Introduction
1. James L. Hicks, “Negro Math Expert Helped Launch Spaceman,” New York Amsterdam News, May 13, 1961, 1, col. 1.
2. Claude Sitton, “Segregationists Fight New ‘Lost Cause’: Governor Wallace’s Action in Closing Alabama’s Schools Points up the Last-Ditch Resistance,” New York Times, September 8, 1963, E5.
3. Konrad Dannenberg, conversation with Richard Paul, December 19, 2006.
4. “Astronaut Trainee Itching to Go into Orbit for US,” Los Angeles Sentinel, June 6, 1963, 1, col. 6; “Negro College Youth to Boost First Moon Goer into Orbit?” Chicago Defender, March 14, 1964, 1, col. 5; “Space City Faces School Segregation Showdown,” Daily Defender, March 28, 1963, 1, col. 11; “Her Science Paper Is Key to Man in Orbit,” New York Amsterdam News, May 13, 1961, 1, col. 1.
5. Morgan Watson, conversation with Richard Paul, January 27, 2009.
6. James W. Button, Blacks and Social Change: Impact of the Civil Rights Movement in Southern Communities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3.
7. Johnson identified the agencies with the most contracts as “the Department of Defense, GSA, the Post Office Department, Veterans’ Administration, the Space Agency.” He also mentioned the Atomic Energy Commission. President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, July 18, 1963, LBJ Library (hereafter LBJL), Austin, TX, 33, 38.
8. Hugh Davis Graham suggests Kennedy defaulted to PCEEO as a solution because he thought that “he could not get any significant civil rights legislation through Congress, and . . . therefore was unwilling to even try, lest he roil the Congress and threaten his higher priorities.” Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 28; Bruce J. Schulman, conversation with Richard Paul, December 2, 2008 (Schulman is the author of From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 [Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 1994]); Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 207.
9. Schulman, December 2, 2008; Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books), 199; Nancy MacLean, “From the Benighted South to the Sunbelt: The South in the Twentieth Century,” in Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, ed. Harvard Sitkoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 204; transcript, Robert S. McNamara Oral History, Special Interview I, March 26, 1993, by Robert Dallek, electronic copy, LBJL, 4.
10. James Jennings, conversation with Richard Paul, November 20, 2008.
11. Roger D. Launius, “Managing the Unmanageable: Apollo, Space Age Management and American Social Problems,” Space Policy 24 (2008): 158.
12. David H. Onkst has focused on race relations in the late 1950s at the Grumman facility in Long Island, New York, while Kim McQuaid’s work on racism at NASA focuses on the 1970s and 1980s.
13. Glen Asner, “Space History from the Bottom Up: Using Social History to Interpret the Societal Impact of Spaceflight,” in Societal Impact of Spaceflight, ed. Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius (Washington, DC: NASA History Division, 2007), 387.
14. President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, July 18, 1963, LBJL, 43.
15. George C. Wallace, “The 1963 Inaugural Address” (speech), January 14, 1963, Alabama Department of Archives and History, p. 2, http://www.archives.state.al.us/govs_list/inauguralspeech.html.
16. Wernher von Braun, “Huntsville in the Space Age” (speech, annual banquet), Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce, Huntsville, AL, 1964, 15.
17. Robert Cohen and David J. Snyder, eds., Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 3.
18. Asner, “Space History from the Bottom Up,” 399.
19. Letter, James E. Webb to Wernher von Braun, June 24, 1963, Minority Groups (1961–1993), file 008983, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; John W. Finney, “NASA Is Training Negroes for Jobs,” New York Times, May 31, 1964, 54.
20. Theodis Ray, conversation with Richard Paul, February 16, 2009.
Chapter 1
1. Guy Bluford became the first African American in space in 1983 and Mae Jemison became the first African American woman in space in 1992.
2. “Kill Six in Florida; Burn Negro Houses: Search for Escaped Negro Convict Leads to Race Riot, in Which Two White Men Die,” New York Times, January 6, 1923, 1.
3. Charles Payne, “You Duh Man! African Americans in the Twentieth Century,” in Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, ed. Harvard Sitkoff (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 178.
4. MacLean, “From the Benighted South,” 208.
5. Ibid.
6. Ben Green, Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 36.
7. Theodore L. Reller, “The School and Child Welfare,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 212 (November 1940): 52.
8. Green, Before His Time, 21.
9. Jerrold M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 171.
10. Roberta Senechal de la Roche, “The Sociogenesis of Lynching,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. William Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 56.
11. MacLean, “From the Benighted South,” 209.
12. Ben Green, quoted in “Race and the Space Race,” Public Radio Exchange, http://www.prx.org/pieces/41113-race-and-the-space-race.
13. Green, Before His Time, 31.
14. William Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 4.
15. David Colburn, conversation with Richard Paul, December 26, 2006. Colburn is the author of From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans: Florida and Its Politics since 1940 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).
16. We asked all of the retired African American NASA employees interviewed for this book a variant of the question “When you were young, what kind of job could a black man aspire to?” The complete list of jobs gathered was teacher, janitor, cook, concrete worker, railroad man, foundry worker, post office worker, doctor, and lawyer. Bearing out this perception are statistics from 1960 showing that the entire state of Florida had five African American electrical or electronic technicians (Alabama had four), thirteen African American electrical engineers (Alabama also had thirteen), and zero aeronautical engineers (Alabama had four). U.S. Department of Commerce, 1960 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 2: Alabama (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 2-373, 379, tables 121 and 122; U.S. Department of Commerce, 1960 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 11: Florida (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 11-469, table 122.
17. NASA retiree Clyde Foster, in talking about Alabama A&M College’s lack of willingness to participate in NASA-sponsored programs to promote engineering, said the school would only train engineers to “build some damn roads” because road construction was the principal job the school administration saw as being open to blacks with engineering degrees.
18. Julius Montgomery, conversation with Richard Paul, February 6, 2008.
19. Hamilton Bims, “Rocket Age Comes to Tiny Triana,” Ebony, March 1965, 106; Lloyd Leigh, “Negroes Vital in Space Program,” Chicago Daily Defender, November 30, 1965, 7.
20. In “Affirmative-Action: Past, Present, and Future,” Peter H. Schuck said Congress authorized the National Labor Relations Board to redress an unfair labor practice by offering the offending party to “cease and desist from such unfair labor practice, and to take such affirmative action . . . as will effectuate the policies of this act.” Peter H. Schuck, “Affirmative-Action: Past, Present, and Future,” Yale Law and Policy Review 20, no. 1 (2002): 46.
21. Douglas Helms, “Eroding the Color Line: The Soil Conservation Service and the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Agricultural History 65, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 37, 39.
22. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 10.
23. Ibid.
24. David Hamilton Golland, Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 40-41.
25. Merl E. Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 349.
26. Charles W. Eagles, “Review of Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946, by Merl E. Reed,” American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (October 1996): 1299.
27. Montgomery, February 6, 2008.
28. Payne, “You Duh Man!” 189.
29. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (New York: Random House, 2010), 320.
30. Ibid., 323.
31. Larry J. Griffin, Paula Clark, and Joanne C. Sandberg, “Narrative and Event: Lynching and Historical Sociology,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. William Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 24-25.
32. Wilkerson, Warmth, 320-321.
33. William Gary, conversation with Richard Paul, December 21, 2006.
34. Paul Ortiz, conversation with Richard Paul, January 10, 2007 (Ortiz is the author of Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006]); Green, Before His Time, 72, 29, 117.
35. Ortiz, January 10, 2007.
36. Ibid.
37. Green, “Race and the Space Race.”
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Ortiz, January 10, 2007.
42. Montgomery, February 6, 2008.
43. Ibid.
44. Julius Montgomery, conversation with Richard Paul, February 24, 2011.
45. John F. Kennedy, “Moon Speech” (speech), Rice Stadium, Rice University, Houston, TX, September 12, 1962, http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm.
46. “President Eisenhower Delivers Farewell Address to the Nation,” NBC News, New York, NBC Universal, January 17, 1961, https://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/browse/?cuecard=60883.
47. “President Eisenhower Delivers Farewell Address to the Nation.” https://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/browse/?cuecard=60883.
48. Howard McCurdy, conversation with Richard Paul, April 9, 2009.
49. Peter Kuznick, conversation with Richard Paul, July 26, 2005. Kuznick is director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, Washington, DC.
50. Paul Boyer, conversation with Richard Paul, August 4, 2005. Boyer is the author of By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
51. Alan Winkler, conversation with Richard Paul, July 30, 2005. Winkler is a professor of history at Miami University–Ohio and author of Life under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
52. Roger Launius, conversation with Richard Paul, March 13, 1998. Launius is a curator at the National Air and Space Museum.
53. Margaret Weitekamp, conversation with Richard Paul, August 1, 2007. Weitekamp is a curator at the National Air and Space Museum.
54. Howard McCurdy, conversation with Richard Paul, April 3, 2009.
55. George Reedy, “The Legislative Origins of the Space Act: Proceedings of a Videotaped Workshop,” NASA Space Act Origins—1992 Symposium hosted by GWU/LBJL, April 3, 1992, folder 12216, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
56. “President Eisenhower Touts U.S. Scientific Advancements,” Universal newsreel, New York, NBC Universal, November 7, 1957, https://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/browse/?cuecard=1618.
57. Meena Bose, conversation with Richard Paul, April 7, 2009. Bose is Peter S. Kalikow Chair in Presidential Studies at Hofstra University.
58. Howard E. McCurdy, conversation with Richard Paul, July 8, 1999.
59. “Lyndon Johnson Speech to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith,” CBS News, New York, CBS Television Network, October 20, 1957, Film Serial CBS-C1R2, LBJL.
60. Ibid.
61. The President’s News Conference, October 9, 1957, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=10924.
62. “Lyndon Johnson Speech to the Anti-Defamation League.”
63. The President’s News Conference, February 17, 1960, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12039.
64. McCurdy, April 3, 2009.
65. Reedy, “The Legislative Origins of the Space Act.”
66. U.S. Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee, Committee on Armed Services, Inquiry into Satellite and Missile Programs, Part 1, Hearing, November 25, 1957, 85th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), 3.
67. Walter A. McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 151–153.
68. Ibid., 151.
69. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 10–11.
70. Roger Launius, conversation with Richard Paul, April 10, 2009.
71. Ibid.
72. Roger E. Bilstein, Orders of Magnitude: A History of the NACA and NASA, 1915–1990, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989). Bilstein’s book is one of several NASA histories placed online by the NASA History Office. http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4406/chap.3.html.
73. Reedy, “Legislative Origins of the Space Act.”
74. “President Eisenhower Delivers Farewell Address to the Nation.” https://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/browse/?cuecard=60883.
75. Bruce Schulman’s book Cotton Belt to Sunbelt is the most thorough work outlining the impact of federal spending on the South.
76. Gordon Patterson, “Countdown to College: Launching Florida Institute of Technology,” Florida Historical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 175.
77. Ibid., 163.
78. Ibid., 170.
79. Ibid., 175.
80. Montgomery, February 6, 2008.
81. Raymond A. Bauer, Richard S. Rosenbloom, and Laure Sharp, Second-Order Consequences: A Methodological Essay on the Impact of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 96. Bauer et al. quote the superintendent of schools from Peter Dodd’s “Social Change in Space-Impacted Communities,” a document of the Committee on Space of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cambridge, MA, August 1964), 36; William S. Ellis, “Space Crescent II: The Brain Ghettos,” Nation, October 19, 1964, 243.
82. Patterson, “Countdown to College,” 175.
83. Montgomery, February 6, 2008.
84. Patterson, “Countdown to College,” 175.
85. Montgomery, February 6, 2008.
86. U.S. News and World Report 2012–2013 College Rankings, http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/florida-tech-1469.
87. Patterson, “Countdown to College,” 175.
88. Button, Blacks and Social Change, 9, 71.
89. Susanne Cervenka, “Melbourne City Council Vote May End Diversity Drought: City Hasn’t Seen Black Council Member since 1977 Elections,” Florida Today, November 3, 2012, http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20121103/NEWS05/311030019/Melbourne-city-council-vote-may-end-diversity-drought.
Chapter 2
1. Ray, February 16, 2009.
2. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster), 2005, 54; Bernie D. Jones, “Southern Free Women of Color in the Antebellum North: Race, Class, and a ‘New Women’s Legal History,’” Akron Law Review 41, no. 3 (2007–2008): 764; Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002), 22; Elizabeth Stone, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us (Edison, NJ: Transaction, 2004), 115.
3. Marshall Space Flight Center Manpower Office, “A Chronology of the Equal Employment Opportunity Program at MSFC,” February 1971, p. 1, Equal Opportunity Employment series, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
4. Ibid.
5. Peter C. Dodd, “The Slow Pace of Change in the Space-Centered Communities: A Report on Technology and Modern Society,” Cahiers d’historie Mondiale, Journal of World History 10, no. 3 (1967): 570.
6. Ray, February 16, 2009.
7. Roz Foster, conversation with Richard Paul, January 30, 2008.
8. Susan Parker and Robert W. Blythe, eds., Canaveral National Seashore Historic Resource Study (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2008), 77, http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/cana/cana_hrs.pdf.
9. Ibid.
10. According to a sign placed at the site of the schoolhouse by the Brevard County Historical Commission and the Brevard County Tourist Development Council, “Campbell’s children included Florida, Eugenia, Agnes, Henry and Willie, who was Valedictorian in 1892. Jackson’s children were Annie, Mary, Floyd and Douglas, who was Valedictorian in 1893.”
11. Parker and Blythe, Canaveral, 78.
12. Foster, January 30, 2008.
13. Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neal Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 756.
14. Ray, February 16, 2009.
15. Letter, James E. Webb to Robert F. Kennedy, June 6, 1963, James E. Webb Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
16. Ray, February 16, 2009.
17. Parker and Blythe, Canaveral, 78.
18. Foster, January 30, 2008.
19. Ray, February 16, 2009.
20. Luther Hodges, “What Kind of America,” in The Deep South in Transformation: A Symposium, ed. Robert B. Highsaw (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1964), 30, 42.
21. On July 1, 1962, the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex was renamed the Florida Launch Operations Center (LOC). Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Alabama originally administered the LOC. The Kennedy Space Center archives have no records regarding the center’s equal employment opportunity (EEO) activities in the early 1960s. Researchers can find what LOC EEO material there is in the MSFC archive. There are also a handful of documents in the NASA History Office in a folder devoted to NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs, 1923–1992.
22. Ben Hursey, personnel officer, John F. Kennedy Space Center, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
23. Theodis Ray, conversation with Richard Paul, May 2, 2013.
24. Report on Evaluation of Personnel Management Activities, LOC, September 16–27, 1963, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
25. During the search that brought us to Julius Montgomery, Richard Paul contacted numerous NASA retiree groups in Florida. No one interviewed could recall ever seeing African American workers at Cape Canaveral. It seems a reasonable assumption that if whites did not even know that blacks were there, they were not aware that blacks had grievances.
26. “Results of EEO Counseling Questionnaires, Agency-Wide,” 1963, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
27. A Chronology of the Equal Employment Opportunity Program at MSFC, Manpower Office, Administration and Technical Services, George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, 1971, Equal Opportunity Employment series, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL, 5.
28. Letter, James E. Webb to Floyd L. Thompson, December 12, 1961, James E. Webb Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. A March 12, 1962, memo written at MSFC suggests the compliance officer at the other centers received the same letter.
29. Letter, James E. Webb to Wernher von Braun, June 24, 1963, Minority Groups (1961–1993), file 008983, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
30. NASA Contracts Equal Employment Opportunity Program Achievement during 1963, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
31. Montgomery, February 6, 2008.
32. Ray, February 16, 2009.
33. Ibid.
34. Bill Bell, conversation with Richard Paul, February 4, 2008. Bell has been mayor of Durham, North Carolina, since 2001.
35. John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (hereafter JFKL), Boston, MA, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Speeches/Special-Message-to-the-Congress-on-Urgent-National-Needs-May-25-1961.aspx.
36. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 169.
37. Packard, American Nightmare, 262–263.
38. Woodward, Strange Career, 171.
39. James Hilty, Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 320.
40. Anecdotes appear in many civil rights histories that have the president speaking this line to speechwriter Harris Wofford, though it is not clear about whom he was complaining. Robert Dallek in An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 and Richard Reeves in President Kennedy: Profile of Power, among others, say he made the comment after he had been criticized at a public function by Harry Belafonte for not doing more to help the Freedom Riders in 1961. Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (New York: Little, Brown, 2003); Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). Nick Bryant says the president was responding to criticism from Yale Law School dean Eugene Rostow, who was at the function with Belafonte. Nick Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
41. Samuel Leiter and William Leiter, “Affirmative Action and the Presidential Role in Modern Civil Rights Reform: A Sampler of Books on the 1990s,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 29, no. 1 (March 1999): 180–181.
42. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 79.
43. Telephone conversation, President John F. Kennedy and Governor Ross Barnett, September 29, 1962, 2:00 p.m., http://soundlearning.publicradio.org/subjects/history_civics/whitehouse_on_civilrights/Transcript_%20JFK%20Talks%20with%20Mississip.pdf.
44. Hilty, Robert Kennedy, 315.
45. Golland, Constructing Affirmative Action, 37.
46. MacLean, “From the Benighted South.”
47. Michael R. Beschloss, “Kennedy and the Decision to Go to the Moon,” in Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 51.
48. Howard E. McCurdy, conversation with Richard Paul, July 8, 1999.
49. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 153.
50. Beschloss, Kennedy, 52.
51. McCurdy, July 8, 1999,
52. Beschloss, Kennedy, 56.
53. Howard McCurdy, quoted in “Washington Goes to the Moon,” Public Radio Exchange, http://www.prx.org/pieces/629/transcripts/629.
54. U.S. Department of Commerce, 1960 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 11: Florida (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 11-12, 11-90; 1970 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 11: Florida (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), 11-149.
55. Ellis, “Space Crescent II,” 241–242.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 242.
58. Ibid., 241–242.
59. Ibid., 241.
60. Letter, Roy Wilkins to David Lawrence, March 15, 1963, NK-15, microfilm records of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, roll 8, JFKL; letter, Roy Wilkins to John F. Kennedy, March 18, 1963, “HU 2/ST 2-HU 2/ST 9” folder (“HU 2 General”), White House Central Subject File (WHCSF), box 368, JFKL; Ellis, “Space Crescent II,” 241; “NAACP Charges Bias at Cape Canaveral,” Atlanta Daily World, March 24, 1963, A1, col. 1; “Canaveral Color Bars Are Bared,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 30, 1963, 1, 2.
61. Letter, Wilkins to Kennedy, March 18, 1963.
62. Letter, Alfred S. Hodgson to Lee C. White, April 5, 1963, “HU 2/ST 2-HU 2/ST 9” folder (“HU 2 General”), WHCSF, box 368, JFKL; letter, Lee C. White to Roy Wilkins, March 22, 1963, “HU 2/ST 2-HU 2/ ST 9” folder (“HU 2 General”), WHCSF, box 368, JFKL; letter, Alfred S. Hodgson to Lee C. White, April 5, 1963, “HU2/ST1-HU2/ST9” folder (“HU2 General”), WHCSF, box 368, JFKL; “Cape Canaveral Bias under Probe,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 11, 1963, 6, col. 6.
63. Ray, May 2, 2013.
64. Ray, February 16, 2009.
65. Ray, May 2, 2013.
66. Bauer et al., Second-Order Consequences, 67.
67. Ibid., 75, 98.
Chapter 3
1. “Missile Scientist on Target,” Ebony, September 1975, 158.
2. Frank Crossley, conversation with Richard Paul, November 12, 2008.
3. Roger D. Launius, “American Memory, Culture Wars, and the Challenge of Presenting Science and Technology in a National Museum,” Public Historian 29, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 14.
4. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), ix.
5. Jennifer Delton, “Before the EEOC: How Management Integrated the Workplace,” Business History Review 81, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 269.
6. “Missile Scientist on Target,” 158.
7. Crossley, November 12, 2008.
8. S. I. Hayakawa, “Second Thoughts: Solitary Negro Student,” Chicago Defender (national edition), February 3, 1945, 11.
9. Joseph P. Reidy, “Black Men in Navy Blue During the Civil War,” Prologue 33, no. 3 (Fall 2001), http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/fall/black-sailors-1.html.
10. Joseph Reidy, conversation with Richard Paul, October 24, 2001.
11. Mark Clague, conversation with Richard Paul, October 18, 2011. Dr. Clague is Associate Professor of Music, American Culture, and African American Studies, University of Michigan.
12. Alex Albright, conversation with Richard Paul, October 17, 2011. Albright is the writer and producer of Boogie in Black and White (c. 1988), Boogie in Black and White Documentary Collection (#1086), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC.
13. Hayakawa, “Second Thoughts,” 11.
14. Ibid.
15. Crossley, November 12, 2008.
16. Hayakawa, “Second Thoughts,” 11.
17. Ibid.
18. Robert Dallek, “Johnson, Project Apollo, and the Politics of Space Program Planning,” in Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 72.
19. Schulman, December 2, 2008.
20. Gavin Wright, “The Economic Revolution in the American South,” Economic Perspectives 1, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 170.
21. David E. Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2001, 10; MacLean, “From the Benighted South,” 215; transcript, Robert S. McNamara Oral History, Special Interview I, March 26, 1993, by Robert Dallek, electronic copy, LBJL, 4.
22. Wilbur Joseph Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1960).
23. C. Vann Woodward and Walter A. McDougall have both referred to this period as the “Second Reconstruction.” McDougall, . . . the Heavens, 376; Woodward, Strange Career, 8.
24. Allen J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 61.
25. Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2003), 100.
26. Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress, 10.
27. MacLean, “From the Benighted South,” 213; Matusow, Unraveling of America, 60–61; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 9.
28. Woodward, Strange Career, 134.
29. Dallek, “Johnson, Project Apollo,” 68.
30. McCurdy, July 8, 1999.
31. Jennings, November 20, 2008.
32. Crossley, November 12, 2008.
33. Employees who held the job titled “computer” made (by tabulating machine, by hand, and by slide rule) the millions of mathematical calculations that the processing chips in the common desktop computer make today.
34. Woodward, Strange Career, 9.
35. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 29.
36. Woodward, Strange Career, 132–133.
37. Jerrold M. Packard, American Nightmare, 228–229.
38. Woodward, Strange Career, 133.
39. Matusow, Unraveling of America, 63.
40. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 38.
41. Matusow, Unraveling of America, 64.
42. Address of Secretary Wirtz at the Michigan celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Detroit, MI, June 30, 1963.
43. Martin Luther King Jr., “Equality Now,” Nation, February 4, 1961, 93.
44. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 24.
45. N. Thompson Powers, “Federal Procurement and Equal Employment Opportunity,” Law and Contemporary Problems 29, no. 2 (Spring 1964): 473.
46. “For Negroes: More and Better Jobs in Government,” U.S. News and World Report, March 5, 1962, 83–85.
47. Executive Order number 10925, 26 Fed. reg. 1977, March 8, 1961.
48. Judson MacLaury, “President Kennedy’s E.O. 10925: Seedbed of Affirmative Action,” Federal History (Society for History in the Federal Government) 2 (January 2010): 57.
49. Crossley, November 12, 2008.
50. Delton, “Before the EEOC,” 272–273.
51. Jennifer Delton, Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940–1990 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 117.
52. Delton, “Before the EEOC,” 277.
53. Ibid., 271.
54. “NOW . . . You Can Be a Part!” (Thiokol Chemical Corporation, advertisement), Houston Post, October 16, 1961, 14; “Success of First Saturn Flight . . .” (General Electric, advertisement), Houston Post, December 3, 1961, 13.
55. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 40.
56. Ibid., 27.
57. MacLaury, “President Kennedy’s E.O. 10925,” 46.
58. Bryant, Bystander, 230.
59. Letter, James E. Webb to Lyndon Johnson, April 13, 1961, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
60. Letter, James E. Webb to Floyd L. Thompson, December 12, 1961, James E. Webb Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
61. James E. Webb, Memo to All Program Directors and Staff Officers, Headquarters; All Directors of Field Installations, April 11, 1961, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
62. “New Compliance Officer,” Marshall Star, May 10, 1961, 8, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
63. Letter, Wernher von Braun to James Webb, undated but makes reference to “your letter of December 12, 1961,” Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
64. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 47.
65. “Half a Million Workers,” Fortune, no. 3, March 1941, 98, 163.
66. “Newest Aircraft Factory Built by Government Funds—Closed Tight to Negroes,” Philadelphia Tribune, March 27, 1941, 2, col. 3.
67. “Boeing Aircraft Says No Place for Negroes,” Norfolk New Journal and Guide, December 13, 1941, 4, col. 1.
68. Kevin Allen, The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 44.
69. Herbert R. Northrup, The Negro in the Aerospace Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 24, 31, 33.
70. Ibid., 22; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 47–48.
71. “Urges U.S. Kill Order with Biased Ga. Plant,” Chicago Defender, April 4, 1961, 4.
72. According to Graham, NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill “extracted from [assistant secretary of labor] Jerry Holloman a public pledge to cancel the contract of any employer who refused to comply with president’s new ban on discrimination.” Graham, Civil Rights Era, 48.
73. Northrop, Aerospace Industry, 76.
74. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 51–54.
75. Powers, “Federal Procurement,” 176.
76. Golland, Constructing Affirmative Action, 45, 48.
77. President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, July 19, 1963, 26, LBJL.
78. Powers, “Federal Procurement,” 480.
79. Golland, Constructing Affirmative Action, 42.
80. Douglas Helms, “Eroding the Color Line: The Soil Conservation Service and the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Agricultural History 65, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 47.
81. Hilty, Robert Kennedy, 300–302; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 70–71.
82. Houston Chapter of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, Nowhere to Go: A Study of the Plight of Negroes in Houston, Texas, 8, HU2/ST42-ST50, HU, box 41, LBJL.
83. Northrup, Aerospace Industry, 31.
84. Hayakawa, “Second Thoughts,” 11.
85. “Will Get First Engineering Ph.D. at Ill. Tech,” Chicago Defender, June 17, 1950, 23.
Chapter 4
1. Andrew D. Grossman, “The Early Cold War and American Political Development: Reflections on Recent Research,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 15, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 473.
2. A number of books focus on the state of mind of important American intellectual elites during the early years of the Cold War, including Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994).
3. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 438.
4. Peter Charles Hoffer, Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud—American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 63.
5. Karsten Werth, “A Surrogate for War—The U.S. Space Program in the 1960s,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 49, no. 4 (2004): 563.
6. Hold On! (There’s No Place Like Space), directed by Arthur Lubin (1966; Hollywood: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer); Way . . . Way Out, directed by Gordon Douglas (1966; Hollywood: Twentieth Century-Fox) (for film poster, see http://www.britposters.com/images/way%20way%20out%20320x240.jpg); The Reluctant Astronaut, directed by Edward J. Montagne (1967; Hollywood: Universal Pictures).
7. The Jetsons, http://www.classictvhits.com/show.php?id=318; Lost in Space, http://www.classictvhits.com/show.php?id=534; Star Trek, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060028/; I Dream of Jeannie, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Dream_of_Jeannie.
8. Frederick J. Baskaw, The Dynamic American City (ca. 1956), http://archive.org/details/DynamicA1956_2.
9. American Institute of Architects, No Time for Ugliness (Washington, DC: AIA, 1965), http://archive.org/details/no_time_for_ugliness_1.
10. Wayne Thompson in Conference on Space, Science, and Urban Life: Proceedings of a Conference Held at Oakland, California, March 28–30, 1963, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Office of Scientific and Technological Information, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1963).
11. Ibid., 2.
12. “Patterson, Faubus Criticize Kennedy and Justice Dept.,” News and Courier, October 2, 1962, 8-A.
13. “Governors Keep Eye on Mississippi,” Danville Bee, October 1, 1962, 7.
14. Lyndon B. Johnson, “The New World of Space” (speech), Proceedings of the Second National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space, Seattle, WA, May 8–10, 1962 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1962), 30.
15. UPI, “Astronaut Grissom Rarin’ to Go,” Daily Defender, July 18, 1961, 4, col. 1.
16. Jack Hicks, “Race and Space,” New York Amsterdam News, April 16, 1961, 12, col. 7.
17. George M. Coleman, “Spaceman Survives Tough One:Hinesville Negroes Lose Out,” Atlanta Daily World, May 25, 1962, 1, col. 5.
18. Ibid.
19. Technically, the first words spoken by Neil Armstrong on the Moon were “contact light,” but his first sentence spoken back to Earth was “Houston, Tranquility Base here; the Eagle has landed.”
20. Houston Chapter, Nowhere to Go, 8.
21. “10 Best Cities for Negro Employment,” Ebony, March 1965, 120.
22. Otis King, conversation with Richard Paul, December 24, 2008.
23. Charles Zelden, conversation with Richard Paul, January 9, 2007. Zelden is author of Battle for the Black Ballot: Smith V. Allwright and the Defeat of the Texas All-White Primary (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
24. King, December 24, 2008.
25. Fritz Lanham, “The Silent End of Segregation: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of Houston’s Peaceful Integration in the 60s,” Houston Chronicle, June 15, 1997, 8.
26. Quentin Mease, conversation with Richard Paul, January 7, 2009.
27. Zelden, January 9, 2007; King, December 24, 2008; Quentin Mease, On Equal Footing (Austin, TX: Eakin Press), 2001, 93, 95.
28. “Texas Firm Wants Contract but Rejects Equality Clause,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 22, 1961, 1; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 86. Branch quoted Johnson’s account of the incident from a July 9, 1963, White House meeting.
29. David Allerd, “Chances Are 99–1 That Houston Will Get the Proposed Space Lab,” Houston Post, August 24, 1961, 1(1); Ralph O’Leary, “NASA Wants Test Site Near Space Laboratory,” Houston Post, August 26, 1961, p. 1, sec. 1.
30. Allerd, “Chances Are 99–1,” p. 1, sec. 1.
31. Ralph S. O’Leary, “NASA to Build Space Center on Clear Lake,” Houston Post, September 20, 1961, 1.
32. David G. McComb, Houston: A History (Austin: University of Texas Press), 1981, 142; O’Leary, “NASA to Build,” 1.
33. Fredericka Meiners, A History of Rice University (Houston, TX: Rice University Studies Special Publications, 1982), http://archive.org/stream/historyofriceuni00mein/historyofriceuni00mein_djvu.txt.
34. Melissa Fitzsimons Kean, “At a Most Uncomfortable Speed: The Desegregation of the South’s Private Universities, 1945–1964” (PhD diss., Rice University, 2000), 413, 417.
35. Ibid., 412.
36. Ibid., 417.
37. Ibid., 419, 422, 423.
38. Ibid., 426.
39. Ibid., 434.
40. Marshall Verniaud, “Pitzer Says Rice Future Tied to End of Race Bars,” Houston Post, February 18 1964, 1, 7, col. 1; Marshall Verniaud, “Restrictions Hinder Rice, Jury Decides,” Houston Post, February 22, 1964, 1, col. 1; Marshall Verniaud, “Ruling Will Permit Rice Tuition, End Race Bars,” Houston Post, March 10, 1964, 1, 6, col. 1; McComb, Houston, 174.
41. King, December 24, 2008.
42. Northrup, Aerospace Industry, 221.
43. “Clear Lake City, TX,” http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hjc23; Richard D. Lyons, “Booming Houston’s Eyes Are on Astronauts,” New York Times, October 22, 1968, 35.
44. “And Now . . . Over to Houston,” Newsweek, June 14, 1965, 36; “The Meaning of the March,” Informer (Houston), May 15, 1965, 4.
45. Lyons, “Booming Houston’s Eyes,” 35.
46. Hofstadter, Progressive Historians, 438.
47. George Simpson in Conference on Space, Science, and Urban Life: Proceedings of a Conference Held at Oakland, California, March 28–30, 1963, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: Office of Scientific and Technological Information, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1963).
48. Meeting tape 63A, JFKL, November 21, 1962, from JFK and the Space Race, Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, http://millercenter.org/presidentialclassroom/exhibits/jfk-and-the-space-race.
49. Enoc P. Waters Jr., “They Helped Track Glenn in Orbit,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 3, 1962, 1; UPI, “Cooper Relays ‘Hello’ to Africa from Space Craft,” Chicago Defender, May 18, 1963, 3, col. 1; Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency (London: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 212.
50. Teasel Muir-Harmony, “From Spacecraft to Icon: Friendship 7’s ‘Fourth Orbit,’” unpublished manuscript (2012).
51. Walter Cronkite, conversation with Richard Paul, February 26, 1999.
52. Richard Witkin, “Cooper Is Flying Smoothly On, Will Try for at Least Seventeen Orbits: He Ejects Beacon, Then Sleeps,” New York Times, May 16, 1963, 1; Richard Witkin, “Cooper Maneuvers to a Bullseye Landing with Manual Control as as Automatic Fails: ‘I’m in Fine Shape,’ He Says after Twenty-Two Orbits,” New York Times, May 17, 1963, 1; John W. Finney, “Cooper Hailed in Capital: He Will Come Here Today,” New York Times, May 22, 1963, 1; Foster Hailey, “City Roars Big ‘Well Done’ to Cooper: Throngs Greet Astronaut at Parade and Luncheon,” New York Times, May 23, 1963, 1.
53. Mease, January 7, 2009.
54. Gregory Curtis, “The First Protestor,” Texas Monthly, 1997, http://www.gregorycurtis.com/greg-art5.htm.
55. Mease, On Equal Footing, 94.
56. King, December 24, 2008; Mease, On Equal Footing, 93, 94.
57. Lanham, “The Silent End of Segregation,” 8.
58. King, December 24, 2008.
59. Mease, January 7, 2009.
60. Mease, On Equal Footing, 98.
61. Lanham, “The Silent End of Segregation,” 8.
62. Ibid.
63. Debra Ann Reid, Inalienable Rights: Texans and Their Quests for Justice (College Station: Texas A&M University Press 2009), 128.
64. 1964 Staff Report: Public Education, 223–224; Harry K. Wright, Civil Rights U.S.A.: Public Schools: Southern States, 1963: Texas (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964), 34, 72; “The Meaning of the March,” 4.
65. King, December 24, 2008.
66. Letter, Lee C. White to Mildred L. Pierce, Elizabeth Chaupette, John Gilbride, and Robert Reed, October 12, 1962; Route slip, White House to NASA regarding October 12, 1962; letter, A. N. Feldzamen to Kenneth O’Donnell, October 16, 1962, “HU 9–1-62.11–30–62” folder (“HU2 General”), WHCSF, box 362, JFKL.
67. “Congratulations to Astronaut John Glenn,” Atlanta Daily World, February 22, 1962, 4, col. 1.
68. “The Negro and Space Agency,” Daily Defender, March 1, 1962, 11, col. 1.
69. Dan Burley, “A Negro Astronaut? You Can Forget That Thought!” Philadelphia Tribune, August 12, 1961, 4, col. 6.
Chapter 5
1. “Select Negro for Aerospace School: May Become First of Race in Space,” Cleveland Call and Post, July 7, 1962, 1C, col. 3.
2. “Report on First Negro Astronaut Trainee,” Jet, April 18, 1963, cover; “America Trains First Negro Spaceman,” Sepia, June 1963, cover; “KCK Native First Negro Astronaut,” Kansas City Call, no date, from personal collection of Edward Dwight; “New Astronaut May Be First Man on Moon: Negro Astronaut Trainee May Be First American to Reach Moon,” Daily Defender, April 1, 1963, 1, col. 1.
3. Joseph D. Atkinson Jr. and Jay M. Shafritz, The Real Stuff: A History of NASA’s Astronaut Recruitment Program (New York: Praeger, 1985), 98–100.
4. U.S. Air Force training programs at Edwards Air Force Base underwent several name changes between 1952 and 1961. This can be confusing. From 1952 to 1955 the name was the U.S. Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School. In 1955 it was renamed the U.S. Air Force Flight Test Pilot School. The program expanded to include astronaut training in October 1961, becoming the U.S. Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS). ARPS was a full-year program with two elements: Phase I: Experimental Test Pilot Course, and Phase II: Aerospace Research Pilot Course (ARPC). The school changed names again in 1972. The designations used by White House staff, U.S. Air Force personnel, and media reflect these changes between 1961 and 1965. http://www.edwards.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=6586.
5. Memoranda, Frederick Dutton to Adam Yarmolinsky, August 1, 1961; Adam Yarmolinsky to Frederick Dutton, August 18, 1961, “HU 9–8-61→9–30–61” folder (“HU2 General”), WHCSF, box 362, JFKL.
6. Memoranda, Frederick Dutton to Adam Yarmolinsky, August 23, 1961, “HU 9-8-61→9-30-61” folder (“HU2 General”), WHCSF, box 362, JFKL; Adam Yarmolinsky to Frederick Dutton, November 4, 1961, “1-18-61→1-25-62” folder (“Outer Space”), WHCSF, box 652, JFKL.
7. The U.S. Air Force’s Space Research Pilot Course required that an entrant be serving on active duty in the grade of lieutenant colonel or below, hold a currently effective aeronautical rating of pilot and be currently on flying status as a pilot, have a minimum of two thousand hours total flying time (including in jet aircraft), have a BA or equivalent in engineering, a physical science, or mathematics, be a graduate of the Experimental Test Pilot Course or Navy Test Pilot School, and be certified as medically qualified based upon successful completion of special medical and physiological testing procedures.
8. Memorandum, H. E. Van Ness, captain, U.S. Navy, assistant director for manned spaceflight operations, Office of Manned Spaceflight, to Directors of Manned Spaceflight, July 9, 1962, Minority Groups (1961–1993), file 008983, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
9. Atkinson and Shafritz, Real Stuff, 98–100; letter, James E. Webb to Uriah J. Fields, March 12, 1962, “March 1962” folder, box 2, James E. Webb Personal Papers, JFKL; “NASA, Cleric Told, Selects Astronauts on Ability Only,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 31, 1962, 3.
10. Atkinson and Shafritz say the request came from the president. Their source is an interview with Ed Dwight. Chuck Yeager wrote that General LeMay told him Attorney General Kennedy wanted “a colored in space.”
11. Chuck Yeager, Yeager: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam, 1986), 269–270.
12. Ibid., 270.
13. Atkinson and Shafritz, Real Stuff, 101; Charles L. Sanders, “The Troubles of ‘Astronaut’ Edward Dwight,” Ebony, March 1965, 32; “Select Negro for Aerospace School.”
14. Ed Dwight, Soaring on the Wings of a Dream: The Struggles and Adventures of the “First Black Astronaut” Candidate (Denver: Ed Dwight Studios, 2009), 88.
15. Ibid., 89.
16. Ibid., 98.
17. Atkinson and Shafritz, Real Stuff, 101; “Tagged as First Tan Astronaut,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 7, 1962, 1; “Astronaut’s Parents Are So Excited,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 6, 1963, 1.
18. Yeager, Yeager, 270.
19. Atkinson and Shafritz, Real Stuff, 101; “Negro One of Fifteen in Space Course,” New York Times, April 1, 1963, 48; Bill Becker, “Negro Astronaut Aiming for Moon,” New York Times, April 2, 1963, 15; “Colored Space Candidate,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 13, 1963, 4.
20. “Report on First Negro Astronaut Trainee,” cover; “America Trains First Negro Spaceman,” cover; “KCK Native First Negro Astronaut”; “New Astronaut May Be”; “No Racial Barriers for Man in Space—Astronaut,” Daily Defender, April 8, 1963, 13, col. 1.
21. Ed Dwight, e-mail correspondence with Richard Paul, October 23, 2012.
22. Ibid.
23. Charles Lang, “Equal Opportunity in Space Science,” n.d. Audio from the filmstrip was provided to Richard Paul by Dr. Lang’s widow, Angela Lang.
24. Sanders, “Troubles,” 36; Atkinson and Shafritz, Real Stuff, 104.
25. Fred Powledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991), 474–475; Branch, Parting the Waters, 713–725.
26. T. Stockett, “‘How in the World Can We Still Keep ’Em Down?’” Baltimore Afro-American, April 13, 1964, 4.
27. “Ousted Astronaut Raps Air Force,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 12, 1965, 2; “Probe of Astronaut’s Charges Urged,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 19, 1965, 1; “NASA, Pentagon Deny Charge,” Informer (Houston), June 5, 1965, 1; “Claims Space Program Bias,” Informer (Houston), June 5, 1965, 1; “Fulfillment of Apollo 11 Moonshot Nears End,” Informer (Houston), July 26, 1969, 1.
28. Atkinson and Shafritz, Real Stuff, 101; Sanders, “Troubles,” 34; Gladwin Hill, “Negro Pilot Finds Bias in Air Force,” New York Times, June 3, 1965, 21.
29. Sanders, “Troubles,” 32.
30. Ibid., 31.
31. Yeager, Yeager, 271–272.
32. Atkinson and Shafritz, Real Stuff, 101; Sanders, “Troubles,” 34; Hill, “Negro Pilot,” 21; Referral, White House to NASA, October 4, 1965, OS July 9, 1965, OS, WHCF, box 4, LBJL.
33. Yeager, Yeager, 269.
34. Alfred J. Phelps, They Had a Dream (New York: Presidio Press, 1994), 22–23.
35. “Dwight, Edward,” Contemporary Black Biography, Encyclopedia.com, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2–3099700020.html.
36. Dwight, Soaring, 202–203.
37. Dwight, October 23, 2012. Emphasis by Dwight.
38. Nancy J. Weiss, conversation with Richard Paul, October 23, 2012. Weiss is the author of Whitney M. Young, Jr. and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
1. George Carruthers, conversation with Richard Paul, June 15, 2009.
2. George Carruthers, interview with David DeVorkin, August 18, 1992, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD, http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/32485.html.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Carruthers, June 15, 2009.
7. Carruthers, August 18, 1992.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Carruthers, June 15, 2009.
14. Carruthers, August 18, 1992.
15. Nancy Grace Roman, conversation with David H. DeVorkin, senior curator, History of Astronomy and the Space Sciences, National Air and Space Museum, April 14, 2010. Dr. Roman, one of the first women in the U.S. space program, is widely known as the “Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope” for her work as the liaison between astronomers and engineers creating the groundbreaking instrument. She described her role in the construction of the Hubble this way in an interview with Richard Paul: “Astronomers knew what they wanted, and the engineers were very happy to try to provide it to them. The problem was that to a large extent, they didn’t speak to one another. Engineers and scientists do not speak the same language.” Her work “as a go-between, between the two groups” is widely credited with ensuring the success of the Hubble.
16. Howard E. McCurdy, Inside NASA: High Technology and Organizational Change in the U.S. Space Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 13.
17. Sylvia Doughty Fries and John A. Greene, Project Apollo: NASA Engineers and the Age of Apollo (Washington, DC: NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program, 1992), 125.
18. Sitton, “Segregationists Fight,” E5.
19. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Address on Civil Rights, June 11, 1963, http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3375.
20. Fries and Greene, Project Apollo, xii.
21. McCurdy, Inside NASA, 65.
22. Ibid., 28.
23. Fries and Greene, Project Apollo, 125.
24. McCurdy, Inside NASA, 71–72.
25. Fries and Greene, Project Apollo, xiii.
26. Letter, James E. Webb to Wernher von Braun and Kurt H. Debus, April 19, 1963, James E. Webb Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
27. McCurdy, Inside NASA, 50.
28. Carruthers, June 15, 2009.
29. Carruthers, August 18, 1992.
30. Jennings, November 20, 2008.
31. Morgan Watson, conversation with Richard Paul, January 27, 2009.
32. NASA Contracts Equal Employment Opportunity Program Achievement during 1963, p. 1, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
33. NASA Contracts Equal Employment Opportunity Program Achievement during 1963, p. 2, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
34. Montgomery, February 6, 2008.
35. Robert A. Caro, “LBJ, the Kennedy Assassination, and Me Excerpt: Lyndon Johnson’s Biographer on the Way He—and the Thirty-Sixth President—Spent November 22, 1963,” New Republic, November 16, 2013.
36. Robert A. Caro, conversation with Terry Gross, Fresh Air, May 13, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2014/02/17/276530368/in-passage-caro-mines-lbjs-changing-political-roles.
37. Mease, January 7, 2009; Montgomery, February 6, 2008.
38. “Title 14—Aeronautics and Space,” Federal Register (January 9, 1965), vol. 30, no. 6, pt. 2, pp. 301–305, reel 121, microfilm.
39. McCurdy, Inside NASA, 23.
40. Letter, James E. Webb to Paul Bickle, June 6, 1963, Minority Groups (1961–1993), file 008983, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
41. Henry Hearns, conversation with Richard Paul, January 8, 2013.
42. Carruthers, June 15, 2009.
43. Dixie Eliopulos, e-mail correspondence with Richard Paul, January 8, 2013.
44. Hearns, January 8, 2013.
45. Webb to Bickle, June 6, 1963.
46. John Hodgson, interview with Richard Paul and Steven Moss, December 5, 2012.
47. “Office of Business Administration Appointments,” NASA press release, December 2, 1960.
48. Memorandum, James Webb to All Program Directors and Staff Officers, Headquarters; All Directors of Field Installations, April 11, 1961, “Equal Employment” folder, James E. Webb Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
49. Hodgson, December 5, 2012.
50. Letter, James E. Webb to Wernher von Braun, June 24, 1963, James E. Webb Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC; letter, Wernher von Braun to James Webb, July 15, 1963; memorandum, R. P. Young to Navy Commander Kenneth J. Kier, June 6, Minority Groups (1961–1993), file 008983, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
51. John Hodgson, e-mail correspondence with Richard Paul and Steven Moss, December 29, 2012.
52. Andrew J. Dunar and Stephen P. Waring, Power to Explore: A History of Marshall Space Flight Center, 1960–1990 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1999), 121, 124.
53. Ibid., 124.
54. Ellis, “Space Crescent II,” 239.
55. Sally A. Downey, “Herbert R. Northrup, Eighty-Nine, Wharton School Professor,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 29, 2007, http://articles.philly.com/2007–10–29/news/25232852_1_wharton-school-wharton-faculty-economics.
56. Northrup, Aerospace Industry, 68, 77, 72.
57. Ibid., 68.
58. Carruthers, June 15, 2009.
59. Carruthers, August 18, 1992.
60. George Carruthers, interviewed by Glen Swanson, Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, March 25, 1999, http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/participants.html.
61. Carruthers, June 15, 2009.
Chapter 7
1. Wilbur Joseph Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1960).
2. Wallace, “The 1963 Inaugural Address,” p. 2.
3. Dodd, “Slow Pace of Change,” 571.
4. Richard Hall, conversation with Richard Paul, December 15, 2008.
5. Werhner von Braun, a German, served in the SS during World War II, a fact that was well known by the mid-1960s.
6. Paul O’Neil, “The Splendid Anachronism of Huntsville,” Fortune, June 1962, 226; William S. Ellis, “The Space Crescent: Moon Boom,” Nation, October 12, 1964, 215; Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 148; “The City That Space Built,” U.S. News and World Report, November 12, 1962, 72, 73; Erik Bergaust, Wernher von Braun (Washington, DC: National Space Institute, 1976), 184, 191, 192, 213; see also David S. Akens, Rocket City, USA (Huntsville, AL: Strode, 1959).
7. Hall, December 15, 2008.
8. Letter, Harry H. Gorman to Alfred S. Hodgson, March 14, 1964, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
9. Delano Hyder, conversation with Richard Paul, December 15, 2008.
10. Jane DeNeefe, Rocket City Rock and Soul: Huntsville Musicians Remember the 1960s (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011), 45.
11. Hall, December 15, 2008.
12. Hyder, December 15, 2008.
13. Sonnie Wellington Hereford III and Jack D. Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters: A Black Doctor Remembers Life, Medicine, and Civil Rights in an Alabama Town (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 28.
14. MacLean, “From the Benighted South,” 208.
15. Hall, December 15, 2008.
16. Dodd, “Slow Pace of Change,” 572.
17. Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 27.
18. Ibid., 88.
19. Ibid.
20. Hall, December 15, 2008; Hyder, December 15, 2008.
21. “‘Sit-Ins’ Finally Hit Huntsville: Twenty-Three Jailed in ‘Missile City,’” Pittsburgh Courier, January 20, 1962, 14.
22. “New Alabama Sit-Ins,” New York Times, January 5, 1962, 18.
23. Ellis, “Space Crescent II,” 240.
24. Anderson, “Sit-Ins,” 14, col. 1.
25. Hereford and Ellis, Beside the Troubled Waters, 86.
26. Anderson, “Sit-Ins,” 14, col. 1.
27. Ibid.
28. Dunar and Waring, Power to Explore, 116.
29. “Student Tells How CORE Staged Huntsville Sit-In,” Daily Defender, January 31, 1962, 6, col. 1.
30. Dunar and Waring, Power to Explore, 117.
31. “Abduct, Spray White Alabama Integrationist,” Daily Defender, January 23, 1962, 2, col. 4.
32. Testimony before the Committee of Inquiry into the Administration of Justice in the Freedom Struggle, May 25–26, 1962, http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt800005x7&&doc.view=entire_text.
33. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 96, 89.
34. “Mrs. Roosevelt’s Civic Unit to Eye Dixie Police Tactics,” Afro American, May 26, 1962, 16.
35. Testimony before the Committee of Inquiry.
36. JML, “Report on Workshop for the Huntsville Movement,” March 9, 1962, 1, http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/report-workshop-huntsville-movement#.
37. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 90.
38. JML, “Report,” 1.
39. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 94.
40. JML, “Report,” 1.
41. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 101–103.
42. “Jail 6, Pregnant Women 90 Days for Sitting-In,” Daily Defender, April 24, 1962, 5, col. 1.
43. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 104.
44. Ibid., 89.
45. Hall, December 15, 2008.
46. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 104–105.
47. Ibid., 105–106.
48. “No Dress-Up in Student Protest,” Daily Defender, April 25, 1962, 15, col. 2.
49. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 106.
50. Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace (New York: Random House, 1996), part 3.
51. “A Look Back to May 16–22, 1962,” Hartselle Enquirer, http://www.hartselleenquirer.com/2012/05/16/a-look-back-to-may-16–22–1962/.
52. Stephan Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Menlo Park, CA: Addison Wesley, 1994), 157.
53. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 108.
54. JML, “Report,” 4.
55. Alvin Spivak, Charlotte Moulton, William J. Eaton, Al Kuettner, and H. L. Stevenson, “Segregation: Is the Dam Breaking in Dixie, North?” Chicago Defender (national edition), June 8, 1963, 9.
56. Memorandum, Bart Slattery to Wernher von Braun, June 5, 1962, von Braun Papers, Library of Congress, box 8, 1962 D-E.
57. Ibid.
58. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 109.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., 100–111.
61. Ibid., 110.
62. James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1994), 162; Simon Hal, “Protest Movements in the 1970s: The Long 1960s,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 4 (October 2008): 655.
63. Mary Ann Moore, oral history interview with Mary Moore, August 17, 2006, interview U-0193, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/U-0193/excerpts/excerpt_9219.html.
64. Memorandum, W. E. Guilian, chief counsel to V. C. Sorensen, chief, Management Services Office, February 26, 1963, “Edward Earl Morton Discrimination Case,” MSFC Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
65. Jennings, November 20, 2008; Hyder, December 15, 2008; Hall, December 15, 2008.
66. Hereford and Ellis, Beside Troubled Waters, 26.
67. Hyder, December 15, 2008; Clyde Foster, conversation with Richard Paul, November 13, 2008; Hall, December 15, 2008.
68. Anthony Balderrama, “What Was Your Salary Worth Fifty Years Ago?” MSN Careers, http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-2146-Salaries-Promotions-What-was-your-salary-worth-50-years-ago/.
69. “Career Planning ’64: A Special Supplement of the Afro American Newspapers,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 21, 1964, 4, 5, 17, 32, 33, 62. A similar supplement was published March 27, 1965. R. Lynn Rittenoure, “Federal Employment in the Sixties,” in Employment of Blacks in the South: A Perspective on the 1960s, ed. Ray Marshall and Virgil I. Christian (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 147.
70. Report of the meeting held by representatives of the Huntsville contractors, 2, in Equal Opportunity Employment series, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
71. Letter, Wernher von Braun to James Webb, July 15, 1963, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
72. Foster, November 13, 2008.
73. E. C. Smith, conversation with Richard Paul, December 15, 2008.
74. Foster, November 13, 2008.
75. Northrup, Aerospace Industry, 10.
76. Arthur Sanderson, personnel officer, Marshall Space Flight Center, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC, 3.
77. Hyder, December 15, 2008.
78. Hall, December 15, 2008.
79. Jennings, November 20, 2008.
80. Hall, December 15, 2008.
81. Wallace, “The 1963 Inaugural Address,” 2, 9; Sitton, “Segregationists Fight,” E5.
82. “Alabama Cancels Course after Negro Applies,” Atlanta Daily World, February 2, 1963, 1, col. 7.
83. Ibid.
84. Lewis W. Jones, “Two Years of Desegregation in Alabama,” Journal of Negro Education 25, no. 3 (Summer 1956): 206.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid., 205, 206.
87. “Alabama Cancels,” 1, col. 7.
88. E. Culpepper Clark, The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation’s Last Stand at the University of Alabama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 172.
89. Robert E. Baker, “Alabama Desegregation May Start at Huntsville,” Washington Post, March 25, 1963, A2.
90. Ibid.
91. Ellis wrote of interviewing David McGlathery “as we sat in his car and talked late into a hot Alabama night,” but in a January 2013 phone conversation with Richard Paul, McGlathery said any suggestion that Stuhlinger or anyone else convinced him not to enroll at UA-HC was not true. Ellis, “Space Crescent II,” 240; David McGlathery, conversation with Richard Paul, January 17, 2013.
92. Clark, Schoolhouse Door, 236.
93. Baker, “Alabama Desegregation May Start,” A2.
94. Clark, Schoolhouse Door, 172.
95. David McGlathery is disinclined to talk with outsiders anymore and would only answer “yes” or “no” in a brief conversation for this book.
96. Hall, December 15, 2008.
97. Ellis, “Space Crescent II,” 240; memorandum, Burke Marshall to Robert F. Kennedy, April 9, 1963, “Civil Rights: Alabama, University of 4/9/63–5/31/63” folder, Papers of Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General’s General Correspondence, box 10, JFKL.
98. Al Kuettner, “How Courageous Businessmen Saved Day in Birmingham, South’s Racial Powder Keg,” Chicago Defender, May 18, 1963, 19.
99. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html.
100. Letter, James E. Webb to Wernher von Braun and Kurt H. Debus, April 19, 1963, Minority Groups (1961–1993), file 008983, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
101. “U.S. Says It Can’t Act to Halt Birmingham Bias,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 15, 1963, 4.
102. Letter, James E. Webb to Wernher von Braun and Kurt H. Debus, 19 April 1963, James E. Webb Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
103. Launius, “Managing the Unmanageable,” 159.
104. James Webb in “Conference on Space, Science, and Urban Life: Proceedings of a Conference Held at Oakland, California,” March 28–30, 1963, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 94 (Washington, DC: Office of Scientific and Technological Information, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1963).
105. Launius, “Managing the Unmanageable,” 162.
106. Telephone call, Alfred S. Hodgson to von Braun staff, May 23, 1963, 9:30 a.m., NARA Southeast Region, Record Group 255, Accession number 01–0002, upper-level management files, box 23.
107. Ibid.
108. Clark, Schoolhouse Door, 195.
109. Memorandum, William H. Orrick Jr. to Robert F. Kennedy, May 29, 1963, “Civil Rights: Alabama, University of 4/9/63–5/31/63” folder, Papers of Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General’s General Correspondence, box 10, JFKL.
110. Memorandum, James E. Webb to Alfred Hodgson, May 29, 1963, “May 1963” folder, chronological file, James E. Webb Personal Papers, JFKL.
111. Letter, J. A. Barclay to George C. Wallace, May 23, 1963, Alabama Department of Archives and History Digital Collections, Alabama Textual Materials Collection, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/3900/rec/5.
112. Daily journal of Dr. von Braun, May 22, 1963, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
113. Letter, Wernher von Braun to Fortune Ryan, June 27, 1963, Chief of Public Affairs, box 14, “Dr. von Braun—Personal,” NARA Atlanta, RG255, MSFC/ULMF #70A1658.
114. Memorandum, Jack Rosenthal to Pierre Salinger, May 13, 1963, “Alabama” folder, box 95, Papers of Robert F. Kennedy, JFKL.
115. Clark, Schoolhouse Door, 210.
116. Ibid., 208.
117. Stephan Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 233.
118. William O. Bryant, “David Mack McGlathery Admitted to Alabama U: Few Spectators on Hand as Race Barrier Falls,” Atlanta Daily World, June 14, 1963, 1, col. 4.
119. Memorandum, Jack Rosenthal to Pierre Salinger, May 13, 1963, “Alabama” folder, box 95, Papers of Robert F. Kennedy, JFKL; memorandum, Burke Marshall to Robert F. Kennedy, May 22, 1963, “Civil Rights: Alabama, University of 4/9/63–5/31/63” folder, Papers of Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General’s General Correspondence, box 10, JFKL; Lesher, George Wallace, 216, 241; “Set to Go to U. of Ala.,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 1, 1963, 1.
120. Hall, December 15, 2008.
121. Hyder, December 15, 2008.
122. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 79.
Chapter 8
1. James H. Peyton, “Michigan News,” Chicago Defender, September 5, 1925, A6.
2. Hamilton Bims, “Rocket Age Comes to Tiny Triana: Space Technologist Revives Forgotten Alabama Town,” Ebony, March 1965, 111; Sam Fulwood, “Today’s Big-City Black Mayors Lead in a Changed Political World,” Houston Chronicle, September 24, 1995, sec. A, 22.
3. Foster, November 13, 2008.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. There are numerous documents in the MSFC archives, many including von Braun’s handwritten notations, that demonstrate this assertion.
7. Bims, “Rocket Age,” 112. Bims’ Ebony article highlighted Foster’s work.
8. Foster, November 13, 2008.
9. “For Negroes: More and Better Jobs in Government,” U.S. News and World Report, March 5, 1962, 83–84; U.S. Civil Service Commission, Study of Minority Group Employment in the Federal Government, 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 25; U.S. Civil Service Commission, Study of Minority Group Employment in the Federal Government, November 30, 1969 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1969), 310, 311; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Federal Civil Rights Enforcement Effort (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1970), 68.
10. Foster, November 13, 2008; Watson, January 27, 2009; Clyde Foster, conversation with Richard Paul, January 11, 2010.
11. Foster, November 13, 2008.
12. John R. Seeley, Bertram M. Gross, Sumner Myers, Lewis A. Dexter, and Edward E. Furash, Space, Society and Social Science, paper presented at the Committee on Space Efforts and Society of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, MA, February 1963, 6, 11, 13.
13. Bauer et al., Second-Order Consequences, 67.
14. Dodd, “Slow Pace of Change,” 568.
15. Ibid., 569.
16. “Peter C. Dodd ’50,” Princeton Alumni Weekly 111, no. 10, April 6, 2011, http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2011/04/06/sections/memorials/1960/index.xml.
17. Carruthers, June 15, 2009.
18. Dodd, “Slow Pace of Change,” 573.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 575.
21. Ibid., 576.
22. Ibid., 573.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 574.
25. Button, Blacks and Social Change, 72, 185.
26. Akens, Rocket City, USA, 59.
27. Dodd, “Slow Pace of Change,” 574.
28. Bauer et al., Second-Order Consequences, 97.
29. Mary A. Holman, The Political Economy of the Space Program (Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, 1974), 200, 203, 205, 207.
30. Ibid., 206. Holman’s employment figure included military personnel.
31. Bauer et al., Second-Order Consequences, 98–100.
32. Button, Blacks and Social Change, 71.
33. Ibid.; Bauer et al., Second-Order Consequences, 96–101.
34. Bauer et al., Second-Order Consequences, 75, 98.
35. Foster, November 13, 2008.
36. Memorandum, Guilian to Sorensen, February 26, 1963.
37. Dunar and Waring, Power to Explore, 118.
38. Letter, James E. Webb to Wernher von Braun and Kurt H. Debus, September 9, 1963, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
39. Letter, Harry H. Gorman to Alfred S. Hodgson, September 17, 1963, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
40. Letter, Wernher von Braun to James E. Webb, September 30, 1963, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
41. Letter, Alfred S. Hodgson to Wernher von Braun, October 10, 1963, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
42. Foster, November 13, 2008.
43. Ibid.
44. “Bombs Upset Racial Peace in Birmingham: Blast Home of M. L. King’s Kin, Gaston Motel,” Chicago Defender, May 11, 1963, 1.
45. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 332.
46. Ibid.; Hilty, Robert Kennedy, 358; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 71.
47. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 67; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 336, 337.
48. Allen Fisher (archivist, LBJ Library), e-mail correspondence with Richard Paul, January, 8, 2013.
49. Memorandum, Young to Kier, June 6, 1963.
50. Letter, James E. Webb to James B. Morrison, president, Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, June 6, 1963, James E. Webb Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
51. Memoranda, James E. Webb to Robert Seamans, May 20, 1963; James E. Webb to Alfred Hodgson, May 24, 1963, “May 1963” folder, chronological file; James E. Webb to Paul Dembling and Richard Callaghan, August 16, 1963, “August 1963” folder, chronological file, James E. Webb Personal Papers, JFKL.
52. Congress, Senate, Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, NASA Authorization for Fiscal Year 1964, pt. 2: Program Detail, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 12, 13, 17, June 18, 1963, 903.
53. Watson, January 27, 2009.
54. Congress, Senate, Senator Javits of New York speaking on discriminatory use of federal funds, 88th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (January 30, 1964), 110, pt. 2, 1391–1392.
55. U.S. President, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, DC: Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Service, 1962), John F. Kennedy, 1961, 304.
56. Letter, Mack Herring, chief, Public Affairs Office, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
57. Letter, James E. Webb to Wernher von Braun, June 24, 1963, Minority Groups (1961–1993), file 008983, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
58. The letter specified that the contractors who needed to attend were Management Services, SPACO, Brown Engineering, General Electric, Hayes International, White Castle, Federal Services, Wetland, Technical Productions, and W. T. Schrimisher.
59. Webb to von Braun, June 24, 1963.
60. Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 397.
61. Bob Ward, Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 173.
62. Report of the meeting held by representatives of the Huntsville Contractors, MSFC Division Files (Atlanta), July 5, 1963, 1, box 1, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
63. Memorandum, Hobart Taylor Jr. to Charles A. Horsky, July 29, 1963, “Coordinating Program for Equal Opportunity Housing for Federal Employees,” office files of Lee C. White, box 3, LBJL.
64. Report of the meeting held by representatives of the Huntsville Contractors, 3, 1.
65. “Separate racial station” comes from Wallace’s first inaugural address, George C. Wallace, “The 1963 Inaugural Address,” p. 2; Report of the meeting held by representatives of the Huntsville Contractors, 2–3.
66. Letter, Wernher von Braun to James Webb, July 15, 1963, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
67. William S. Ellis, “Space Crescent II,” 241; Congress, Senate, Senator Javits of New York speaking on discriminatory use of federal funds, 88th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record (January 30, 1964), 110, pt. 2, 1391–1393. Senator Javits included Paul G. Dembling’s letter in his remarks to the Senate.
68. “Status of Desegregation of Thirty-Nine Selected Southern Cities: March 1964,” 3/64, “Civil Rights-Ad Hoc Businessmen’s Group” folder, box 4, office files of Lee C. White, LBJL.
69. In Arthur Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times, which contains the seminal description of this confrontation, Conway is Schlesinger’s source for the PCEEO story. However, the July 18 transcript does not list him as a participant. Allen Fisher, an archivist at the LBJ Library, said that, traditionally, Conway would only come to meetings when Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers could not attend. Reuther was at the July 18 PCEEO meeting. However, the July 18 transcript includes speech from people who are not listed as attending, so there is a chance Conway was there but was simply not listed as attending. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 36.
70. Memorandum, Hobart Taylor Jr. to Lyndon B. Johnson, July 12, 1963, James E. Webb Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
71. President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, July 18, 1963, LBJL, 17–18.
72. Ibid., 31.
73. Ibid.
74. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 336.
75. President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, 34–35.
76. Ibid., 37–38.
77. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 336.
78. In Robert Kennedy and His Times, Schlesinger wrote that Robert Kennedy expressed his general fury at the poor state of equal employment opportunity during a PCEEO meeting on May 29 and then became angry at James Webb specifically during another PCEEO meeting “twenty days later,” which would have been June 18. However, the confrontation Schlesinger recounts, which he quotes verbatim, appears in the July 18 PCEEO transcript. The June 18 mistake is repeated in Power to Explore, the MSFC official history. In his Robert Kennedy book Brother Protector, James Hilty suggests Kennedy threatened to fire Webb at the May 29 meeting, which Webb did not attend. In a 2006 book on Kennedy and civil rights called The Bystander, Nick Bryant repeated the May 29 date, saying that RFK “unleashed a barrage of barbed questions,” attacked Webb, screamed at Hobart Taylor, and then “stormed out.”
79. James W. Button said in Blacks and Social Change, “There is still widespread debate about the effects of the civil rights movement” on African Americans. Harvard Sitkoff, Allan J. Matusow, and others have argued that the civil rights reforms of the 1960s were a failure because they addressed only political power and not economic opportunity; this opinion is summed up by Hugh Davis Graham: “social and economic equality were pursued at a procedural level that, like the War On Poverty, left substantive structures of inequality intact”; Graham, Civil Rights Era, 451–452.
80. Foster, November 13, 2008, January 11, 2010.
81. Jennings, November 20, 2008; James Jennings, conversation with Allan Needell, July 23, 2010, http://capecosmos.org.
82. Jennings, November 20, 2008.
83. Foster, November 13, 2008.
84. Jennings, July 23, 2010.
85. Watson, January 27, 2009.
86. Bims, “Rocket Age,” 106.
87. Ibid.
88. Foster, November 13, 2008.
89. Dorothy Foster, conversation with Richard Paul, July 19, 2012.
90. Foster, November 13, 2008.
91. Bims, “Rocket Age,” 108, 112.
92. Ibid., 108.
93. Foster, November 13, 2008.
94. Bims, “Rocket Age,” 111.
95. Ibid.
96. Foster, November 13, 2008.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.
99. Foster, January 11, 2010.
Chapter 9
1. Watson, January 27, 2009. Walter Applewhite and Wesley Carter worked at the Redstone Arsenal’s Army Missile Command in Huntsville rather than at NASA.
2. Ibid.
3. Morgan Watson, panel discussion, National Air and Space Museum, February 20, 2010
4. Watson, January 27, 2009.
5. George Bourda, conversation with Richard Paul, November 15, 2012.
6. Watson, January 27, 2009.
7. Editorial, “Southern University Plantation,” Chicago Defender, February 24, 1962, 8.
8. “Thirty-Five More Sit-In Students Jailed,” Daily Defender, March 30, 1960, 3; “US Supreme Court Affirms N.O. School Desegregation,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 1, 1961, A44; UPI, “La. Sit-In Convictions Overturned,” Chicago Defender, December 12, 1961, 1.
9. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
10. “Southern University Plantation,” 8; Robert Cohen and David J. Snyder, eds., Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 4.
11. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
12. Watson, January 27, 2009.
13. Michele M. Simms Paris, “What Does It Mean to See a Black Church Burning? Understanding the Significance of Constitutionalizing Hate Speech,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (Spring 1998): 138; Kraig Beyerlein and Kenneth T. Andrews, “Black Voting during the Civil Rights Movement: A Micro-Level Analysis,” Social Forces 87, no. 1 (September 2008): 8; Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 127–128, 323; Cohen and Snyder, Rebellion in Black and White, 4.
14. Charles Smoot, conversation with Richard Paul, January 28, 2013.
15. Finney, “NASA Is Training,” 54; Hall, December 15, 2008; MSFC Manpower Office, “A Chronology of the Equal Employment Opportunity Program at MSFC,” February 1971, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL, 6.
16. Earnest C. Smith, conversation with Richard Paul, December 15, 2008.
17. Smoot, January 28, 2013.
18. Smith, December 15, 2008.
19. Smoot, January 28, 2013.
20. Letter, Wernher von Braun to James Webb, July 15, 1963, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
21. Smoot, January 28, 2013.
22. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
23. Smoot, January 28, 2013.
24. Betteridge’s “law of headlines” is a twenty-first-century adage declaring that “any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”; the opposite is often true, however, with the question mark serving as a fig leaf to maintain journalistic objectivity. In fact, as Roger Simon wrote, “In journalism, a question mark (in a headline) justifies virtually anything, no matter how unlikely.” Roger Simon, “Empty Seats Haunt President Obama,” Politico, May 8, 2012, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76017.html.
25. “Negro College Youth to Boost First Moongoer into Orbit?” Chicago Defender, March 14, 1964, 3.
26. In a 1964 article, the New York Times said there were eleven African Americans, “about half” professional and the rest clerical. But it is difficult to know which facility the reporter was writing about because he conflated anecdotes and statistics from Florida and Alabama. The dateline on the story was Washington, DC.
27. Finney, “NASA Is Training,” 54.
28. Watson, January 27, 2009.
29. Report of the meeting held by representatives of the Huntsville Contractors, MSFC Division Files (Atlanta), 1963, box 1, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL, July 5, 1963, 3.
30. Watson, January 27, 2009.
31. Ibid.
32. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
33. Smoot, January 28, 2013.
34. Watson, January 27, 2009.
35. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
36. Wallace, “The 1963 Inaugural Address,” p. 2.
37. Watson, January 27, 2009.
38. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
39. Watson, January 27, 2009.
40. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
41. Watson, January 27, 2009.
42. Ray, February 16, 2009.
43. The details and the dialogue from this anecdote come from interviews with George Bourda and Morgan Watson.
44. Finney, “NASA Is Training,” 54.
45. Morgan Watson, conversation with Thomas Lassman, July 23, 2010, http://capecosmos.org.
46. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
47. Watson, January 27, 2009.
48. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
49. Amy E. Foster, Integrating Women into the Astronaut Corps: Politics and Logistics at NASA, 1972–2004 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 101.
50. Watson, January 27, 2009.
51. Bourda, November 15, 2012.
52. Watson, January 27, 2009.
53. Robert A. Caro, conversation with Bat Segundo, May 15, 2012, http://www.edrants.com/the-bat-segundo-show-robert-a-caro/.
54. Telephone conversation, President Johnson to Walter Jenkins, January 28, 1964, tape 1530, WH 6401.20 Program Number 31, LBJL.
55. Tom Wicker, “Remembering the Johnson Treatment,” New York Times, May 9, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/09/opinion/remembering-the-johnson-treatment.html.
56. Telephone conversation, President Johnson to John Stennis, January 28, 1964, tape 1594, WH 6401.23 PNO 13, LBJL.
57. “Urge Halt to NASA Officials Speech Jackson MS.,” Informer (Houston), February 1, 1964, 2. President Johnson’s “rule” is a reference to Executive Order 10925 and President Kennedy’s “Memorandum on Racial or Other Discrimination in Federal Employee Recreational Associations.”
58. “Party Is Boycotted by the Astronauts,” New York Times, March 3, 1965, 33; “Party Snubbed by Astronauts,” Informer (Houston), March 6, 1965, 1.
59. Letter, Harry H. Gorman to Alfred S. Hodgson, March 14, 1964, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
60. Von Braun daily journal, September 4, 1964, NASA Headquarters, Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC, 13259.
61. Graham, Civil Rights Era, 75.
62. Letter, James Webb to Hon. Robert R. Casey, November 17, 1964, Webb Oct. 1964 Huntsville, AL, Controversy, file 3517, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
63. John W. Finney, “NASA May Leave Its Alabama Base,” New York Times, October 24, 1964, 12.
64. Wernher von Braun, “Speech to the Alabama Legislature on June 8,” June 8, 1965, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC, Speeches by Key Officials, Wernher von Braun, https://mira.hq.nasa.gov/history/.
65. Telegram, Jim Dunn to President Johnson, October 27, 1964, 4/15/64–10/31/64, FG 260, box 295, LBJL.
66. James E. Webb, “Discussion of George C. Marshall Space Flight Center Programs and Problems, October 29, 1964,” Webb Oct 1964 Huntsville, AL, Controversy, file 3517, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC; NASA Historical Staff, Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1964: Chronology on Science, Technology, and Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 367.
67. UPI, “Ala. Bigotry May Cause Space Research Loss,” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 5, 1964, A11; William Hines, “Point of View,” Washington Star, October 26, 1964; Webb Oct. 1964 Huntsville, AL, Controversy, file 3517, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
68. Neufeld, Von Braun, 396.
69. UPI, “NASA Refuses to Reveal Names,” Webb Oct. 1964 Huntsville, AL, Controversy, file 3517, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
70. Neufeld, Von Braun, 395.
71. Letter, J. A. Barclay to George C. Wallace, May 23, 1963, Alabama Department of Archives and History Digital Collections, Alabama Textual Materials Collection, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/3900/rec/5.
72. William S. Ellis, “Space Crescent III: The Wide Blue Porkbarrel,” Nation, October 26, 1964, 276.
73. Clay Risen, “Suburbs, not Racism, Blamed for Political Shift in South,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 30, 2006, 5K.
74. Aviation Week and Space Technology, November 2, 1964, 15; Webb Oct. 1964 Huntsville, AL, Controversy, file 3517, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
75. Finney, “NASA May Leave,” 12.
76. “NASA Job Talk Scored by Burch as ‘Browbeating,’” Sunday Star, November 1, 1964; Webb Oct. 1964 Huntsville, AL, Controversy, file 3517, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
77. “Webb Repeats Warning to Marshall (an Analysis),” Space Business Daily, November 2, 1964, 1–2, Webb Oct. 1964 Huntsville, AL, Controversy, file 3517, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
78. “1964 Presidential General Election Results,” http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1964.
79. Neufeld, Von Braun, 392.
80. “One Hundred of Space Agency Will Leave Alabama,” New York Times, November 28, 1964, 16.
81. Letter, Wernher von Braun to Bert Slattery, November 10, 1964, Wernher von Braun Papers, U.S. Space and Rocket Center History Office, Huntsville, AL, 123/12.
82. Wernher von Braun, speech, annual banquet—Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce—December 8, 1964, 13, Speeches by Key Officials, Wernher von Braun, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, https://mira.hq.nasa.gov/history/.
83. Ibid., 9, 15.
84. Neufeld, Von Braun, 396.
85. Wernher von Braun, “Building a Space Program” (speech), State Home Builders Association, Mobile, AL, September 28, 1964, Speeches by Key Officials, Wernher von Braun, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, https://mira.hq.nasa.gov/history/.
86. Jonathan McPherson, organizer of the Miles College Student Boycott of Segregated Birmingham Businesses, “First Person Accounts from 1963 Birmingham Campaign,” Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, April 25, 2013, http://www.c-span.org/video/?312240–1/first-person-accounts-1963-birmingham-campaign. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/FirstPe.
87. Neufeld, Von Braun, 396; “Miles College Gets Science Building, $50,000,” Jet Magazine, December 10, 1964, 23; “History Began Again,” Chicago Daily Defender, December 9, 1964, 10.
88. Letter, L. C. McMillan to Wernher von Braun, November 30, 1961–64, Equal Opportunity Employment series, Digital Media, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Historical Reference Collection, Huntsville, AL.
89. Letter, Linton Crook to Wernher von Braun, April 19, 1965, reproduced at National Archives and Records Administration.
90. Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 161–166; Lesher, George Wallace, 323–334.
91. Robert E. Baker, “Wallace Clouds the Alabama Murk: Visiting Newspapermen Were Treated Royally but Kept from the Gut Issue,” Washington Post, June 13, 1965, E1.
92. University of Alabama Board of Trustees, “A Chronological History of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and Its Predecessor Institutions and Organizations, 1831–,” http://www.uab.edu/archives/chron.
93. Memorandum, James E. Webb to Dr. Simpson, May 28, 1965, box 1, AC 69–88, James E. Webb Personal Papers, LBJL.
94. Telephone conversation, Werhner von Braun with James Webb, May 26, 1965, 13260, WvBP-4 122–1, NASA Headquarters, Historical Records Collection, Washington, DC.
95. Telephone conversation, Wernher von Braun with John Zierdt, May 26, 1965, 13260, WvBP-4 122–1, NASA Headquarters, Historical Records Collection, Washington, DC.
96. Telephone conversation, von Braun with Webb, May 26, 1965.
97. Ibid.
98. Telephone conversation, Wernher von Braun with Col. Lawrence W. Vogel, May 26, 1965, 13260, WvBP-4 122–1, 5, NASA Headquarters, Historical Records Collection, Washington, DC.
99. Baker, “Wallace Clouds,” E1.
100. Von Braun, “Speech to the Alabama Legislature on June 8,” June 8, 1965.
101. Ben A. Franklin, “Wallace Is Given a NASA Warning,” New York Times, June 9, 1965, 31.
102. Cox News Service, “Voice from Vanguard of Civil Rights Movement James Farmer, Last of a Generation of Black Leaders, Talks of Hope,” Baltimore Sun, May 15, 1997, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997–05–15/news/1997135088_1_rights-movement-james-farmer-civil-rights.
103. Whitney M. Young, “Third of Moon Trip Cost Could End Poverty,” Rock Hill Herald, August 2, 1969, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1821&dat=19690802&id=eUYtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=b58FAAAAIBAJ&pg=4883,2772269.
104. A master’s thesis entitled “Space Race: African American Newspapers Respond to Sputnik and Apollo 11,” written in 2007 by Mark A. Thompson of the University of North Texas, looked at articles from this period in the New York Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Sentinel, Michigan Chronicle, Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, Milwaukee Courier, and Minneapolis Spokesman and found they uniformly called into question the amount of money spent on space exploration, comparing it with the needs of the hungry and poverty-stricken. Many of these writers invoked Abernathy’s protest march.
105. James Jennings, conversation with Allan Needell, July 23, 2010, http://capecosmos.org.
106. Bourda, November 15, 2012; Watson, January 27, 2009.
107. Watson, January 27, 2009.
Conclusion
1. Jennings, November 20, 2008.
2. Nanette Dobrosky, A Guide to the Microform Edition of the Presidential Oral History Series: The John F. Kennedy Presidential Oral History Collection (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1988), v–vii.
3. Hobart Taylor Jr., oral history interview by John F. Stewart, January 11, 1967, 23, 24, JFKL.
4. Watson, January 27, 2009.
5. Arthur Sanderson, personnel officer, Marshall Space Flight Center, NACA/NASA Equal Employment Opportunity Programs 1923–1992, file 188977, NASA EEO, e. 1960s Federal Records Center, NASA Headquarters Historical Reference Collection, Washington, DC.
6. Kim McQuaid, “Racism, Sexism, and Space Ventures: Civil Rights at NASA in the Nixon Era and Beyond,” in Societal Impact of Spaceflight, ed. Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius (Washington, DC: NASA History Division, 2007), 421; Dunar and Waring, Power to Explore, 124; “NASA Equal Opportunity Program,” appended to Ruth Bates Harris, Joseph M. Hogan, and Samuel Lynn to James C. Fletcher, September 20, 1973, NASA History Division Documents Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
7. Smoot, January 28, 2013.
8. Delano Hyder, Richard Hall, and E. C. Smith, conversation with Richard Paul, December 15, 2008.
9. Button, Blacks and Social Change, 71.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 71, 73; Bauer et al., Second-Order Consequences, 96–101; Annie Mary Harts- field, Mary Alice Griffin, and Charles M. Grigg, eds., Summary Report: NASA Impact on Brevard County (Tallahassee, FL: Institute for Social Research, 1966), 16–19.
12. Susanne Cervenka, “Melbourne City Council Vote May End Diversity Drought: City Hasn’t Seen Black Council Member since 1977 Elections,” Florida Today, November 3, 2012, http://www.floridatoday.com/article/20121103/NEWS05/311030019/Melbourne-city-council-vote-may-end-diversity-drought.
13. “For Negroes: More and Better Jobs in Government,” U.S. News and World Report, March 5, 1962, 83–84; U.S. Civil Service Commission, Study of Minority Group Employment in the Federal Government, 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 25; U.S. Civil Service Commission, Study of Minority Group Employment in the Federal Government, November 30, 1969 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1969), 310, 311; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Federal Civil Rights Enforcement Effort (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1970), 68.
14. Tables A.1 to A.8 in the appendix contain relevant census numbers for the NASA host states of Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas.
15. U.S. Department of Commerce, 1960 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 11: Florida (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 11-469, table 122.
16. U.S. Department of Commerce, 1960 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 2: Alabama (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 2-373, 379, tables 121 and 122; U.S. Department of Commerce, 1970 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 2: Alabama (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), 2-623, 626, table 173.
17. Letter, Robert E. Jones to President Johnson, January 23, 1967, General FG 260 8/12/65, FG 260, box 295, LBJL; memorandum, James E. Webb to Richard Callaghan, March 14, 1967, March 1967, box 2, James E. Webb Personal Papers, LBJL. There appears to be no mention of the Alabama race question after 1967 in the James E. Webb Personal Papers at the LBJ Library.
18. U.S. Department of Commerce, 1960 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 45: Texas (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 45-884, table 122; U.S. Department of Commerce, 1970 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 45: Texas, Section 2 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1973), 45-1679, 45-1683, table 173.
19. Northrup, Aerospace Industry, 22.
20. Otis King, conversation with Richard Paul, December 24, 2008.
21. “The Space Age Comes to Mississippi,” 80; letter, James E. Webb to Adam Clayton Powell, February 4, 1964, General FG 260 NASA 11/22/63-2/24/64, WHCF, box 294, LBJL.
22. U.S. Department of Commerce, 1960 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 26: Mississippi (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 26-333, table 122.
23. U.S. Department of Commerce, 1970 Census of the Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Pt. 26: Mississippi (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), 26-553, 535, table 173.
24. Herbert R. Northrup, “In-Plant Movement of Negroes in the Aerospace Industry,” Monthly Labor Review 91 (February 1968): 23.
25. Northrup, Aerospace Industry, 10.
26. Ibid.
27. Jennings, November 20, 2008.
28. “Excerpts of Remarks by Dr. George M. Low before Conference on EEO,” undated (apparently 1973), NASA History Division Documents Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
29. McQuaid, “Racism, Sexism, and Space Ventures,” 431, 447.
30. “Race Labor Leaving,” Chicago Defender, February 5, 1916, 1.
31. Isabel Wilkerson, remarks at “From Emancipation to the Great Migration,” a National Constitution Center and New York Public Radio event at the Greene Space in New York City, January 21, 2013, http://www.c-span.org/Events/From-Emancipation-to-the-Great-Migration/10737437314/.
32. Ibid.
33. Watson, January 27, 2009.
34. Jennings, November 20, 2008.
35. Watson, January 27, 2009.
36. Wilkerson, “From Emancipation.”
37. Carruthers, June 15, 2009.
38. Hyder, Hall, and Smith, December 15, 2009.
39. Watson, January 27, 2009.
40. Finney, “NASA Is Training,” 54.
41. Watson, January 27, 2009.
42. Mae Jemison, conversation with Richard Paul, March 30, 2009.
43. Richard Paul arranged for Julius Montgomery and Morgan Watson to be at the National Air and Space Museum that day, moderated the panel on which they spoke, and witnessed this exchanged in the Green Room.
44. Smoot, January 28, 2013.
45. John F. Kennedy, “Moon Speech” (speech, Rice Stadium, Rice University, Houston, TX, September 12, 1962), http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm.
