Conclusion

James Jennings, Clyde Foster’s young mentee from Alabama A&M College’s first computer class, ended up spending his entire career at NASA. Over the course of his thirty-five years there, Jennings had the opportunity to be part of the agency’s Council on Equal Employment Opportunity. NASA populated the council with deputy center directors from across the agency, the equal opportunity officers from all of those centers, and four selected employees from across the agency. Jennings started out as one of the four employees and by the early 2000s was council chair. This experience gave him a remarkable perspective on the EEO issue at NASA, enabling him to see how it has changed and how it has not. Considering Jennings’ background, the length of his tenure at the agency, and his continued interest in the hiring and promotion of African Americans, his view is unique and valuable. His conclusion, therefore, is somewhat depressing. Overall, he said, “we haven’t made much progress.” In fact, he said, “the same things that we were talking about in the early ’70s about getting blacks involved in the program or hiring blacks—they were the same problems that we have today.”1

That assessment contrasts with one made by someone else who had a firm grasp on the issue. After President Kennedy’s death, the John F. Kennedy Library Project began an oral history program designed to “recapture the experiences and impressions of those who served during the eventful one thousand days of the Kennedy presidency.”² John F. Stewart was the project’s chief. In 1967, he sat down with Hobart Taylor Jr., who was Lyndon Johnson’s principal ally on the President’s Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO), for a conversation about Kennedy’s effort to open the federal workforce to African Americans. Considering how little is written about the role of NASA in the PCEEO’s project, their exchange is striking. Stewart began by asking if Taylor remembered, from his work with the PCEEO, which agencies “were outstandingly successful, and which were quite opposite?” The first agency Taylor mentioned was NASA. The significant exchange came next. NASA, he said,

worked at it under very difficult circumstances because their facilities, and their—

STEWART: Type of people—the occupations involved were quite different.

TAYLOR: That’s right. And also the location of all the NASA facilities are in the South . . . where they had tremendous problems of housing, and everything else of that kind, too, you see? But I think that the people of NASA were very intelligent.3

Two things are notable. First, Taylor pointed out the particular difficulties NASA had because it was in the South. As the man who helped institute Johnson’s plan to change that region of the country, Taylor’s understanding of NASA’s struggles with the South’s peculiar institutions was acute, and he understood, as Johnson did, why that presence—a federal presence and one of futuristic, technological excellence—mattered. If the South was to be changed, new jobs in new fields had to replace the archaic status quo. And if the South was to be changed, federal intervention was imperative.

The second notable thing was more subtle. Taylor shot down Stewart’s suggestion that NASA jobs were too sophisticated for African Americans to hold. In a conversation about federal jobs, Stewart walked in assuming that at NASA, the “type of people—the occupations involved were quite different.” At NASA, he suggested, the challenge was not filling the kinds of jobs they had at the post office or the Federal Highway Administration. At NASA, it must have been impossible to find black people for jobs that were “quite different.” Taylor refuted that contention immediately, shooting down the idea that NASA jobs were too sophisticated.

As a member of the African American upper class, Taylor read the black press and saw dozens of stories about technicians, mathematicians, engineers, and pilots who went to work for NASA. No one can know whether he read stories about Frank Crossley inventing his new class of titanium alloys; about Morgan Watson and George Bourda going to Huntsville to work as part of the nation’s technological elite; or about Clyde Foster’s role in starting the Eastern Conference of Black Mayors. There is no doubt, however, that he came away from the black press reinforced with a feeling that allowed him to tell Stewart that “the people of NASA were very intelligent”—and he meant all the people of NASA: black and white.

That is a vitally important distinction in considering the role NASA played in the Kennedy administration’s push for equality and the Johnson administration’s drive for it. Equality is not just about access. For people to be equal, they need to perceive each other as equal. For many Americans, especially in the South, however, it might have been less difficult to accept a Chinese American or Mexican American co-worker as equal than to accept an African American. NASA played a role in changing that. As Morgan Watson said—and it bears repeating—NASA “helped to break the walls down. It helped change people’s perception of black people in the South.”4

It did this in both overt and subtle ways. The Marshall Space Flight Center in particular went out of its way to promote its African American employees by putting their photographs in the house newspaper, the Marshall Star. The center cited one African American worker for sustained superior performance in a film that it produced to promote an incentive awards program.⁵ It is easy to see this as tokenism, but consider the culture in which they took this action. If, as Jack Spielman, the EEO hearing officer, found, “discrimination continue[d] to exist” at MSFC, then lauding an African American worker for his sustained superior performance was no small thing. In the same way, the dustup over employees attending segregated meetings and the restrictions on staying only in integrated hotels contributed to a sense that, at NASA centers, everyone was allowed to share in the sense of exceptionalism.

As Hobart Taylor Jr. said in the JFK library oral history interview, what was most important was the location of NASA’s facilities and the inherent challenges that came along with that location. There were practical considerations beyond regional economics that brought NASA to the South and kept it there, but many in Washington, DC, knew or hoped they knew that having it there might change everything.

One reason why there has never been a detailed exploration of NASA’s role in civil rights is that historians perceive the two issues as being completely separate. Quite the contrary; they were connected. Lyndon Johnson certainly saw them that way and, as chairman of the National Space Council, the PCEEO, and then as president of United States, he was in a position to see that they remained connected. Johnson set out to make the South a different kind of place. He sought to use massive infusions of federal money with strings attached to change its base from agriculture and poverty to research and technology. A side benefit, he hoped, was that creating more wealth would ease the South’s racial tension. He thought that bringing white and black people together in the workplace would help with that, too. The NASA story demonstrates this plan in process.

Can one conclude, as Taylor said, that NASA was “outstandingly successful” in its equal employment efforts and its broader execution of federal antidiscrimination policies? There are many ways to answer that question. Hard numbers do exist. Census figures break down how many black and white engineers, computer specialists, scientific technicians, and the like there were in the communities in which NASA had a significant presence. Those numbers give one picture. In addition, there are the impressions of NASA’s African American pioneers themselves. They give a different sense of what the space program did, what it did not do, and what it might have done. It is also possible to look at the impact NASA had on the communities as a whole. After all, if one believes that a rising tide lifts all boats, this metric can help shape an impression, too.

Several factors allowed NASA as an agency to promote civil rights. Policy enforcement, leadership by agency chiefs, NASA’s public image as a modern and enlightened meritocracy, and the political-economic influence the agency held over contractors and within some host communities all contributed. Each factor allowed NASA, with varying degrees of success, to advance the cause of racial equality in the South.

Political and economic influences are basic tools of government agencies and critical industries within a community, but if the community is not centralized, neither will be fully effective. Only in Huntsville did conditions exist that allowed NASA to have a significant impact on local race relations. MSFC director Wernher von Braun and his German rocket men had lived in Huntsville since 1950. They were the core of the NASA workforce at MSFC. When von Braun spoke against segregation, he did so as a federal executive and, more importantly, as a respected neighbor with a long record of civic activities. No other NASA center director, regardless of competency, had a term of residency or community service similar to von Braun’s in Alabama. Neither did any other host community have as effective a business coalition as AHAC, the Association of Huntsville Area Contractors. NASA and its contractors became Huntsville’s second skin and protected the city from many of the worst segregationist excesses and from the wrath of George Wallace during the 1960s. It is difficult, however, to say they had a role in changing the racial makeup of the community’s workforce, and there are even suggestions that, when it came to integration, the MSFC personnel office continued to stand in the way.

In a paper about NASA’s civil rights activity in the years after the Moon landing, Kim McQuaid recounted the firing of Ruth Bates Harris, the assistant deputy director who dealt with equal opportunity issues at NASA headquarters in the early 1970s. The agency fired Harris for “submitting a private report to NASA Administrator James Fletcher stating that NASA’s belated equal opportunity program was ‘a near total failure.’” The report paints a particularly damning portrait of the hiring at MSFC. The center, it said, “appointed only one totally inexperienced employee rather than the three highly qualified specialists required.” The report found that the center’s EEO staff “has been continuously kept short of resources and under the control of insensitive middle management.”6

Charlie Smoot, for his part, said that NASA in Alabama could have done much more to increase the number of African Americans it had working at Marshall. He said the constant whining from the agency about how it could not find quality blacks to hire was nonsense. “It was not easy,” he said, “but you could find them if you wanted to. It depended on how bad you wanted to.” When NASA said they could not get blacks to come to Alabama, he said, “they used that as reasons for not doing the right thing. They used it as an excuse. It gave them an out, a reason why they didn’t do anything.” The truth, he said, is that “they didn’t do it because it was difficult.” Smoot said he dealt with constant frustration over what he saw as a lack of willingness on the part of the MSFC personnel staff to accept the people he would send their way. He even had trouble placing his vaunted “Water Walkers.” “They would not take them,” he said. “You’d bring them credentials and they would drag their feet.”7

Nevertheless, Huntsville was a different kind of place than the rest of Alabama, a point that Governor George Wallace’s segregationist rhetoric and confrontational style gave the city and its principal employer ample opportunity to make. Wallace was a lightning rod. His views allowed NASA as an agency to enter racial politics without fear of a presidential leash or serious retribution. The agency’s economic and political presence also allowed Huntsville to resist Wallace, whereas other Alabama communities that lacked a “big brother” succumbed easily, perhaps willingly, to segregationist pressure. Finally, NASA’s prestige and the powerful symbolism attached to the agency and its mission launched Huntsville onto national and international platforms. Consequently, civic leaders recognized the importance of public image to long-term economic growth and coordinated their plans with the agency to accomplish mutual goals.

When they got together in 2008 to discuss their experience as some of NASA’s first African American employees, Richard Hall, Delano Hyder, and E. C. Smith all concurred in this assessment. NASA changed Huntsville, they said, but it did not change Alabama or the South. As Smith said, “It changed in Huntsville. Yes. How far did that spread? I don’t know. I doubt very far.” Huntsville, Hyder said, “was different in the beginning, but with the space program coming into Huntsville it even made it more special and different.” His feeling (and the others chimed in to agree) was that the city’s educated, multinational workforce made it unique.⁸

The Wallace situation did not repeat itself in other host states. Florida governor Farris Bryant promoted the state’s ethnic diversity. Texas governor John Connally was loath to embarrass Lyndon Johnson. And finally, the Mississippi Test Facility (MTF) was far removed from Mississippi’s political and social strife and had so few NASA employees that it was insulated from the problems of the day.

Public image and Space Age rhetoric sold the human space program to the American people, and to a degree, it sold desegregation as a de facto part of modern society to southern communities. The most successful sale was Brevard County, Florida. Here more than anywhere else in the South, Space Age imagery outweighed substance as an agent of social change. Regardless of NASA activity, the agency’s very presence in Florida inspired reformers to invoke the agency’s modernist image to advance the cause of racial equality.

NASA and contractor personnel at Cape Canaveral, unlike their Alabama counterparts, remained apart from local politics and social issues. One reason for this disengagement was the apolitical nature of engineers. Another reason was the term of residency—the Florida personnel viewed their time at Cape Canaveral as one more duty station in the course of their careers. The space workers were in Brevard County to engineer rocket launches, not re-engineer local society. Julius Montgomery’s decision to pull out of Brevard Engineering College was one demonstration of that. The “old-line . . . rural, southern, here all their lives” culture described by James W. Button in Blacks and Social Change was another.”9

Politics and money were not absolute determiners of racial moderation. NASA spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Brevard County but never intervened in local issues, as it did in Huntsville. The Cape Canaveral workforce was not concentrated in a single community, but spread throughout the county. These workers were more interested in roads and sewer lines than in political power and social reconstruction. Space imagery in other communities was seldom attached to the civil rights movement. At Huntsville, the imagery was more mainstream and served to reinforce the national effort to define the agency and its goals in heroic, even mythic, terms. Even the comments Webb and Wernher von Braun made in the mid-1960s related primarily to policy and economics rather than functioning as symbols of the Space Age.

What area of integration did NASA influence in Florida if not schools, housing, employment (including its own), and public accommodations? What did NASA contribute? The space program’s in-migration of space-related workers and their families accelerated an already rapid population growth. The agency, its contractors, and the newcomers themselves increased tax and sales revenue and added to community prosperity. The community responded with improved roads, sewage systems, and greater spending on schools, though not always in black residential areas. It can be argued, however, that the general quality of life in the community improved.¹⁰ In Titusville and Brevard County, the space program caused the growth that led to better community services. A black resident later said, “Racial changes came about because of changes in the community due to the Cape. You can’t live in a Space Age and treat people in antiquated ways. We have better human relations now because there are more people in the community who care about all the people.”11 Clearly the Space Age and, by implication, program-related personnel were seen as agents of change. Another impact is that in 1969 Julius Montgomery became the first African American ever elected to the Melbourne City Council. When he retired in 1977, however, he was still the council’s only black member, and, after he left, they did not have another for thirty-five years.¹²

NASA’s role in the advancement of racial equality in Brevard County lacked the fire and thunder of its rocket launches. The agency was more facilitator than agitator. Brevard County slowly changed itself. NASA’s arrival, replete with dollars and symbols, accelerated the process. Cities and towns that benefited from NASA dollars could no longer use low revenues to excuse race-biased services. The idea that outsiders changed places like Brevard County was a convenient conceit for all involved. On the one hand, traditionalists could blame “Yankees.” On the other, reformers used the myth to shame the federal government into action; and most important for the agency, NASA’s public image remained untarnished.

Houston was understandably proud of its space center and quickly engaged space rhetoric for its very own. But in “Space City,” the rhetoric and hyperbole promoted business and industry—not civil rights and racial harmony. Houston had begun a slow process of desegregation before NASA arrived. And the city warmly embraced the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) and its contribution to the local economy. However, Houston’s population was too large and its economy far too strong and diverse for NASA to dominate. Only the integration of Rice University can be directly linked to NASA’s influence. Even if NASA officials wanted to challenge segregation in Texas and Houston, the political cost would have been enormous. NASA’s keenest political supporters were Texans, some from the Houston area, who would not appreciate agency interference. Thus, political influence inhibited rather than fostered NASA intervention.

Other than integrating cocktail parties at the Petroleum Club, promoting limited training/educational opportunities, and the alteration of the Rice University charter, of what direct benefit was NASA to the average black worker and resident of Houston? NASA as a singular entity benefited blacks no more than it did whites. The agency was not a dominant player and thus could not leverage the local community on questions of race as it did at other southern installations. Even NASA’s image as a champion of modernity and change—so popular in Florida—was little used in Houston. Furthermore, because so much of Houston had desegregated or was in the process of desegregating by the time of NASA’s arrival, there seemed little for the agency to do. What NASA could do and did do was to enforce its own policies and oblige those who wished to do business with the agency to adopt desegregated, if not integrated, policies of their own. Finally, the agency required the support of Texans in Congress and the White House, support that might waver if the MSC became active in racial politics.

No two NASA site locations were more different than rural Mississippi and metropolitan Houston. Yet in both places, the space agency’s prestige and money failed to radically alter long-standing racial attitudes and policies. Despite the NASA payroll, Pearl River and Hancock Counties remained too isolated and too small in native population for the agency to change social tradition. On the other hand, Houston’s large population and its powerful economic base, so attractive to the selection committee, granted the Bayou City immunity from a Space Age social agenda. Different circumstances produced the same result—a Space Age business as usual.

NASA always said that its greatest problem with equal employment was not the hiring of African Americans but finding African Americans to hire. The agency’s black pioneers suggest that NASA was not looking in the right places, but hard numbers suggest it was going to be an effort no matter what. Regardless of who was right, NASA’s employment efforts were paltry. In 1961, the agency employed 18,953, of whom 3 percent were black. That percentage remained stable as the decade progressed. In 1964, 2.9 percent of NASA’s employees were black. In 1965, 3.2 percent were black. Agency downsizing reduced employment in 1967, but in that year, still 2.9 percent were black. By the time of Apollo 11 in 1969, 3.1 percent of the NASA workforce was African American.13

None of NASA’s African American pioneers interviewed for this book, with the exception perhaps of Charles Smoot, had any knowledge of the greater national picture when it came to the pool of African Americans from which NASA could draw. They were going with their gut. They all had skills and they went to school with people who had skills. They merely assumed there must be many more. Census data suggests otherwise.

The near complete absence of black engineers and technicians in some southern states made an integrated workforce an almost impossible goal, even though NASA did establish local training programs within host communities. Census data for NASA’s southern host communities from 1960 shows what the agency faced. Data from the 1970 census shows how well (or poorly) Johnson did in his plan of creating a new category of jobs for blacks to hold. The following highlights demonstrate how significant the hurdle was.14

When the government conducted the 1960 census, there were five African American electrical and electronic technicians in the entire state of Florida. The state had 3,734 of them overall. The state had no African American aeronautical engineers. Not one. It had thirteen black electrical engineers and nine black mechanical engineers.¹⁵ The situation had improved ten years later, though not by much. First, there were new categories of jobs—computer specialist, astronautical engineer, scientific technician—created by the space program. There were African Americans who held jobs in all these fields. The state had 4,721 people working as computer specialists, 88 of whom were black. There were 2,136 aeronautical and astronautical engineers, 24 of whom were black. Nearly 21,000 new engineering and scientific technician jobs were created in Florida during the Space Age. Of those, blacks held 488. The number of African American electrical engineers had gone from thirteen to thirty-nine. The number of African American mechanical engineers went from nine to thirty-nine.

As memo after memo from NASA and the Huntsville contractors lamented, black professionals and technicians in Alabama were almost unknown in 1960. The state had four black aeronautical engineers, four black electrical and electronic technicians, and no African American designers or draftsmen. Those numbers are not for Huntsville, but for the entire state of Alabama.¹⁶

NASA remained concerned with its local influence and race relations within Alabama throughout the remainder of the decade. However, by 1966 changing federal priorities and agency concern for continued Project Apollo funding overshadowed other considerations. Webb continued his criticism of Alabama’s image, raising the ire of citizens and politicians to the point where Alabama congressman Robert Jones asked the president, “Why is it necessary to alienate our people in this manner? Such divisive statements seem so unnecessary and they serve no useful purpose.”17 Despite Webb’s criticisms, however, the employment situation at NASA in Alabama appears to have remained static for several years into the 1970s as well.

By 1970, black professionals and technicians remained an insignificant part of the state’s workforce. Out of 2,300 computer scientists, only 33 were black. There were six African American aeronautical and astronautical engineers in the state by 1970, only 252 engineering and scientific technicians, and only 25 electrical and electronic technicians. There were thousands of whites working in all of those jobs.

As in the other locations, the low number of black professionals and skilled technicians employed in pre-NASA Houston represented a shallow labor pool from which to draw. Houston had no African American aeronautical engineers in 1960 and no black electrical or electronic technicians. The census showed there were nine African American draftsmen and eight electrical engineers. The absolute number of black professional and skilled technicians increased between 1960 and 1970, but federal employment of these workers was abysmal—abysmal not only in relation to private industry but also when compared to Mississippi. The federal government in Houston employed no African American civil engineers, no African American mechanical engineers, no African American life and physical scientists, and no African American chemists. The federal government employed six black computer specialists, five astronautical engineers, and only nine engineering and scientific technicians, while employing thousands of whites in these job categories.¹⁸

Part of this may have had to do with the very location of the MSC. As Otis King said, “NASA is located at Clear Lake, which is at least thirty miles from downtown Houston.” African Americans were less likely than whites to own their own cars in the early 1960s,¹⁹ but aside from that, as Otis King said, Clear Lake was in the middle of “Ku Klux Klan territory.” There were African Americans in Galveston, he said, and “some blacks in Texas City, but not much in between and so you had a stretch of about fifty miles where there were blacks in Houston and then blacks again in Galveston, but no blacks living in between and NASA of course was right in the middle of that in space.”²⁰

To understand the absence of blacks at NASA’s facility in Mississippi, one must accept two facts: first, the recruitment of black professionals for work in rural Mississippi in the 1960s was difficult at best, and second, black professionals and technicians were a rarity in 1960 Mississippi.21 In 1960, the state had no black chemists, no black draftsmen, no black electrical or electronic technicians, no black electrical engineers, and only four black aeronautical engineers.²²

Sadly, NASA did not significantly alter attitudes in Mississippi, either. The hardened positions Peter Dodd found in 1963 continued throughout the decade. Despite published reports of official optimism that the MTF would lead to changes in social customs in southern Mississippi, no evidence suggests that a statewide or regional change in racial attitudes occurred because of the space program. NASA contracts provided the federal government with additional but unused leverage in its dealings with Mississippi. If the agency had an impact on Mississippi racism, it did so indirectly and in a manner quite different from Alabama’s clash of personalities and Florida’s symbolism. By 1970, the number of employed black engineers and technicians in Mississippi had increased from 1960 but not by much. There were 170 chemists, 16 draftsmen, 4 electrical or electronic technicians, and 16 electrical and electronic engineers. That is better, but nothing to brag about. The state still had no aeronautical and astronautical engineers.²³ The increase in statewide totals and the inclusion of blacks in all save one category cannot be solely attributed to the economic growth of a racially enlightened Mississippi. At best, the 1970 census numbers were a hollow victory for reformers. The number of black professionals compared to whites remained pathetic. The one area where the MTF could have truly changed Mississippi was through employment. It failed. By 1970, the federal government employed only 95 of the 364 black scientists, engineers, and technicians in the state. Even if NASA or its contractors employed all 364, the number would represent only 12 percent of the total MTF employment in 1968. Change was slow in Mississippi.

But the overall scorecard is not all bleak. There was massive hiring during the space program, and it was not limited to the hiring of scientists and engineers. Herbert R. Northrup, of the Wharton School of Finance, tracked the hiring of African Americans in aerospace throughout the period of NASA’s greatest growth. His writing shows one of the rays of light in the story of NASA’s impact on the African American community. Writing at the end of the decade in the Monthly Labor Review, Northrup conceded, “Aerospace companies have scoured the country looking for professional and technical employees. But Negroes have traditionally not been oriented to engineering as a profession.” He added, “The few who are found in the aerospace industry are a sizable percentage of those available” and opined that many of the employed black engineers who graduated from segregated schools did not have a background conducive to corporate mobility and worked where they did, in part, due to governmental pressure.24

Nevertheless, while the federal government may not have been able to create new kinds of jobs in the South that African Americans could hold, as Northrop stated in The Negro in the Aerospace Industry, technology jobs are not the only jobs out there. In addition to scientists and engineers, Northrop wrote, the aerospace industry required “huge clerical, accounting, finance, personnel, systems and computer and data processing staffs to operate and to control its manufacturing, research and testing facilities.” This need had “a distinct impact on the industry’s capacity to employ Negroes,” he said, “since Negroes are disproportionately unrepresented among these groups in our society.²⁵

As a result, one can find at least part of the change Johnson and others were looking for. The federal government’s presence created jobs, and many of those jobs went to African Americans. Northrop discovered that in the Southeast in 1968, major aerospace companies had opened facilities and “partially because they have practiced equal employment, and partially under federal government prodding, they have changed employment practices of the region in a major manner.” Even though African Americans were not working in most of the new high-tech jobs, these aerospace companies “have done much more in this regard than many other industries, for example automobiles, which have tended much more to maintain the status quo.”²⁶

Could NASA have done more for blacks more quickly than it did during the 1960s? The agency could only advance civil rights or any other policy beyond its charter as quickly and as strongly as the president, Congress, and the agency’s administrator would allow. NASA followed when and where the Kennedy and Johnson administrations led federal intervention into the racial equality campaign. The space agency followed not only as one of many federal agencies but as an agency that enjoyed and wished to maintain almost unqualified presidential and southern congressional support. Independent action by NASA in the politically sensitive area of civil rights, without the umbrella of presidential protection and later the Civil Rights Act of 1964, would have—in all probability—doomed the agency. So yes, NASA could have done more to advance racial equality more quickly if the federal government as a whole had been more willing or able to address the issue. Despite the efforts of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and the NASA administration, race relations progressed less quickly than space technology and the attainment of space goals.

What is NASA’s excuse after the tumult of the 1960s subsided? Well, NASA’s post-1960s employment record is much more difficult to justify. Looking over NASA’s record in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early twenty-first century, James Jennings found that “NASA hasn’t made the progress that it should have as far as minorities and them moving up into positions. In fact,” he said, “if you look at the percentages, it’s not very much different today than it was probably twenty years ago.”27

NASA had 5.6 percent minority employees in 1973, versus a government average of 20 percent. At that time, Deputy Administrator George Low is said to have declared, “Equal Opportunity is a sham in NASA.”²⁸ By 1983, the number of African Americans at the agency had doubled, from 6 percent of NASA’s labor force to 12 percent. In the science, engineering, and technical half of NASA, the increase was from 3.9 percent to 8.3 percent. By 1991, about 4 percent of all NASA science and engineering jobs were held by African Americans.²⁹

This all addresses the question of what impact civil rights had on the space program. But turning the question around is important, too. What impact did the space program have on civil rights? To answer this, one must turn again to the plan by southern New Deal politicians to use government spending to change the South. The space program helped end the protracted brain drain and culture drain of African Americans that Americans have come to know as the Great Migration. Beginning in 1916, 6 million African Americans, fleeing treatment that “doesn’t warrant staying,” left the Jim Crow South.³⁰ When the Great Migration began, 90 percent of all African Americans were southerners. By the time it was over, nearly half were living somewhere else. The Great Migration ended in the 1970s.³¹ The space program was one of the reasons why.

The Great Migration empowered millions of African Americans by giving them the rights they were denied in the places of their birth. It also enriched the nation with the contributions of the children of those first pioneers. As Isabel Wilkerson, author of the epic chronicle of the Great Migration The Warmth of Other Suns, has said, this massive movement of people “changed our culture, it changed the music that we listened to, it changed literature, it changed politics.”32 But, as inevitably happens whenever communities are uprooted, the movement wiped out important elements of the culture that had existed in the South before.

Morgan Watson saw these reluctant escapees while he was growing up. They would “come back to the South on visits,” he said. He heard and experienced their sadness, the loss of leaving the place they understood. Watson made and kept many vows throughout his life to end what was wrong with the place where he grew up. He saw going to work at NASA as yet one more. Watson said of himself and the other African American NASA co-ops, “We were tired—all of us—of the outmigration.”³³

Before the Space Age, there really was no alternative. As James Jennings remembered, when he was growing up, “the mentality was: I can go to the North and get a good job and live in a nice place and—you know, everything will be great.” He talked about a man he knew. “He was two or three grades ahead of me, name was Stanley Kennedy.” Kennedy, he said, “went to Tuskegee and he was a brilliant guy. I think he made one B during his whole, entire education career.” When his friend graduated, Jennings said, he “went to work for IBM up in Rochester, New York. My thinking and probably the thinking of many other people at that time was, If a guy this brilliant can’t get a job here in the South, I certainly can’t. So I need to be looking to go somewhere in the North also.”³⁴

Like many of the 6 million who left, Jennings and Watson loved the South. They considered themselves people of the South, and Watson said that although he “got very good job offers in other parts of the country,” because of the changes brought by NASA and the rest of the Second Reconstruction, “those of us that wanted to remain in the South; it gave us an opportunity to do so.”³⁵

Isabel Wilkerson has said that the African Americans who left the South gave a hand to those who stayed in helping them change the region’s conditions. While “six million people actually voted with their feet” and became a force that pushed northern and western Democrats to support civil rights, “those who actually stayed [in the South] marched and protested for things to change.” That is what transformed the South. These two groups together, she said, “were actually able to do what the Emancipation Proclamation on the day that it was signed could not do.”36

But the African American pioneers of the space program represent a third group. The people who went to work for NASA and the space program in the South did not march. They did not protest.

Morgan Watson and George Bourda sat out the sit-ins in Baton Rouge. Julius Montgomery capitulated to segregation at Brevard Engineering College (BEC). Working through agency channels, Clyde Foster got NASA to create a separate but equal advanced training program for blacks in 1970. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Washington, DC, burned, not only did astrophysicist George Carruthers not get involved; he was so distracted with his scientific discoveries that he did not even realize the riots occurred.³⁷ No, the space program’s African American pioneers were not marchers. As Delano Hyder said, people in Huntsville had “a different attitude” when it came to protesting. As a result, as Richard Hall said, protesting was something that “just doesn’t become a part of you.”³⁸

There are a number of ways to look at this dichotomy. In the case of Foster and Montgomery, they were not conciliatory; they were strategic. Montgomery stayed away for a year. Once BEC got on its feet, he enrolled. Now the school has an award named after him. If he had called in SNCC or the NAACP and caused a fuss, none of that could have happened. Clyde Foster appealed in person to Eberhard Rees, the Marshall director who replaced von Braun, and got him to bring African American professors from all over the South to Alabama A&M to teach black NASA employees. The result was that Hall, Hyder, Foster, and others all got promotions and raises. Foster could have organized a walkout; he could have marched with a placard back and forth in front of the gates at MSFC. He saw the benefit—the greater benefit to all—of holding back.

The people who push through the door are not always the people who march. Sometimes they are the ones who show up every day, work hard, do their jobs, and impress on everyone around them that they can handle the load. “We had heard Martin Luther King say, ‘When you start off a race behind, you have to run faster than everybody else,’” Morgan Watson said.39 He and the other African American co-ops knew—as Clyde Foster and Julius Montgomery and all of the others knew—that their success was not just personal; nor were their failures. If they messed up, the repercussions were magnified. It was not “I messed up.” It was “those people can’t be trusted.” They had to be the very best and the very best at all times. As Watson said, they knew that they could not fail.

The national media—especially the black media—took note. The black press had always been the biggest cheerleader in African American communities, confirming for a downtrodden people that what they saw and feared was reality was, in fact only a manifestation of their repression; that they could do anything if only someone would give them the chance. The coming of the space program handed the black press two new tools of racial uplift. The cutting-edge jobs created by NASA and its contractors allowed for the creation of a whole new crop of heroes. The papers held up Ed Dwight, Frank Crossley, Clyde Foster, George Carruthers, Morgan Watson, and George Bourda as icons of intelligence, worthiness, and ability. And especially in the case of Dwight, the black press was able to use the futuristic imagery of the Space Age and turn it back on American society to force the question of whether the nation truly was launching into the future or whether it was still stuck in the past. As for the mainstream white media, when the New York Times called Frank Williams “a social pioneer” and “a symbol,” it was giving notice to white America that its black fellow citizens possessed the requisite level of intelligence to compete at the highest level of American science and technology.⁴⁰ As someone who passed through the center of all this change, Morgan Watson saw the impact both short term and long. Today, he said, “no matter where you go in the South, you see a great number of black professionals.”⁴¹ That was not the case before Kennedy and Johnson began creating jobs—including brand new types of jobs, which African Americans could hold.

Morgan Watson had the opportunity to drive this point home in a particularly meaningful way in an event at the National Air and Space Museum on February 20, 2010. Of the almost fourteen thousand people who streamed in to the museum that day, many were black. February 20 was African American Family Day, a special event for patrons to learn things they had probably never heard before about African Americans in aerospace history. Highlights included a talk with surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen and a panel featuring the first all African American, all-female air crew. There was one more very important panel, too.

NASA finally opened the ranks of its most exclusive club, the astronaut corps, to African Americans in June of 1967. Air force major Robert H. Lawrence, the first black astronaut, died in a plane crash five months later. But the creation of the shuttle program finally allowed NASA to send African Americans into space. Dr. Guion Stewart “Guy” Bluford Jr. became the first African American to do so in 1983, and Dr. Mae Jemison, the daughter of a roofer who worked on the construction of Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal, became the first African American woman in space in 1992. 42

The National Air and Space Museum panel featured astronaut Mae Jemison, along with astronaut Leland Melvin, just back from a trip to the International Space Station. Sitting on the dais with them were two special guests: Morgan Watson, then in his mid-sixties, and Julius Montgomery, still amazingly spry at nearly ninety. The museum designed family days to teach younger patrons something new, but, as it would turn out, this family day would be a learning experience for the younger panelists—that is, the astronauts—too. Today they would hear first-hand stories of just what it took to kick in the doors that allowed them to eventually reach the stars.

Watson talked about picking cotton in ninth grade, how the buses would ride by on the roads, filled with white kids shouting taunts. And Montgomery talked about being the first African American at the Cape way back in the ’50s. What it felt like to realize that “I was always the Only One. Where I worked and wherever I went, I was the only one.” And, as he always did in settings like this, he told the story of his first day on the job at RCA, knowing there was probably no place worse for African Americans in Florida than the area around Cape Canaveral, that if you were black, you had a greater chance of being lynched there than anywhere else in the South. He talked of walking up to each man, and having them turn their backs; how no one would shake his hand and how his “great white bastard” comment got everyone to laugh and finally broke the ice. The two astronauts listened with rapt attention. Melvin shared a funny story of a white man who ignored him in an elevator at NASA only to learn later in a meeting that he had snubbed an astronaut. He and Jemison reminisced about how, as blacks, it was frightening to drive the back roads around the Cape.

Later on in the Green Room, as people snapped pictures of Mae Jemison with the airmen (it was tough to tell who was more honored to meet whom), Julius Montgomery sidled over to Leland Melvin and looked up (the astronaut, a former wide receiver for the Detroit Lions, towered over the older man) with wide-eyed awe. “I’ll tell you,” Montgomery said, “You astronauts; you’re the bravest people I ever met.” Leland Melvin returned the look and his grin broke into a wide, beaming smile. “No, sir,” he said. “I heard your story out there. You are the bravest person I ever met.” And Julius Montgomery laughed and Leland Melvin laughed, and they shook hands.43

Here, in essence, was the interplay between the space program and civil rights. Bounded in a nutshell was Julius Montgomery, whose bravery opened the door to let Morgan Watson’s bravery break the walls down and allow Mae Jemison and then Leland Melvin to count themselves rulers of infinite space. This is the very progression that Lyndon Johnson and Hobart Taylor had envisioned and the one they pressed on James Webb and Wernher von Braun to create.

Did it do inestimable good? Ask those who benefited—ask Mae Jemison and Leland Melvin. Ask former astronaut Charles Bolden, who became NASA’s first African American administrator in 2009. Was it perfect? Of course not. Overall, Charles Smoot said, “there was some good done by NASA but they were no better than Martin Marietta or Lockheed or any of the others.” There were changes made by NASA, he said, but “they weren’t the only one,” and not only that, “they did it screamin’ and hollerin’.” In the end, he said, “I’m trying to be fair. At that time, it was not easy for them. NASA did a lot of good. They could have done better.”⁴⁴ Those who benefited from NASA’s action, however, took the opportunity given to them and ran with it as far as they could go.

America had to pursue the space program, President Kennedy said, because there was “new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won and used for the progress of all people.”⁴⁵ While he was not talking about American race relations when he said that, an accident of timing and coincidence ensured that the space program would help win rights and create progress for African American people in ways the president could not have imagined. In doing so, the space program would help white Americans gain new knowledge about their black fellow citizens and their abilities. In the end, NASA’s story with civil rights is just one agency’s story. The plan put in place by Kennedy and Johnson caused the federal government to hire African American men and women throughout the South during the turmoil of the 1960s. There are doubtless stories of other Water Walkers out there; people who also helped break the walls down and change the perception of black people in the South.