A Man of Firsts
Julius Montgomery
I walked into this barracks full of all these guys—white guys—and I said “Good God!” I sat on my bunk and said, “How in the world will I be able to identify them? They all look alike to me.”
JULIUS MONTGOMERY
Julius Montgomery’s first day in the space program was lonely and terrifying. Walking down the dusty road past the squat wooden buildings at the entrance to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Montgomery was entering a place that would soon come to embody the very idea of Tomorrow in the American imagination. But what he faced that day in 1956 was a dispiriting combination of the sad and hateful present, tinged with the bitter history of yesterday. Montgomery was the first African American hired as anything other than a janitor at the Cape, but he shouldered a burden other racial pioneers did not. His experience was unlike that of Jackie Robinson when he integrated baseball, unlike that of the Little Rock Nine, who just weeks later would integrate Central High School in Little Rock, unlike that of Guy Bluford and Mae Jemison as they waved and boarded the space shuttle.1 As he made his way to the building that housed the RCA Development Lab, there were no reporters along to watch, no columnist from the black press cheering and urging progress. There was no one from the National Urban League or the NAACP standing by to offer legal or moral support. Julius Montgomery was completely and utterly alone. Reaching the lab, he swung the door open and there faced a roomful of angry white men.
From the end of World War I through most of the twentieth century, Florida, where NASA would launch rockets to the Moon, was a terrible place to be an African American. In the 1920s, the state enjoyed a sustained land boom and cultivated its reputation as a vacationer’s paradise. As it did, Florida—along with the rest of the nation—looked the other way when it came to horrific racial secrets such as the Rosewood Massacre, where whites burned and destroyed the black section of town after armed African Americans tried to defend their homes from a mob.2 Florida had Jim Crow racial separation as severe as any other state in the former Confederacy—separation that was not just socially isolating but that also translated into deficits in government services that kept blacks running a race in which they could never catch up.3 Most pernicious was the impact of discrimination on the public schools. Southern states spent one-third to one-half as much on education over the years 1890–1940 as the rest of the country, and that was for working-class whites.4 For blacks, especially in the countryside, the gap was much more severe, and it was crushing.5 In the area near Cape Canaveral in 1937, for example, the school board spent $69.05 per capita for white students and $27.04 per capita for blacks.6 African American children were “crowded into very inadequate buildings and taught by poorly qualified teachers.”7 Sadly, that was actually an improvement from twenty years earlier, when Floridians elected Governor Sidney J. Catts, who ran on a platform opposing any education for blacks.8
Along with the deprivation came a capacious dose of terror. Because of a lack of legal protection (there were no black police and African Americans had not served on juries in the South since the 1870s), whole African American communities were under constant threat of violence and death.9 It is a sad fact of the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth century in America, especially in the South, that African American lives were in the main considered worthless. That was not the case, of course, before the North won the Civil War. For more than two hundred years, African American life had had a price. Africans were property; bought and sold like a mule or a scythe. Black lives were not for sale after the war and to many that meant they now had little or no worth—a principal motivating factor within the sociogenesis of lynching.10 Whites sometimes used lynching as a last resort, when no other form of coercion worked to keep the black population in line. Sometimes they just did it because they could.11 This was especially true in the swampy mangroves surrounding Cape Canaveral.
Up through the time Julius Montgomery walked through that door, the Ku Klux Klan controlled East Central Florida. The sheriff of Orange County was a Klansman. There were city commissioners, aldermen, and county commissioners in the Klan. “Local businessmen joined the Klan almost like joining the Rotary club.”12 The Klan was so central to life there that the local paper covered their activities on the society page.13 And in the Florida Klan’s wake came the lynching. By the end of World War I, 95 percent of all lynching in the United States occurred in the states that formed the Confederacy,14 and in the southern states where NASA was based (Florida, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi), Florida had the highest lynching rate per capita.15
Montgomery knew all of this. He was from out of state, but Florida had a distinct reputation among African Americans. He knew about black men who looked at white men crossways and disappeared in the middle of the night. Consequently, he expected harassment from his co-workers. It would not surprise him if he got shoved, or if maybe someone spit. He knew quite possibly he could get punched. He faced his co-workers on that first day of his new job armed with nothing more than his knowledge of the rules of southern life, along with his wits and the paperwork that said he belonged there.
That he qualified for the job, which involved tracking, timing, radar, and telemetry, as well as repairing missiles, was a tribute to nearly twenty years of work by African American activists who had pushed the federal government into a grudging shift in policy on race relations. Not that many years before, when Montgomery’s father was entering the workforce, say, an African American in the Old South with a degree in a field like mathematics or science could aspire to be a teacher and not much more.16 One with a degree in engineering might build roads if the community needed roads and was a community that allowed African Americans to work in road construction.17 If not, that person could become a teacher. Knowing this, Montgomery studied to be a linotype operator in college at Tuskegee Institute. He understood the paucity of jobs southern society would allow blacks to hold. Janitor and “concrete work” were the main ones, he said, “but you couldn’t be the boss.” Though he was interested in science, he had learned from a cousin’s experience just how hard it would be to become a doctor. “My cousin had to go to Morehouse in Georgia, because they wouldn’t let him go to the school in Alabama,” he said. His cousin applied for medical school and they told him, “You can’t go here, boy.” Montgomery continued, “They would send you out of the state back in those days. And they paid for it! First, you have to apply to the school to be turned down by the state. And then they would give you an option of going to another school.”18 With employment options so narrow, he made a conscious choice to study a trade rather than to focus on academics. Then the air force drafted him and during his service he received his First Class Radiotelephone Operator’s license. Despite that valuable asset, when he got out of the service and moved back home, he applied for lots of jobs but “got a letter back from them: ‘We don’t hire blacks.’”
In time, the people who worked at Cape Canaveral would be elevated in the popular imagination to the ranks of America’s technical and intellectual elite. The black press would laud the African American ones with encomia. They were denizens of a “glittering new world”; part of a “team which sends US astronauts forth to master space.”19 None of that entered into Julius Montgomery’s decision to work in the space program, however; he had a much more prosaic motivation. Montgomery was working at a black radio station in Mobile, Alabama. All he wanted was to find a job that would pay at least $100 a week. One day he got a telephone call from his mother. “‘You got a telegram.’ I said, ‘Read it, Mama.’ She said ‘$96 a week.’ I said, ‘Close enough!’” He gave two weeks’ notice and headed for Florida.
As a southerner, Montgomery grew up under segregation. “I had not talked to a white person in my life until I was in the service,” he said. “No conversation. That’s the way it was” growing up. But because that segregation was complete, because he never encountered white people, he never had to feel their contempt. The government had desegregated the air force before it drafted him, so he had dealt with white people (“I remember walking into this barracks full of all these guys—white guys—and I said ‘Good God!’ I sat on my bunk and said, ‘How in the world will I be able to identify them? They all look alike to me!’”), but the job at Cape Canaveral was going to be different. Would they accept him? Did they think he belonged? Did they even think—some of them—that he was human? “I was a strange person coming into an all-white building. All white.” He entered the lab and eyed his co-workers. They stared back. “Nobody would shake my hand.” His heart was pounding. Who knew the number of Florida Klansmen in the room? One by one as he approached these men, each one turned away. “I got to the last fellow,” he said, “And I said ‘Hello, I’m Julius Montgomery.’ He said, ‘Look, boy, that’s no way to talk to a white man!’” At this point, there are any number of ways a man can react to these people he would be spending every day with for who knew how long. He could lash out; knock the man to the ground. He could go to management. He could storm out, call the NAACP, and file a complaint. But that was not who Montgomery was. This is who he was: he looked the white man in the eye and “I said—I said, ‘Ah, forgive me, oh great, white bastard, what should I call you?’ I really did say that! And I laughed, and he laughed and he shook my hand.”
“Cease and Desist from Such Unfair Labor Practice”
The federal government had tried at least since the Franklin Roosevelt administration to address hiring discrimination within federal facilities like Cape Canaveral. Roosevelt imposed limited forms of affirmative action during the New Deal, and in fact the term “affirmative action” comes from the wording of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.20 The government integrated elements of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and the Agriculture Department’s Soil Conservation Service hired African American technicians (though, tellingly, regulations restricted that second group to only counseling African American farmers).21 The most significant action taken by Roosevelt came in early 1941 when, hoping to head off a threatened African American march on Washington for equal rights, the president created the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which sought to end discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin in federal employment and defense contracts.22 A second committee was established by executive order in 1943 (after the first committee collapsed) and its jurisdiction was extended to additional industries and to labor organizations, which it said had the “duty” to eliminate discrimination not only in employment but also in union membership.23 Oversight by this committee was never strong and contractors often threw out their good intentions on racial integration in the rush to complete federal projects.24 It nonetheless made some impressive inroads at key agencies that laid the groundwork for future progress.25 A southern filibuster finally killed the committee in 1946. 26 The Truman administration created its own committee to oversee federal contractors and federal hiring. Eisenhower dissolved that and replaced it with yet another committee, this one headed by Vice President Nixon, which had taken several actions by the time Julius Montgomery went to work at the Cape.
While the government designed these programs to get African Americans in the door, their success often depended on the ability of people like Julius Montgomery to find ways to overcome the hatred and discriminatory attitudes and behaviors that kept them out of the workforce in the first place. Montgomery’s way worked for him. Repeatedly—as he did that first day—he would size up a situation, and then defuse it. Disarm his opponent with a joke, preferably an audacious one. Over the years, he took plenty of opportunities to tell his co-workers, “Look, I’m part of the educational program to train you guys to act like people. You’ve been acting like rednecks all your lives. So you need training; retraining.”27 Was his approach the best way? There is a counterstory from the same place at about the same time that shows that it just might have been.
The Martyr of Mims, Harry T. Moore
The counterstory is that of a pioneering activist for civil rights who raised his following and fought and died in view (or certainly within earshot) of Cape Canaveral.28 Today, Harry T. Moore of Mims, Florida, is a mostly forgotten early hero of civil rights. But his impact was enormous and makes clear the scope of the task set before those looking to use government programs like NASA to change the southern way of life. Moore was not a contemporary of the civil rights pantheon; he labored at a time when the NAACP battled only furtively in the South, when Rosa Parks was a newlywed and Martin Luther King Jr. was still going by the name “Mike.”29 Harry T. Moore was born in 1905 in North Florida and raised by his aunts in a home that infused him with an appreciation for education (his Aunt Masie had a PhD from Syracuse University), a sense of justice, and a strong motivation to fight for it. In the 1920s, Moore moved to Brevard County and took a teaching job at a black elementary school in Cocoa.
In his spare time, Moore courted danger by creating the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP. Already “known and despised by white officials all over the state” and fired for trying to organize his black colleagues, Moore turned his attention in the late 1930s to the two most pressing issues facing African Americans in the South.30 Operating with a meager stipend from the NAACP, he threw himself into the battle over voting rights and the drive to stem the “window to the soul of white supremacy and African-American life in the South,” lynching.31
The case that first spurred Moore to action was one where “a young colored boy sent a Christmas card to a white girl, who showed the card to her father. A posse of white men captured the boy, hogtied him, and forced the boy’s father to watch as they tortured the boy and drowned him in the river.”32 While this kind of thing was sadly all too common in Brevard County, Moore was never a man to let an injustice pass, and according to William Gary, who has held the job Moore once had at the North Brevard NAACP, the community would not have let him anyway. “Speaking from personal experience,” Gary said, “you get drawn into things that you could do without, because even today people are looking for someone to provide solutions to the many problems we face here.”33 After campaigning to draw attention to that first case, Moore began traveling across Florida, a self-funded investigator of and crusader against lynching. Taking on the white school authorities could get Moore fired, but taking on the Florida sheriffs, he knew, could get him killed.
His fight against lynching was not the end of it, however. Back when he was a teacher, the issue of voting rights had consumed Moore. This was a time when Florida still imposed a two-dollar poll tax that disenfranchised poor blacks and whites. A black voter with the money and guts to cast a ballot had to vote Republican. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed whites-only primaries, Moore was still battling as late as 1947 against legislation to make the Florida Democratic Party a private club. Some would have called Moore’s effort an exercise in futility. Nonetheless, by 1950, a full fifteen years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, he worked to make 116,145 African Americans eligible to go to the polls in Florida. That was 31 percent of all voting-age blacks in the state, 98 percent of the blacks in Brevard County, and a rate 50 percent higher than anywhere else in the South.34 One hundred thousand people could be a potent voting bloc in any statewide election; but these hundred thousand were not just registered. They exercised discipline and organization—seized, as they were, with the recognition that they could have an impact on their own political interests.35 By bringing these people together, Harry T. Moore had caused a significant shift in Florida politics by the late 1940s. White politicians—even those who ignored or openly attacked the black community—now had to listen to their African American constituents.36 Those hundred thousand voters were poised to change the 1952 governor’s race, though Harry Moore would not live to see it.37
A few days before Christmas 1951, he was told “he ought to have his neck broke for putting notions in Niggers’ heads.”38 Moore went home to Brevard County to celebrate Christmas with his wife Harriette and one of their daughters. That night was also Harry and Harriette’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. As the family celebrated, white Klansmen slunk through the darkness to deliver their ghastly present. They placed it at the base of the Moores’ home, and at 10:00 p.m. Christmas Eve, an enormous explosion rocked the town of Mims. People who heard the bomb (and they heard it as far as Titusville, four miles away) told the FBI they thought it was loud enough to be all kinds of things—a tanker truck that had blown up or a propane tank. There was another common thought that night, too. A rocket launch was anything but a routine thing in 1951. FBI agents later reported that one man ran into his yard thinking that a missile had blown up at the Cape. The next morning, Christmas day, much of the black community made the trek out to the house, where they learned Harry Moore was dead. “He died on the way to a hospital,” Gary said. It was not their local hospital, which would not admit him because he was black. Moore’s wife Harriette died nine days later.
For a short time, there were protests around the country. A group in New York started a boycott of Florida citrus. The governor read their letter “and said, ‘This stuff is getting serious.’”39 State authorities were alarmed, not about the state’s racial problems, but about the tourism industry and the state’s reputation. With considerable business interests at stake, they decided to end the growing uproar. Within days, the Moore story “just vanished” from the Titusville Advocate. Within a week as far as anyone could tell it was “business as usual” in East Central Florida.40
Florida could do that. The state has a unique and distinct mythos. In the 1950s, it was a place of sunshine and beaches where people spent all their time by the pool or going to look at the alligators and the Weeki Wachee Water Ballet.41 Racism and racial strife in the 1960s bring to mind Alabama or Mississippi, not Florida. The violent death of Harry T. Moore showed otherwise. So did the day-to-day life of Julius Montgomery. The racism that confronted him on his first day did not let up as time went on. During all his years at the Cape, Montgomery said no one ever invited him or any of the other black employees when there was an office party or a going-away lunch. “We could not go, so we just didn’t go. We were just not invited. That’s just what it was.”42 In addition to the casual racism, there was also the overt. One day, Montgomery said, a co-worker walked up to him, looked him in the eye, and said, “You are nothing but a nigger.” As he always did in these kinds of situations, Montgomery said he closed his eyes to compose himself. When he opened them, he said, “I looked down, the guy’s on the floor.” Montgomery said he never touched the man. “I swear to this day, I did not move.” But there he was on the floor. Montgomery said he looked down, thought, “what are you doing down there? What in the world!?” and finally concluded, “God did it.”43 That was how he survived in Jim Crow Florida—self-composure, a sense of humor, and sometimes a little help from above. He walked away from the man and went back to work.
How We Got Here
Julius Montgomery’s work did not involve astronauts and rockets. He worked on the military side of the space program. In fact, much of what he did was top secret. That sounds glamorous in the abstract, but aside from occasional international travel, it was mostly mundane. Montgomery was part of team called the Range Rats, who repaired malfunctioning ballistic missiles and the systems that tracked them. Whenever a missile blew up, the air force sent in the Range Rats to figure out why it happened and then fix it. Their work mostly involved developing circuits (there was no “over-the-counter equipment to do the jobs,” Montgomery said) and soldering connections. The team was also sent out to the ships that “searched the skies for anything the Russians were doing” to perform maintenance on the satellite equipment.44 That kind of work was consistent with the Eisenhower administration’s orientation toward space: the space program was a bulwark against Soviet aggression. But government policy on that subject changed radically after the next presidential election. When it did, it had wide-reaching ramifications for the South and the drive for civil rights.
Anything viewed from the perspective of decades can seem inevitable, but the Kennedy administration’s decision to put a man on the Moon was not. It was the culmination of a years-long offensive to drive government policy. In his most eloquent speech about outer space, President Kennedy asked a series of pointed questions that addressed the skepticism many expressed about what would be an endeavor of massive cost. “Why, some say, the Moon?” the president asked. “Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic?”45 Kennedy’s answer to those questions is now famous. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” That is, of course, not the reason why the United States spent billions of dollars in outer space. The real reasons were much more practical and strategic—the need to know what our enemies were up to and the need to stay ahead in an existential battle for nuclear superiority and international popularity.
The argument that ended with Kennedy’s decision had begun fifteen years earlier, at the end of the Second World War. Science and technology brought horror and devastation during the war, but they also brought the conflict to its end and ushered in life-altering changes like jet engines, radio astronomy, radar, satellites, and missiles. The United States had come through the war physically untouched, and when it was over, American leaders—both policymakers and leaders in business, industry, and higher education—were able to pick up whichever of these advances they wished, and do with them whatever they wanted.
The war had also changed much about why and for whom American scientists did the work that they did. We can see perhaps the strongest evidence of that change in a lament expressed by the president who was in office while most of it was settling into place. In the annals of presidential farewell addresses there are—at best—two lines recalled today by the public at large: George Washington’s warning against “foreign entanglements” and a line from Dwight Eisenhower’s address, spoken as he poured out his frustration over forces he said were hijacking the federal purse. “We must guard,” the president told his television audience that night, “against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military/industrial complex.”46 In this speech, the president complained about the direction the country was taking when it came to spending money for science and technology—a direction that started during the war. Of science he said, “A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of the federal government.” Politicians and the defense industry, he said, removed university research from its lofty perch for the benefit of the war effort. When the war ended, however, they declined to put it back. The result, Eisenhower said, was that universities had “experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”47
At the time he gave this speech, Eisenhower’s vice president had just been defeated in his run for the presidency. In important ways, this speech was really about that political transition. The speech was not a warning against defense contractors; instead, it was a bitter response to what had happened to the Republicans.48 Over the previous years, from 1957 until the election, the Democrats had pounded Eisenhower, particularly when it came to spending on outer space. That carping, he thought, was a significant factor driving the Republicans and the Republican agenda from power.
Understanding the conditions that put America in a position to place a man on Moon requires a full recollection of the nation’s state of mind during the Eisenhower years—in particular, to America’s evolving relationship with the concept of nuclear destruction. At first, Americans had largely embraced the atomic bomb. Eighty-five percent supported the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. 49 In 1951, 51 percent of Americans were urging the use of the atomic bomb in Korea.50 But as the decade wore on, a creeping dread highjacked the American psyche. In 1952 a nuclear test code-named “Mike” carved out a mile-long hole in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and impressed on Americans the ominous power of the hydrogen bomb.51 What made matters worse, from a U.S. perspective, was when these technologies, which had once been ours alone, found their way into enemy hands. In 1945, the United States exploded the atomic bomb, demonstrating our technological virtuosity. In 1949, the Soviet Union did the same thing. In 1952, the United States exploded a hydrogen bomb. In 1953, the Soviet Union did the same thing.52
Six years later, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first human satellite. That was followed shortly afterward not by an American satellite launch (that attempt failed miserably), but by the launch of a political strategy in the United States to make Americans scared enough to care. While the military rocketry establishment was concerned about the Sputnik launch on May 15, 1957, the public at large and the president were not. Anthropologist Margaret Mead was conducting a field study of high school and college students at the time, and on the night Sputnik launched, she sent a telegram to her researchers asking them to add questions about Sputnik to find out what people were thinking and feeling; they found that the launch actually engendered a mix of concern, hope, and excitement.53 President Eisenhower demonstrated no surprise or concern at the launch of Sputnik. The day it hit the press, Eisenhower left for Camp David to play golf.54 When he got back, the president answered some Sputnik questions at a press conference, but at his next press conference, no one asked about it. That nonchalant attitude, however, would not last.
The strategy to get America concerned and excited about Sputnik evolved through typical Washington back channels. Thirteen days after the launch, a longtime aide to Senator Lyndon Johnson named George Reedy got a visit from his friend Charles Brewton. Brewton was an assistant to Alabama senator Lister Hill, who, like Johnson, saw federal spending and economic development as a way out of the South’s poverty and isolation. Up until then, Reedy said he and Johnson had “put the space thing on the back burner.” But Brewton had an idea that would change their minds. He gave Reedy a memo in which he said that exploiting Sputnik “could clobber the Republicans” and elect Lyndon Johnson as president. Reedy sat up most of the night composing a memo to Johnson on how to exploit the Sputnik issue, telling his boss, “This could be one of the great dividing lines in American and world history, the whole history of humanity.”55
Republicans and Democrats had been battling over the best way to address the Soviet threat. Eisenhower preferred nuclear deterrence—mutually assured destruction. He believed, he said in a 1957 speech, that America had “enough power in its strategic, retaliatory forces to bring near annihilation to the war-making capabilities of any country.”56 Democrats leaned on a strategy called “flexible response” that called for a range of options. They argued that by cutting defense expenditures—relying more on nuclear deterrence and less on conventional forces—Eisenhower had made the United States more vulnerable.57
Reedy told Johnson that the Democrat’s key to success was to pound away at Sputnik as evidence that America had fallen behind the Russians and to support spending on a civilian space program. The idea fit well with a key desire of Johnson’s. He had been looking for a way to pump massive amounts of federal money into the South to try to change its economy and—he thought—its racial dynamic, too. Space, Reedy told him, was the key he had been looking for.58 It could change the South permanently from an agricultural region to one based on knowledge and technology; it could simultaneously bring glory and honor to the United States and (reflectively) to Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson picked up the ball and ran with it. “In the Air Age,” he said in a speech shortly after the Sputnik launch, “we were powerful because we had airplanes. And now, tonight, the communists have established a foothold in outer space.”59 Insinuating that Eisenhower’s inattention had allowed the Soviets to catch up and surpass the United States, Johnson said, “It took the Soviets four years to catch up with the Atomic Bomb. It took the Soviets nine months to catch up with the Hydrogen Bomb. And now, tonight we’re trying to calculate how long it will take us to catch up with the Soviet satellite.”60 President Eisenhower continued to believe that a space race with the Soviets would be expensive and counterproductive.61 Johnson mocked that position, saying, “It is not very reassuring to be told that next year we’ll put a better satellite into the air. Perhaps it will even have chrome trim, automatic windshield wipers.”62
Contrary to what Johnson was saying, throughout the 1950s, the U.S. had been involved in extensive defense-related activity high above the atmosphere, had spent billions on rockets and missiles, and planned to spend more. “I don’t think we should pay one cent for defense more than we have to,” Eisenhower said at the time, “but [what] I do say is our defense is not only strong, it is awesome, and it is respected elsewhere.”63 The president held steady to that position, but world events were about to push things over to Johnson’s advantage. On November 3, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2. This second satellite launched with a dog and a payload that, had it been a warhead, was capable of doing considerable damage to the United States.64
Johnson was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the wake of the second Sputnik launch, he shared Brewton and Reedy’s ideas with the committee’s chairman, Senator Richard Russell, who authorized Johnson to use the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee to hold some hearings into the Sputnik question.65 The subcommittee had been defunct for several years, but Russell had Johnson revive it to use as a cudgel to beat the Republicans. As the hearings opened, Johnson compared the Sputnik 2 launch to Pearl Harbor, saying, “In some respects I think that it is an even greater challenge. In my opinion,” Johnson said, “we do not have as much time as we had after Pearl Harbor.”66 As expected, Johnson’s subcommittee found U.S. space activities underfunded and poorly organized.
As often happens in Washington, interest groups coalesced around this argument and came together over Johnson’s hearings. Called to testify were generals and admirals; scientists like the man known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” Edward Teller; academics like Vannevar Bush, dean of the MIT School of Engineering; and aeronautical leaders like Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist and future director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, and his commander at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, General John Medaris.67 Their motivations varied, from those who saw spaceflight as mankind’s destiny to those in the aerospace industry who viewed increased spending as an opportunity; to university-based scientists who had been receiving millions in federal contracts during the Second World War that were now winding down. Those who did not testify wrote op-eds and magazine articles and made television appearances warning of the dangers posed by Soviet control of space. They advocated for massive spending on manned spaceflight to demonstrate America’s technological and scientific prowess in an effort to ward off any fear at home or abroad that the nation was second best.68
This line of thinking tracked along with that of liberal Democrats. In the late 1950s, they were arguing that Eisenhower’s focus on balancing the budget and returning money to the private sector had taken funding away from research and development efforts to create valuable things that could benefit the nation—like new ballistic missiles and spaceships. Liberals said Eisenhower was instead making that money available for R&D on consumer and luxury goods.69 They pressured the White House both to demonstrate a devotion to the future (and to the fight to beat the Russians) and to institutionalize the space race by creating a federal Department of Space or a cabinet-level Secretariat of Science.70 The pressure worked, forcing Eisenhower to make large and important structural changes to the United States government—changes not matched in scope until the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. 71 First, he created the Office of Presidential Science Advisor, the first person in the White House whose sole purpose was to speak for science and technology. Second, he created the Advanced Research Project Agency, which later became DARPA, the agency that created the Internet. And finally, he streamlined the outer space components of the Defense Department, largely by creating the most visible legacy of the Sputnik launch, NASA. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 on July 29, and the space agency began operations on October 1, 1958. 72
These changes are what Eisenhower was complaining about in his “military/industrial complex” speech. During the previous three years he is said to have held to the position that “Lyndon Johnson can keep his head in the stars if he wants. I’m going to keep my feet on the ground.”73 But it had not worked. Eisenhower was furious that the liberals had forced him to spend money in places that did not need it. That spending was about to launch into the stratosphere, he thought, and he intended to let the American people know what they had just allowed to happen. The government, he said, needed to “maintain balance in and among national programs—balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage—balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable.”74 Johnson had another agenda and, assisted by circumstances, was able to bring along the president he entered the White House with to see the benefit of space spending as a tool for social change.
Although the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 never charged the space agency to be an agent of social change, reforms did happen because of NASA’s presence.75 NASA’s challenge to racism in its southern host communities had several components: NASA centers would obey and enforce presidential executive orders, laws passed by Congress, and directives issued by NASA headquarters, applying economic pressure at local and state levels, as intended by the federal government. In so doing, they would help to convince business and civic leaders to pursue desegregation. But more importantly, NASA officials were able to use the agency’s enormous prestige and public image as political leverage. This is not to suggest that this was deliberate; it was not. The government was not going to spend all of those billions of dollars just to make a point. The mission of NASA was space, but because it was in the South, it was going to make a difference in society as a whole.
First at FIT
Back on the ground in Florida, just about the time the Kennedy/Nixon election was gearing up, Julius Montgomery was having yet another experience that demonstrated just how badly change was needed. Any building you go into, it seems there is a plaque on the wall commemorating someone—usually people who have done great things. Institutions honor them to try to keep alive the memory of their accomplishment. At the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) they have an honor like this, though it is not a plaque on the wall. Every year on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday they give the Julius Montgomery Pioneer Award to someone who has made a significant contribution to the community.
Montgomery is not a benefactor; he did not give the school millions of dollars to get started. What Julius Montgomery gave FIT is more important than money. At a pivotal time in the school and the country’s history, Montgomery once again put his pride aside, allowing FIT to remain segregated at harm to himself but to the benefit of the institution. His sacrifice and generosity were so significant that according to FIT’s founder, “The school would have been tossed out on the street” and closed down if not for Montgomery.76 The story of why FIT gives this award—like the rest of Julius Montgomery’s story—reveals so much about the times in the early days of the Space Age. It also talks powerfully about the human spirit, the desire to advance, and the benefits of going against the grain of what we consider traditional civil rights protest.
FIT started as a night school, set up to meet “the educational needs of America’s missilemen.”77 Companies staffing Cape Canaveral in the 1950s feared that the humdrum life of pre-NASA Eastern Florida was going to make it difficult to recruit and maintain the best technical people. So when Jerry Keuper, a senior engineer in the Missile Test Project, went to his bosses at RCA and told them he wanted to open a school to keep workers engaged and up to date on the state of the art in engineering, they gave the project their full support. The school’s original name was Brevard Engineering College, and it began life in three rented classrooms at Eau Gallie Junior High School, a public school near the current site of the Melbourne, Florida, international airport.78
Not too long after opening, though, BEC “found itself in the midst of a local controversy”—a controversy started inadvertently by Julius Montgomery.79 As Montgomery recalled, Dr. Keuper put up a notice on an RCA bulletin board asking people to sign up if they wanted to enroll at his new school. It also asked them to list where they had done their undergraduate work. “I signed it,” Montgomery said, and “of course I put down Tuskegee.”80 Within days, the Brevard County superintendent of schools, Woodrow Darden, was on the phone to Dr. Keuper, telling him the school system was canceling BEC’s contract to rent the classrooms. This same Woodrow Darden would tell the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, “The space program, as such, opens up new opportunities for the schools . . . It enables us to do more experimentation.” That experimentation apparently included neither school desegregation nor integration.81 According to FIT’s official history, Darden told Keuper he was worried about traffic jams “and ‘other things.’ High among the list of ‘other things’ that made BEC a problem for Woody Darden was the school’s admissions policy.”82 Julius Montgomery said that Darden phoned Keuper and “he was told, ‘I’m sorry, but this fellow here is from Tuskegee so he must be black. He cannot come to this classroom.’”83 The ultimatum was clear: expel this black man or close the school.84
What happened next, Montgomery said, was that while he was at his workbench soldering some missile parts a message came over the intercom: “‘Julius Montgomery, come to the office please.’ So I went to the office. And the manager said, ‘I want you to meet Dr. Keuper. He wants to talk to you.’ I said, ‘Yes, Dr. Keuper, what can I do for you?’ He said ‘Well, I need your help.’ And the help they needed was for me to take my name off of that list so that he could start his new college.” It would only be for a short time, Keuper promised. As Montgomery remembered, Keuper said, “As soon as I get my own buildings, you are welcome.”85 It was 1959—five years after Brown v. Board of Education, four years after Rosa Parks stayed in her seat and said “no,” three years after a bus boycott in Tallahassee, and just a few months before young men would sit down at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Now, faced with the same choice, what would Julius Montgomery do? Support the system or fight it? Help himself or help his race? Montgomery said he sat and thought for a minute. Then, “I said, ‘well, OK.’ After a short conversation—for the better good of everybody—I took my name off the list.” The school, he told Keuper, could stay segregated. He would drop out and he would not cause a fuss.
That the Florida Institute of Technology created an award in Julius Montgomery’s honor speaks to the existential nature of his decision. Today FIT has 130 acres and nearly three thousand students. U.S. News and World Report ranks it among the top two hundred colleges in America.86 But in 1959, its future was fully dependent on the decision of one man. The decision he made was a selfless one. With Montgomery out of the way, “Darden dropped his threat of immediate eviction.” BEC could use the classrooms.87 Several months later, after BEC got its own buildings, Keuper kept his word. The school desegregated and Julius Montgomery enrolled.
Some would see Montgomery’s decision as redolent of Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech, a sell-out to segregation. This was, by all accounts, a snap decision, however, and one individual made it. Of course, James Meredith was one individual when he integrated the University of Mississippi. Meredith was part of a movement, however, with the backing of the NAACP. In this situation, Montgomery did not see himself fighting the institutions of segregation or racism; he saw himself as helping a guy out and helping out co-workers who would benefit from attending this new school.
Montgomery’s is one of many stories of the space program’s African American pioneers that does not comport with the stories of civil rights achievement that are found in the standard high school textbook. Not everyone achieved the ends of the civil rights movement by marching, picketing, and saying “no.” Many did, of course, but others, like Julius Montgomery, applied the principles of self-help and—often—accommodation to reach the same ends. It worked for him, but he admitted that the black community did not always understand. “I got a lot of problems from the black community,” he said.
People never understood how it was that he got his job at Cape Canaveral, for example. “I had to explain to them that I took a test, you know; they gave me a test and I passed.” He said people in the community did not understand his work ethic. “They could not understand how I could come down, go to work, on a regular job—they could not understand that,” he said. Other things he did caused him problems, as well. “I read the paper every day and they couldn’t understand that,” he said. “They said I was acting white.” The life he portrayed sounds at times like one of supreme loneliness. Along with the abuse that he endured all those years from whites, he got no credit as a pioneer in the black community. “They would leave me sometimes at work and I would have to hitchhike home,” he said with a mordant chuckle.
The community turning its back on the civil rights hero and leaving him to walk home alone is yet another story that does not conform to what we read in school. Montgomery’s story clearly stands out. It is a lesson perhaps that the civil rights movement, like so many other undertakings in history, is not monolithic. All mass movements—revolutions, wars, western expansion, the civil rights movement—begin, end, and gain their sustenance from individual choices.
There is solace, however, in knowing that despite the scorn from both sides, Montgomery was content to continue being a pioneer. He began standing for election to the city council in Melbourne in 1956, a time when fewer than fifty African Americans held elected office in the eleven former Confederate states and in a county where some old-line council members still had fond memories of the Confederacy.88 Nevertheless, he pressed on and, as if being first at Cape Canaveral and first at FIT were not enough, he attained yet another milestone in 1969 when he became the first African American ever to win a seat on the Melbourne City Council.89
A story from Montgomery’s first election is worth recalling as we turn from the 1950s to the 1960s. “First time that I ran for City Council in 1956, we had fourteen precincts,” he said. “I took all of the precincts except one—except mine”—the black precinct. While he understood the reason for that, nonetheless, “I was really disheartened. I was really shocked.” In time, he found an advisor, a white man from New Jersey who taught him an important lesson. “He said, ‘Do you want to win, or do you want to be loved in your black precinct, which only had about nine hundred or six hundred votes? You can’t win. You’ve got to go to the other side to get them.’ So we did.” Race matters in Florida, the advisor told him, but times are changing.
Change would come, albeit in an excruciating creep. In the coming years, a new presidential administration would flex new types of muscle—muscle that included the space program—to try to achieve racial parity in the workplace; at the same time, new styles of civil rights protest would emerge. The advisor’s admonition was significant. You are a person of substance and a man of historical import. Understand who you are, he told Montgomery; do not dwell on who you think you are or who you think you should be. Know who you are and move forward.