make “Martin” a success he had to make what you saw on the screen genuine.“That's the key, that it was connected to the cultural base from which the show was supposed to be about. I mean, truth is a very powerful thing. So, I said, listen, Martin, it's got to be your voice. It's going to be you. “Martin” still in syndication today. Topper says everything he brought to Hollywood all started in Roxbury where he grew up with his grandmother.“Writing has been a very consistent aspect of my life, and I started it with her, and she was my big mama. Now as the big mama, you know, she was the one who was moving me across the tracks because we lived across the tracks from the tracks that run, you know, that whole tea thing, used to be railroads. And so, she was taking me to the Y. She took me to the to the Black Pops. There was a thing called the Black Pops. You know black people couldn't go to the Pops. They had to go to the Black Pops. She would take me to Brigham's Ice Cream. So, she was trying to move me along you know, she's taking me to the teas and all this.”He says those experiences added to his creativity; however, he says at a young age some encounters planted a different seed.So, at the fourth grade, my cousins and I integrated this school before bussing. And in the fourth grade, I got chased, you know, and you call the n-word. Fifth grade, some dude walked up to me, white dude walked up to me, just punched me in the face, gave me a black eye, laughed, and ran. Sixth grade I got a black eye.You know, and it was always that tension in Boston before bussing that finally reared its head when bussing came along. You know, that's been a been around for a long time. I don't know a boy in my family who didn't run."So the idea of justice got embedded in my DNA. " Topper says racial justice has always stayed with him. He became a student at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., to study architecture.“I don't think I chose architecture; I think it chose me,” says Carew.It was in D.C.; he would join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also known as SNCC. From sit-ins to freedom rides the committee was made of mostly black college students that practiced peaceful, direct-action protests during the civil rights movement.While part of SNCC Topper spent time in Mississippi pushing a voter registration campaign to help black Americans get out the vote.“When I went south, John Lewis was our chairman, the congressman. Stokely Carmichael was in our chapter. Stokely created Black Power, and we organized in the state of Mississippi under a person named Bob Moses. "Moses was a very powerful symbolic figure, and because of that campaign in 1964, and because a number of our workers got murdered, that's how the Voting Rights Act came to be because of that campaign,” says Carew.Being a part of SNCC changed his vision for his future.“I can be a justice warrior; I can use all the tools and the assets that I have available to me personally and empower those in the interest of service to people. So, I became a different kind of architect because of going to the South and now coming back. We were like, social architects.”Using his skills to empower others.“I was the guy you would come to if you had a problem? You got a zoning problem. Come to me. I'm not going to charge you.”Then in 1966 came “The New Thing Art and Architecture Center,” a cultural hub he created out of a storefront in D.C."We would practice architecture during the day, and then after school, we turned it into an art center for kids,” says Carew.A community art center where kids learned how to play music and even get a front-row seat to the stars before they hit it big.“Some of the musicians, you know, Roberta Flack, Shirley Horn, Donald Byrd, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. You know, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, The Soul Searchers. Now, The Soul Searchers are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And when all of those artists were just sort of bubbling around D.C.," says Carew.Back in his childhood home in Boston, Topper says he still has more he wants to do. His next project is already global.“I said, I want to do something different, so I want to do something positive because there's a lot of darkness in the world right now. There's a lot of division,” says Carew.Topper teamed up with Nanoracks, a company specializing in commercial space travel, to send a payload to the International Space Station. That payload will broadcast a film Topper produced of children’s choirs from around the world singing "This Little Light of Mine."His goal to inspire kids to dream big."I want to get the idea of space in kids’ heads. It’s going to go through PBS; it’s educational. So, all the PBS educators and so that website and the whole experience is going to be, a teaching experience.I'll just put that energy out there. I'm riding that rocket,” says Carew.The payload went up on Jan. 30 and will be there for all of Black History Month. To learn more about the payload, you can visit This Little Light of Mine in Space.