BlackPast.org Blog: 'NASA and the Legacy of Eminent Black Scientists and Engineers'

[Black Wings: Courageous Stories of African Americans in Aviation and Space History; Von Hardesty; Smithsonian]

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.