3

Stronger Than Steel

Frank Crossley

My fear gene seems to be very weak.

FRANK CROSSLEY

As an engineer, Frank Crossley created metals that were stronger than steel but much lighter. The irony is, doing that as an African American in the 1960s required a fortitude that was stronger than steel, but with a touch that was much lighter. Brilliant, but with an unfailingly self-effacing personality, Crossley started out fast and rose to positions of authority in the military, the world of science, and the corporate suite that were so unprecedented that he was regularly vaunted in the pages of the black press. He battled prejudice throughout his life: denied food because “we don’t serve Negroes,” denied entrance “because they did not admit Negroes.” He ended up studying metallurgical engineering rather than his first choice, aeronautical engineering, because the school that taught aeronautical was too far to travel to without going through neighborhoods where police would tail him and the residents accost him with kicks, spitting, or worse.1 He recalls supervisors at two different companies telling him he had not received a promotion because he was “so advanced for a Negro [that] we thought you were content.”² It would be wrong to say that it did not bother him when he saw his progress stunted by the wider world’s prejudice. It clearly did. Even at the end of his life, he spoke about each slight with disdain. However, while these experiences bothered him, he never let them get in his way. He seemed always to face them by rolling his eyes, slowly shaking his head, and then continuing to excel.

So many years removed from the battle over workplace integration in America, it is natural for the perception of that time to be somewhat unclear—for the lines between “the unrecoverable past and our memory of it” to blur.3 In cases like this, a popular inclination is to default to the “accepted paradigm” that shapes our thinking from the distance of years.⁴ Within that paradigm, the tendency is to look at workplace equality and ask why it took so long.⁵ The story of Frank Crossley helps explain instead why it happened as quickly as it did. His experience fuses a personal and a national narrative at the core of understanding the integration that took hold in American factories and offices following World War II. While Crossley was never a NASA employee, the work he did developing metals that became the skins of rockets and missiles was vital to its success. His experience is also indicative of the changes the space program helped bring to race relations in America during the early 1960s.

“One Clean-Cut and Fine-Looking Negro”

Crossley grew up in the 1920s and 1930s on the South Side of Chicago. His father was a railroad porter and his mother worked in a button factory. “The United States in the 30s, for a black person, could be a very hostile place,” Crossley said.⁶ In particular, job prospects for African Americans, as we have made clear, were severely limited, and his family looked to give him every edge he could get. Crossley had three uncles with college degrees. The one who was a lawyer encouraged Frank to be a doctor, telling him, “You don’t have to worry about being employed by anyone.” Medicine was not what young Frank was interested in, though. “Engineering appealed to me,” he said.⁷

He completed two years of study at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) when World War II interrupted his studies. Crossley’s father had been a sergeant in the infantry in the First World War and Frank had been an ROTC commanding officer in high school, so, with the war on, he entered the U. S. Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School, which trained naval officers. He was the only African American in a class of 1,500, a fact that got him attention—the type of attention that stayed with him much of his career. At the time, S. I. Hayakawa, a future U.S. senator, was writing a column for the Chicago Defender. He took note of Frank Crossley and wrote several pieces about him. “Among all those clean-cut and fine looking white boys,” a typical column ran, “there is one clean-cut and fine-looking Negro student. Residents of the neighborhood have probably wondered who he is, what he is doing there, and how he is getting along.”8 Their wonder, and any concern they might have had, was justified.

The United States Navy has a complicated racial history. While it was the case for years that there was not a service of the U.S. military more segregated than the navy, the navy was in fact the U.S. military’s first proving ground for integration. Fifteen hundred African American men served in the navy during the Revolutionary War, and a black fife player and seaman named Cyrus Tiffany helped save the life of Commodore Perry during the War of 1812. From the 1830s through the 1850s, about 5 percent of the U.S. Navy consisted of men of African descent. At the same time, the number in the U.S. Army was zero.⁹ By 1864, more than 25 percent of the U.S. Navy was black. After the Civil War, however, as Jim Crow took hold, harsh and vivid discrimination gripped the navy.¹⁰ Whether that discrimination was worse than in the army is difficult to say, principally because of the nature of military service. Armies exist on land and can peacefully segregate, as the U.S. Army did. There is not enough room to do that on a ship, however, so the navy segregated by job category. For more than seventy-five years after the Civil War, African Americans on navy ships were limited to being cooks, assistants to cooks, and valets for white senior officers.¹¹

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, pushed for conditions to change in the U.S. military. In 1940, she suggested that one way to move toward integration was to have all-black marching bands in the navy.¹² The B-1 Band in North Carolina and two other bands in California and Michigan allowed African Americans to hold navy ranks other than cabin boy, and by 1944 Mrs. Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson had persuaded the president and the navy secretary to go even further. As an experiment, the navy commissioned a handful of African Americans to see if white crews would take orders from black officers. The black press dubbed the first group of African American commissioned and warrant officers in the United States Navy “The Golden 13.”

As far as Frank Crossley was concerned, the impact of even this token integration was remarkable. He and the white cadets, he told Hayakawa, “do everything together. We work, study, drill, eat, march, and live together.” He did mention the bad part, but he played it down. “The only time I don’t join the rest of the boys is when they go out on social engagements,” he said, but “that doesn’t worry me because I have friends of my own in the city; besides, I’m working too hard to go out much.”13 Crossley received his commission as an ensign in November 1945, two months after the war ended and about eighteen months after the “Golden 13.” Only one of the Golden men ever got a ship assigned to him. The navy thought so much of Crossley, however, that it put him in charge of the second deck division—the sailors who do the fueling and painting—on a troop transport ship. Crossley had thirty-six men under him, including an officer. “When they first saw me, they looked surprised—the way the boys at Illinois Tech look at you when they find that you are going to be their English teacher,” he said at the time.¹⁴ But as he would throughout the rest of his career, he handled the stress of command and the potentially dangerous novelty of the racial situation onboard his ship with calm and expertise. “I think there are two generic characteristics that I have based on my observation of other companions who were my age,” Crossley said. First, “My fear gene seems to be very weak.” Second was something he learned when he was very young. “An older friend—and I was still in elementary school when this happened—basically taught me to control my emotions,” he said; particularly anger. “I used to be hot tempered,” Crossley said, “and he taught me control.” This led Crossley to take a radical approach when he stepped onboard his first ship. “When I joined the navy,” he said, “I decided that if I heard the N-word and it was not directed to me—I simply overheard it because it was commonly used in those days—I would not take offense. I would only take offense if it was directed to me.”¹⁵

When Hayakawa interviewed Crossley at the end of the war, Crossley said he agreed the experiment was a success.

“Did your men show any resentment ever being commanded by a Negro officer?” I asked.

“No,” said Crossley.

“Not even a little bit?” I asked again.

“No.”

“Well, did they ever notice that you were Negro?”

“Yes,” Crossley said. . . . “[But] after they got over their surprise, they acted towards me just as they do to other officers.”¹⁶

In Crossley’s wartime experience, the fact that he returned home with “no dramatic stories of injustice, of fights against prejudice, of indignities nobly borne, of triumphs over discrimination,” Hayakawa saw a tantalizing harbinger of the postwar world. “His uneventful and untriumphant tale is itself a triumph,” he said. “His kind of uneventful, peaceful integration in joint work with other men is the kind of thing that we hope for all over America.” This Pollyanna vision was expressed in the euphoria attendant at the birth of the “American Century”; but Hayakawa did hit on something. There turns out to be an element in Crossley’s story that would in fact be present throughout his career. “The important thing about the lack of integration,” Hayakawa said, “is that it doesn’t give people the chance to be human to each other, and encourages instead the spread of superstitions about the ‘other’ race.”17 Crossley always strived to stay as close to white people as the law and custom would allow. He did this with a purpose, always mindful that he could prove by example the absurdity of superstitions about the “other” race.

Johnson’s Plan to Change the South

After the war, Crossley was ready to start a career. He took a teaching job at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College (A&I), the all-black college now known as Tennessee State. His timing could not have been better, as this was the period during which Lyndon Johnson was driving the idea that government could bring about economic and social progress by spending enormous sums of money.¹⁸ In the 1950s, Johnson and other southern legislators in Washington were looking to force economic progress in the states of the Old Confederacy. Whatever the end game was for the other southerners, for Johnson racial harmony was part of the package.

Like many other southern New Dealers, Johnson thought that the roots of injustice in the region had grown thick in the soil of southern poverty.¹⁹ Hatred and discrimination persisted because people were all fighting over the same meager economic pie. Fix the economy, Johnson believed, and segregation would crumble away. This was a job, he felt, which could not fall to the region’s private sector. He saw southern businessmen as too invested in keeping their workers—both black and white—languishing in ill health, hunger, and ignorance. The South at that time was, as economist Gavin Wright wrote, “a low-wage region in a high-wage country.”20 As such, its business leaders and the local politicians they controlled lived in constant fear of anything that might cause folks to up and move away. This was not an idle fear; they had seen it numerous times. It happened first when emigrant agents enticed blacks away from Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas to higher paying jobs in Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas between the Civil War and World War I. It happened again during the Great Migration, when the proportion of African Americans leaving the South entirely grew from 20 percent to more than 50 percent. They could not see it continue and felt they had to keep outside influence at bay, which is why outside influence was precisely what Johnson sought to deliver. Bringing in the full force of federal power was the only way he saw of integrating the South into the mainstream of America’s economic life.²¹

When W. J. Cash talked of there being “many Souths,” he meant that the Old South had its timber, its coal mines, and its mills.²² The monumental changes that precipitated the 1960s-era intervention known as the “Second Reconstruction,” however, came about principally due to the death of one particular “South” that had dominated the region’s legend as much as it did its economy.²³ The system of cotton-based sharecropping had been under pressure since the beginning of World War I, and, by the time of the Great Depression, it was on its knees. In the end, cotton acreage dropped from 43 million in 1929 to less than 15 million by 1959. ²⁴ By the 1930s, the situation had become so bleak that the region’s power structure felt it had no choice but to accept a dose of federal help, regardless of the consequences.²⁵ Taking federal money meant accepting both policies that flattened wage differentials and workplace protections that kept northern jobs from “heading South.”²⁶ It meant accepting cutbacks on cotton acreage. It even meant limited enforcement of policies banning race discrimination.²⁷ As time went on and World War II showered the region with military bases and federal contracts, the South of old faded further.²⁸

By the 1950s, the war contracts were ending. The military bases were scaling back or closing. What might take their place and continue the federal intervention to the point where it might actually bring about racial harmony? Lyndon Johnson had an answer: spending on space.²⁹ As he saw it, space was a federal jobs program (something his more recalcitrant southern colleagues might balk at) that he could tie to American prestige and to fighting the Soviets in the Cold War.30 The jobs it would create would be high-paying ones—jobs that would lift all southerners, black and white.

Stories of African American NASA workers and those who, like Frank Crossley, made their way elsewhere in the space program suggest Johnson was on the right track. About a year after Sputnik launched, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, and more and more American young people began to think about careers in engineering and science. According to James Jennings, a retired NASA deputy administrator, however, that movement bypassed the black community completely. “We heard Sputnik on the radio,” Jennings said, “but at that time we didn’t even dream of being able to participate in it. I mean, most folks went to school to be something in the black community. They didn’t think about that they could go out and actually be a part of something like a space program.”³¹ Other African Americans who ended up at NASA shared that bleak assessment. While Frank Crossley felt otherwise, he could not help being realistic. “I decided that I would study engineering,” he said, “and if I couldn’t get a job—and I thought my chances of getting a job as an engineer in the United States was less than 50 percent—I decided I would either go to Canada or Mexico. Canada had the virtue of speaking English and Mexico had the virtue of having colored people.”³²

As Johnson envisioned, when the space program came along, the job dynamic changed. Even a low-level space job like a “computer” was a desk job, where a person worked with his or her mind instead of his or her back.³³ There is no question that NASA’s black employees shared a sense of the agency’s mission. What was more important, however, was that for African Americans struggling to achieve economic as well as social equality in the face of Jim Crow, NASA offered a way up and a way out. Along with a living wage, NASA also offered job security. All of that was a change from the lives southern blacks lived before Kennedy announced America was going to the Moon.

As Kennedy was making his Moon decision, Frank Crossley was making decisions, too. He had tired of Tennessee. The president of A&I, he thought, “came through to me as just a flunky for the white power structure.” Therefore, he traveled back to Chicago and back to IIT, where he made contact with Kurt Peter Anderko, one of the German scientists the United States brought here after the war to keep them out of the hands of the Russians. Anderko was the head of the metals research department at the IIT research institute. Crossley settled in at IIT, working on metals for the emerging aerospace industry as the Kennedy administration came into office.

Equal Employment Opportunity

While NASA pursued the initiatives of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to promote equality, it would be wrong to give the impression that civil rights began with Kennedy, though there are certainly those who would like to suggest it. The movements for desegregation and voting rights rushed ahead with considerable force during the Kennedy years, but even before then, many, including Julius Montgomery, benefited from initiatives of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. During the Eisenhower administration, presidential executive orders, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and action by government, business, and private social and religious groups, both black and white, made additional progress.34 Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King Jr. praised Vice President Richard Nixon, a “card-carrying member of the NAACP,” for his work to pass the 1957 Civil Rights Act.³⁵

As for why Eisenhower got as engaged as he did with the civil rights cause, a consensus opinion is that the credit goes to international reaction to demands and protests by African American communities and their representatives. A thoroughly unintended consequence of the decision to base the headquarters of the United Nations in New York was that the move brought African Americans a worldwide stage for their plight and their demands to address it.³⁶ America’s enemies abroad, who were anxious to show newly emerging nations in the Third World that Communism, not the American free enterprise system, was the better way to achieve worldwide harmony and understanding, egged them on. Discrimination made America’s allies uncomfortable, too, and as large numbers of UN members, including America’s friends, began attacking the U.S. for its racial policies, Eisenhower realized that change had to come.³⁷

As the Kennedy administration came into office in 1961, civil rights protests were already beginning to simmer and the president was pushed by the liberal wing of his party (which had inserted a strong civil rights plank into the platform at the party’s 1960 convention) to take action on equal rights. In addition, the pressure Eisenhower had been receiving from overseas continued.38 Kennedy knew—and he told allies black and white—that southern committee chairmen would guarantee any civil rights bill would be dead on arrival in Congress.³⁹ He also recognized the political danger that came from threatening to withhold federal funding to states that discriminated; holding back money for highway construction or aid to hospitals not only risked angering Democratic southern governors but also the aid recipients themselves and their lobbyists and activists.⁴⁰ Still, the pressure was on and he felt compelled to respond, so the president decided to fight the battle for racial equality on two fronts he knew he could control. The Justice Department would tackle the desegregation of public accommodations and schools, while equal employment opportunity was addressed through the hiring provisions of federal contracts overseen by the Labor Department and enforced by the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO).⁴¹

Kennedy’s labor secretary, Willard Wirtz, later said, “The larger edifice of civil rights is itself dependent on the quality of employment opportunity. Without it, the quality of citizenship is only an empty phrase.”⁴² That is not why the Kennedy administration concentrated on federal workplace integration to the initial exclusion of other equal rights, however. They did it because it allowed the president to address the problem on his own—to demonstrate action on civil rights without having to work through Congress. He preferred the approach espoused by Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “The President could give segregation its death blow through a stroke of the pen.”⁴³ The political realities of the Kennedy years dictated that the president turn to his executive powers, rather than legislation, as his principal means of addressing discrimination, and on March 6, 1961, Kennedy did just that by signing Executive Order 10925.

The order was a three-part plan to review federal employment practices and promote equal employment opportunity within and by the executive branch of the federal government. Part 1 created the PCEEO. In part 2, the president authorized the PCEEO to recommend changes in federal hiring practices and directed all executive agencies to examine their employment policies. The order, in part 3, required all government agencies that contracted work out to the private sector to include antidiscrimination clauses in their contracts and apply antidiscrimination policy to their contractors and subcontractors. It also told the agencies to provide nondiscrimination recommendations for those service providers’ labor unions. Federal contractors had to identify themselves as equal opportunity employers and declare in their advertising that they would not discriminate based on race. Companies that did discriminate risked losing their contracts.

Kennedy tasked Johnson with drafting EO 10925, so it makes sense that it tracked with his sense that jobs were the proper route to equality.44 When Kennedy issued the order, it covered thirty-eight thousand contractors, so its impact was potentially immense.⁴⁵ As for the federal workforce itself, the Defense Department, for example, which had desegregated in 1948, had 110,000 African American employees and at the time of Kennedy’s executive order and was “probably the biggest employer of Negroes in the world” according to U.S. News and World Report.⁴⁶ Imagine the impact—the thinking went—if the whole government could hire in a completely race-blind fashion. That is what the PCEEO set out to do.

The idea was that the head of a company could not afford to go to his shareholders and announce the loss of a multi-million-dollar NASA contract because of race-based hiring. A lot of the business community in the South realized desegregation was coming. The space program in those communities gave business and civic leaders an opportunity to accelerate the process and blame the space program, saying, in effect, “Well, we would like to stay true to the old ways, but we just can’t. We have these contracts; we have this base, we have this mission.”

Taking Affirmative Action

History has long forgotten the PCEEO; however, the executive order creating it has an enduring legacy. The order mandated that federal contractors “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and the employees are treated during employment, without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin.”⁴⁷ Over the years, the term “affirmative action” would come to be synonymous with quotas, especially when it was applied to universities in the late 1970s, but what it represented in 1961 was a shift in government policy on racial discrimination. No longer would the government simply remedy discrimination cases. Instead, it would affirmatively promote and enforce the idea that employers bore a responsibility to hire people of all races. Companies that were equal opportunity employers had to announce that anyone could work for them and then they had to create a work environment where that was true.48

The terms “equal opportunity” and “affirmative action” are so commonplace today that it is difficult to understand their impact at the time the Kennedy administration first imposed and enforced them. Frank Crossley understood. He had been working in the IIT Metals Research Department for a few years when he learned about two management openings. Crossley interviewed for both jobs and both supervisors told him that he was their choice. Though he waited and waited, however, no job offers in metals research ever came. Crossley checked into the situation and learned that “at the executive level, someone had turned down my employment.” The person who turned him down never interviewed him, so he did not know whether Frank Crossley was qualified. All he knew was that Frank Crossley was black.

Crossley’s mentor at the time, John T. Rettaliata, who would go on to be president of IIT, was a refugee from fascism in Italy. He knew discrimination firsthand and, to him, this treatment seemed neither right nor fair. So Rettaliata got on the phone and called the head of the IIT research institute while Crossley listened in on Rettaliata’s half of the conversation. As Crossley told it, “He told him that he had heard that Frank Crossley had been offered a job there and had been turned down at the executive level by someone who had not even interviewed him.” Crossley said there was a pause and then he heard Dr. Rettaliata say, “No! You cannot do that. [Pause] Why, well because we are an equal opportunity employer.” Crossley said when he heard those words he jumped up with a start. “That was the first time I had ever heard the expression ‘equal opportunity employer.’” Not too long after the call, the director who had turned him down did interview him, “and I was offered a job after that.”⁴⁹ That is what “equal opportunity” and “affirmative action” meant in the real world in 1961.

Human Resources

As with Julius Montgomery at Brevard Engineering College, Frank Crossley’s story of discrimination demonstrates a different approach from the common story in civil rights histories. Once again, his was a quiet approach. He did not picket or march. He did not organize and he did not sue. While Julius Montgomery’s story can be seen as an old school reaction—backing down, trusting a white man in charge, and hoping for the best—Crossley’s story demonstrates what was at that time an emerging approach. His integration had the assistance of a set of business management techniques that came to be widely accepted during the war. The period when Crossley was entering the workforce was the heyday of the new field of “human resources.” During the war, researchers—many of them with roots in race relations and many of them from Chicago, where he was working—fanned out to factories and offices around the country to teach bosses and managers new ways of working with their employees. Managers were encouraged to understand the hopes, needs, and fears of their workers and to use that understanding, rather than coercion, to get what they wanted. This was also the era of Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, which the government charged with integrating industries vital to the war effort.50 Pamphlets like the 1942 “How Management Can Integrate Negroes in the War Industries” denounced workplace discrimination as just one more way managers and owners were besieged by problematic workers.⁵¹ The war effort gave the consultants making this argument a strong tool. Race discrimination was depicted as un-American—one more impediment to winning the war.⁵²

These ideas had taken hold by the time Crossley was rising at IIT. The training he received as an aspiring manager, as well as the predominant workplace culture, had drummed these principles into him and every other up-and-comer after the war.⁵³ He absorbed these lessons and adapted them to those he had learned back home growing up on the South Side of Chicago—control your emotions, especially anger, and do not give anyone an excuse to make you a stereotype. In the case of the IIT manager’s discrimination, Crossley saw injustice and did the thing his management training classes taught him was the right thing. He went to a supervisor. Fortunately enough, the supervisor understood the new rules, too, when it came to integration.

Implementing Equal Opportunity

The civilian space program began a massive hiring binge following Kennedy’s man on the Moon speech, so NASA contractors were early participants in the equal opportunity game. Soon after the president’s speech, national firms with connections to the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Alabama began to advertise for engineers and technicians around the country. Ads run in the fall of 1961 by G.E. and Thiokol Chemical in the Houston Post proclaimed the companies to be equal opportunity employers.54 The advertising requirement was a new element of the Kennedy administration’s equal opportunity strategy and the space program made it a large one.

News stories at the time focused on a handful of other elements that made Kennedy’s PCEEO seem different. They mentioned that membership on the committee included agency directors (including James Webb, the new administrator of NASA), that it had the ability to investigate and enforce equal hiring by labor unions doing government work, and that it would allow the attorney general to bring legal action if needed.⁵⁵ The president was keen to demonstrate that the PCEEO was not going to be “another futile gesture in the chain of Washington attempts to deal with the massive problem of racial discrimination through feckless committees.”⁵⁶ So almost immediately following the first (ceremonial) meeting, the committee members got together with the leaders of major labor unions and defense contractors.⁵⁷

On the day the president unveiled the PCEEO, its new chairman, Vice President Johnson, declared that when it came to enforcing equality in hiring by federal agencies and contractors, “we mean business.”⁵⁸ A few days later, NASA administrator Webb wrote to assure the vice president that “I am trying to make it clear in the space administration that you and I together mean business.”⁵⁹ Webb had his work cut out for him. Knowing as he did that his agency had the worst record in the federal government of hiring African Americans, he called for “the support of all NASA personnel in vigorous action to implement the President’s program for equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, creed or national origin.” He designated compliance officers at all the NASA centers.⁶⁰ He also sent a memo to the program directors and staff officers of all NASA field installations telling them to “take the initiative to see that the provisions of the Executive Order [creating the PCEEO] are carried out in your area of responsibility.”⁶¹ There is evidence that the entirety of this initial message on racial integration did not get through. Tellingly, in the MSFC newsletter, the Marshall Star, the May 10 article announcing the new EEO compliance officer made no mention of race. It said the new officer will “assist the Director in assuring that all civil service and contractor employees directly or indirectly connected with the center have equal opportunities for employment assignment and advancement.”62 Nowhere did it say what the words “equal opportunities” referred to, and one cannot assume that in 1961 people knew offhand what that term meant. At the time, there were forty-three African Americans employed at the center.⁶³

Planning Progress

In the hours before Kennedy set up the PCEEO, the Pentagon announced a ten-year program to build and procure the C-141 Starlifter, a massive jet built by the company Frank Crossley had recently joined, Lockheed. The plane carried equipment and paratroopers to a combat zone. One would also end up at NASA as a flying observatory. This was the first time the nation had ever spent a billion dollars for a single military system.⁶⁴ What black employment there was in the aerospace industry in 1961 had been slowing to a trickle in the years since the end of World War II as companies shut down plants within city limits in places like Los Angeles and moved out to suburbs like Marietta, Georgia (where the C-141 would be built). Suburban locations were often beyond the reach of the bus and transit systems used by most African Americans. In addition, the handful of black workers at the Lockheed-Marietta plant were ghettoized into an all-black affiliate of the International Association of Machinists, and the white union local denied these workers access to its apprenticeship program.

This behavior was not unique to Lockheed. In fact, it was typical. There appear to have been few industries more openly contemptuous toward the idea of racial equality at this time than the aerospace industry. “You will find almost universal prejudice against Negroes” at aircraft plants, Fortune magazine declared in 1943. “There is little concealment about the anti-Negro policy.”⁶⁵ Frank Crossley’s thoughts about having to move to Canada or Mexico for work came from an understanding of this situation. He no doubt knew of the outrageously racist statements made by aircraft manufacturers. Reporters asked J. H. “Dutch” Kindleberger, the president and general manager of North American Aviation (which would go on to build the Apollo space capsule), about hiring blacks when the company opened its new plant in Kansas City in 1941. He said, “Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them in the North American plant. While we are in complete sympathy with the Negro, it is against the company policy to employ them as mechanics or aircraft workers.” African Americans, he said, “would only be hired as janitors.”66 That year the Associated Negro Press wire service carried a story that Boeing Aircraft had “no place for Negro workers” in its plant in Chicago.⁶⁷ The year before, W. G. (Gerald) Tuttle, the director of industrial relations at Vultee Aircraft, told the National Negro Congress that “it is not the policy of this company to employ people other than of the Caucasian race.”⁶⁸ Thus it is of little surprise that of the 250,000 people working in aerospace between 1945 and 1950, African Americans represented only 1.6 percent. That number would improve slightly in the 1950s and then significantly in the early 1960s as federal rules required NASA contractors to hire more African Americans.⁶⁹

The NAACP took advantage of Kennedy’s announcement of the executive order creating the PCEEO by challenging discrimination in the aerospace industry head-on—filing thirty-two complaints on behalf of black Lockheed-Marietta employees.⁷⁰ Here on the very first day of the PCEEO’s existence was an immediate challenge to the Kennedy administration’s approach to equal rights through federal contracting. On its commitment to end flagrant discrimination and smooth the path to southern black employment in federally supported defense plants, would the administration put up or shut up?

PCEEO executive director John Feild flew out to Lockheed corporate headquarters in California to talk with Courlandt Gross, the company’s president. When they were through, Gross had agreed to two actions, neither of which addressed the problem at hand. First, Lockheed removed the “white” and “colored” signs from the bathrooms, water fountains, and cafeterias in the Marietta plant. Second, on May 25, in a high-profile White House ceremony, Gross signed what was termed a “Plan for Progress” to eliminate segregation at the facility.⁷¹ In a single photo op, Lockheed earned itself a reprieve (the NAACP had secured a pledge to cancel the contract if the company did not comply with the president’s EEO order)⁷² and “the reputation as the region’s most active and interested employer of Negroes.”⁷³ The Kennedy administration bought itself some effective public relations, and Lyndon Johnson was able to brag that he really did “mean business” when it came to workplace equality. The model was a Washington classic and before you could say “too good to be true,” defense contractors were lining up at the White House gate for a chance to shake the president’s hand and sign Plans for Progress of their own. On July 12, eight more defense contractors showed up. On November 24, twelve more. On February 7, 1962, thirty-one came by.74 In all, by February 1964, “one hundred forty one corporations employing approximately 7 million workers [had] signed Plans for Progress with the federal government.”⁷⁵

From one perspective, this was the Kennedy administration taking bold action to guarantee African Americans a slice of the federal pie. The NAACP, however, did not view it from that perspective. Neither did the National Urban League. Nor the black press. The National Urban League pointed out that none of the Plans for Progress had compliance procedures or addressed any of the things that companies were required to do under the president’s executive order. The National Urban League further noted that the program had a loophole allowing companies to claim they were complying with the spirit of equal employment opportunity while actually not doing anything at all. At its national convention in July, the NAACP passed a resolution calling Plans for Progress “virtually useless.” One analysis showed that in those 141 companies employing 7 million people, Plans for Progress had resulted in only 2,000 African Americans getting jobs.⁷⁶

Plans for Progress—which in Vice President Johnson’s mind became synonymous with the PCEEO—constituted only one link in the system, and a weak one at that.⁷⁷ As Johnson wrote in the executive order, contractors were not required to police their subcontractors, and they did not have to guarantee subcontractor compliance, either. All they had to do was insert an equal opportunity clause in their subcontracts and require that the subcontractors file compliance reports.⁷⁸ The compliance system set up under the executive order had its own enormous loophole. Contractors had to submit progress reports and they had to open their books to the committee, “but this requirement could be waived if the committee awarded the contractor a ‘certificate of merit.’”⁷⁹ Though Johnson went so far as to call cabinet secretaries in the middle of the night to quiz them on their EEO compliance, he complained bitterly that the structure of the PCEEO left him insufficient resources to carry out the committee’s mandate.80 In fact, there are hints that the PCEEO was intentionally set up this way, and for a specific reason: under its structure, the Kennedy brothers got credit for any good the committee did, and when things went wrong, Johnson got the blame.⁸¹

Regardless of the weakness of its structure and the questions raised about the implications of its creation and the insufficiency of its procedures by the national civil rights leadership and the black press, the PCEEO was the structure that the Kennedy administration chose to implement Johnson’s plan to create equality in the South through jobs. Flawed as it was, the PCEEO would be the instrument they used to drive NASA and the space program to examine and modify the way they did business in the early 1960s. The task was huge, the tool chosen insufficient. Given the political realities, however, it was the president’s choice; and, over time, Johnson’s experiment—creating an entirely new class of jobs for African Americans to aspire to—would attain a measure of success. The number of employed black professional and skilled laborers in Houston increased during the 1960s.⁸² And according Herbert Northrup of the Wharton School of Business, once “civilian aircraft production, military procurement, and the space program all boomed in concert with increased emphasis on civil rights . . . Negro employment in the aerospace industry began to show both qualitative and quantitative advances.”⁸³ This new committee, with its power to cajole, investigate, and possibly force integration, would turn out to be one reason why.

“No matter how dark the future looks, the young Negro student must prepare himself well,” Crossley told S. I. Hayakawa back in 1945. “Opportunities for Negroes are not great, but they are gradually increasing. You cannot take advantage of an opportunity unless you are prepared.”⁸⁴ Crossley certainly did that. He was the first African American to receive a PhD in metallurgical engineering.⁸⁵ He received seven patents, five for the titanium-base alloys that greatly improved the aircraft and aerospace industry. He received something more, as well: the respect of his coworkers. Many years later, it is difficult to recall how monumentally important that was. When Crossley began his career, race discrimination was an accepted fact of everyday life. A coworker could walk up to someone like Julius Montgomery and declare, “You are nothing but a Nigger,” with impunity. In the Hayakawa interview, Crossley was referring to this dark future—the one he set out to change.

Crossley did not know it in 1945, but he was preparing himself for the Space Age, which would soon arrive. He was able to take advantage of it. The PCEEO and its members would push NASA to see that other African Americans could, too. Despite a massive effort, they would largely fail. As we will see, the critics of America’s inactivity on racial integration took their opportunities, too, and when those opportunities included outer space, the results could be memorable.