BlackPast.org Blog
Hazel Singer (Excerpt)
This
summer marks another milestone in NASA'S Mars exploration
efforts: the landing of the Curiosity Rover. Space craft, space stations, and the astronauts who operate and populate them
are the newsflash and news splash people love to read about. Astronauts Mae Jemison, Michael Anderson, Frederick Gregory, Ronald McNair have thrilled many a school child with
dreams of space. The forerunners of
these astronauts are the black aviators, whose courage and daring can be read
about in these two books by Von Hardesty.
But,
none of this would have been possible without the years of dedication,
experimentation, and problem-solving by the ‘worker bee brains’ behind the
public face of NASA.
Several
years ago, Mae Jemison narrated an audio documentary called Race and the Space Race (the link takes you to the transcript, but you can listen to it by clicking on the title) produced
by Richard Paul as part of a larger project called Cape Cosmos: be sure to explore the personal interviews within that site of many of the
people mentioned below. A download of those documents may
be found here. Jemison explains that the Space Age and the Civil Rights Movement became
entwined when NASA chose to “base itself in the heart of the Old Confederacy”,
Houston, Huntsville, Cape Canaveral, and therefore became a mirror of social
change in America.
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