The Gates of Opportunity

Eric Fenrich studies the efforts of Black activists and NASA to increase minority educational access that would lead to greater participation in the space program. According to Fenrich, the concurrence of the civil rights movement and the American space program reveal the two primary methods by which the advocates in the modern era have sought to advance the interests of African Americans. First, a negative project: the removal of formal barriers to the exercise of rights, more specifically, ending discriminatory practices in Equal Employment Opportunity and education. Second, more positive efforts, such as equal employment opportunities or affirmative action, that place opportunities within the reach of historically disadvantaged people. Fenrich also examines the fallout over James C. Fletcher’s firing of Ruth Bates Harris.

The Congressional Black Caucus and the Closure of NASA’s Satellite Tracking Station at Hartebeesthoek, South Africa

Keith Snedegar explores the impact of the civil rights movement on decisions related to NASA facilities outside the United States. Snedegar maintains that when Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the founders of the Black Congressional Caucus, visited the NASA satellite tracking station at Hartesbeesthoek, South Africa, in 1971, he discovered a racially segregated facility where technical jobs were reserved for white employees and black Africans essentially performed menial labor. Upon his return to the United States, the Detroit congressman embarked on a two-year struggle, first to improve workplace equity at the tracking station, and later, for the closure of the facility. NASA administration under James Fletcher was largely indifferent to demands for change at the station. It was only after Representative Charles Rangel proposed a reduction in NASA appropriations did the agency announce plans to end its working relationship with the white minority regime of South Africa. NASA’s public statements suggested that a scientific rationale lay behind the station’s eventual closure in 1975, but this episode clearly indicates that NASA was acting only under political pressure, and its management remained largely insensitive to global issues of racial equality.

The Newest South

Brenda Plummer examines the effect of the U.S. space program on race relations in key areas of the South, and the impact of that connection on popular culture. She also explores the intersection of the struggle for racial equality and aerospace exploration, as both constituted potent narratives of freedom in the American imaginary. Plummer disputes the assumption that NASA as an instrument of modernization and partner in the creation of the New South was implicitly allied with the civil rights movement. While the transformation of parts of the Deep South undeniably broke up earlier political, economic, and cultural patterns, aerospace research and development helped inaugurate a successor regime that neither challenged the structural foundations of racial inequality nor guarded against the production of new disparities.

Bringing the Moon to Mankind

In chapter 3, Molina and Blount offer a contextualization of NASA’s interlocutory role throughout the long civil rights movement by mobilizing these three themes to analyze a series of archival and cultural artifacts. The authors first analyze the rhetoric deployed by the Poor People Campaign’s various mobilizations to show that the American space program was viewed with deep skepticism by the African American community and particularly within the context of ongoing struggles for black freedom. Second, they discuss the “distance” between the tropes of spatial disenfranchisement represented in the civil rights movement and the Moon missions to show how space exploration was portrayed as an acceleration of the marginalization of black spaces.

Conclusion

Jonathan Coopersmith underscores the two major challenges of doing history—finding and preserving archival material, challenges particularly acute for subjects traditionally not collected by archives, such as minority movements. To prevent such future losses and expand archival access, Coopersmith explores how historians, archivists, and other stakeholders can utilize public history tools including oral histories and the digital humanities to encourage the creation and preservation of the widest possible range of appropriate records and histories, especially for historically underrepresented and under-researched areas and people in space exploration and exploitation.

Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez and Guion Bluford

Cathleen Lewis argues that throughout the Cold War, race played an important role in foreign policy with the United States painfully aware that its civil rights situation could have an adverse impact on foreign policy ambitions abroad. The USSR preyed on that U.S. sensitivity, calling the country out on its failures. In the early 1980s, almost a decade after U.S. foreign policy had all but abandoned race as a Cold War issue, the race issue reemerged, albeit briefly when the USSR launched the first black man into space, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, beating NASA’s own Guion Bluford. This final battle over race in the Cold War ultimately revealed American domestic progress and the hollowness of Soviet space stunts.

Accommodating the Forces of Change

Matthew Downs explores the impact of Sunbelt-era federal development and the response of civic and commercial leaders to the civil rights movement, demonstrating how local leaders worked closely with government officials to attract and maintain such installations and the accompanying public and private investment. When federal officials and their representatives in the city made clear that southern intransigence on civil rights would adversely affect the local, space-based economy, Huntsville’s civic leaders modulated their approach to civil rights in the hopes of ensuring continued support. Such action was particularly surprising, given the overtly hostile response to the movement by Alabama’s other local leaders and the state government. While Huntsville was not without conflict, the presence of the federal government, combined with the threat that southern resistance might lead to a withdrawal of federal support, led the city to a more moderate reaction when the city’s local movement pressured for equality.

NASA, the Association of Huntsville Area Contractors, and Equal Employment Opportunity in the Rocket City, 1963–1965

Brian Odom surveys the implementation of Equal Employment Opportunity at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Odom contends that Marshall’s strategy focused on recruiting qualified African American engineering students outside Alabama and developing a partnership with the Association of Huntsville Area Contractors (AHAC) locally. By serving as both a catalyst for technical educational programs in the Huntsville community and clearinghouse for job opportunities and racial dialogue, AHAC facilitated a modicum of progress toward minority gains. During the civil rights movement, local activists such as Dr. Sonnie Hereford III and aerospace executives, including Brown Engineering Company’s Milton K. Cummings, brokered “backroom” agreements meant to improve Alabama’s “image” problem.

Bringing Mankind to the Moon

In this chapter, P. J. Blount and David Molina trace NASA’s attempted counternarrative of social value and a policy of liberal equality rooted in the concept of “all mankind.” They consider whether this argument for NASA’s value remains a salient one at present as the continued inequalities in American life are increasingly highlighted in the media, and as we face a historical moment in which activists and astronauts alike will be challenged to bridge the distance between Black Lives Matter and Mars.

Space History Matures—and Reaches a Crossroads

Margaret Weitekamp explores the state of the “New Aerospace History” field. Weitekamp re-evaluates the state of the field in space history, looking especially at the influence of race, gender, and regional history. Weitekamp suggests that attention be paid to three major areas of growth in the field: individual and collective biography (historiography), fresh takes on technologies and cultural contexts, and international/global history.