We Could Not Fail

The First African Americans in the Space Program

Richard Paul, Steven Moss

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781477311134
• eBook ISBN:
  9780292772519
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This "surprising and insightful" history profiles ten African American engineers, mathematicians, and others who worked for NASA's space program (Lauren Helmuth, New York Times Book Review).

The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. NASA itself became an agent of social change, with President Kennedy opening its workplaces to African Americans. In We Could Not Fail, Richard Paul and Steven Moss profile ten pioneer African American space workers whose stories illustrate the role NASA and the space program played in promoting civil rights.

Paul and Moss recount how these technicians, mathematicians, engineers, and an astronaut candidate surmounted barriers and navigated being the sole African American in a NASA work group. These brave and determined men went on to help transform Southern society by integrating colleges, patenting new inventions, holding elective office, and reviving and governing defunct towns.

Adding new names to the roster of civil rights heroes and a new chapter to the story of space exploration,  We Could Not Fail demonstrates how African Americans broke the color barrier by competing successfully at the highest level of American intellectual and technological achievement.

1

A Man of Firsts

Julius Montgomery

I walked into this barracks full of all these guys—white guys—and I said “Good God!” I sat on my bunk and said, “How in the world will I be able to identify them? They all look alike to me.”

JULIUS MONTGOMERY

Julius Montgomery’s first day in the space program was lonely and terrifying. Walking down the dusty road past the squat wooden buildings at the entrance to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Montgomery was entering a place that would soon come to embody the very idea of Tomorrow in the American imagination. But what he faced that day in 1956 was a dispiriting combination of the sad and hateful present, tinged with the bitter history of yesterday. Montgomery was the first African American hired as anything other than a janitor at the Cape, but he shouldered a burden other racial pioneers did not. His experience was unlike that of Jackie Robinson when he integrated baseball, unlike that of the Little Rock Nine, who just weeks later would integrate Central High School in Little Rock, unlike that of Guy Bluford and Mae Jemison as they waved and boarded the space shuttle.¹ As he made his way to the building that housed the RCA Development Lab, there were no reporters along to watch, no columnist from the black press cheering and urging progress. There was no one from the National Urban League or the NAACP standing by to offer legal or moral support. Julius Montgomery was completely and utterly alone. Reaching the lab, he swung the door open and there faced a roomful of angry white men.

Sunshine Segregation

From the end of World War I through most of the twentieth century, Florida, where NASA would launch rockets to the Moon, was a terrible place to be an African American. In the 1920s, the state enjoyed a sustained land boom and cultivated its reputation as a vacationer’s paradise. As it did, Florida—along with the rest of the nation—looked the other way when it came to horrific racial secrets such as the Rosewood Massacre, where whites burned and destroyed the black section of town after armed African Americans tried to defend their homes from a mob.² Florida had Jim Crow racial separation as severe as any other state in the former Confederacy—separation that was not just socially isolating but that also translated into deficits in government services that kept blacks running a race in which they could never catch up.³ Most pernicious was the impact of discrimination on the public schools. Southern states spent one-third to one-half as much on education over the years 1890–1940 as the rest of the country, and that was for working-class whites.⁴ For blacks, especially in the countryside, the gap was much more severe, and it was crushing.⁵ In the area near Cape Canaveral in 1937, for example, the school board spent $69.05 per capita for white students and $27.04 per capita for blacks.⁶ African American children were “crowded into very inadequate buildings and taught by poorly qualified teachers.”⁷ Sadly, that was actually an improvement from twenty years earlier, when Floridians elected Governor Sidney J. Catts, who ran on a platform opposing any education for blacks.⁸

Along with the deprivation came a capacious dose of terror. Because of a lack of legal protection (there were no black police and African Americans had not served on juries in the South since the 1870s), whole African American communities were under constant threat of violence and death.⁹ It is a sad fact of the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth century in America, especially in the South, that African American lives were in the main considered worthless. That was not the case, of course, before the North won the Civil War. For more than two hundred years, African American life had had a price. Africans were property; bought and sold like a mule or a scythe. Black lives were not for sale after the war and to many that meant they now had little or no worth—a principal motivating factor within the sociogenesis of lynching.¹⁰ Whites sometimes used lynching as a last resort, when no other form of coercion worked to keep the black population in line. Sometimes they just did it because they could.¹¹ This was especially true in the swampy mangroves surrounding Cape Canaveral.

Up through the time Julius Montgomery walked through that door, the Ku Klux Klan controlled East Central Florida. The sheriff of Orange County was a Klansman. There were city commissioners, aldermen, and county commissioners in the Klan. “Local businessmen joined the Klan almost like joining the Rotary club.”¹² The Klan was so central to life there that the local paper covered their activities on the society page.¹³ And in the Florida Klan’s wake came the lynching. By the end of World War I, 95 percent of all lynching in the United States occurred in the states that formed the Confederacy,¹⁴ and in the southern states where NASA was based (Florida, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi), Florida had the highest lynching rate per capita.¹⁵

Montgomery knew all of this. He was from out of state, but Florida had a distinct reputation among African Americans. He knew about black men who looked at white men crossways and disappeared in the middle of the night. Consequently, he expected harassment from his co-workers. It would not surprise him if he got shoved, or if maybe someone spit. He knew quite possibly he could get punched. He faced his co-workers on that first day of his new job armed with nothing more than his knowledge of the rules of southern life, along with his wits and the paperwork that said he belonged there.

That he qualified for the job, which involved tracking, timing, radar, and telemetry, as well as repairing missiles, was a tribute to nearly twenty years of work by African American activists who had pushed the federal government into a grudging shift in policy on race relations. Not that many years before, when Montgomery’s father was entering the workforce, say, an African American in the Old South with a degree in a field like mathematics or science could aspire to be a teacher and not much more.¹⁶ One with a degree in engineering might build roads if the community needed roads and was a community that allowed African Americans to work in road construction.¹⁷ If not, that person could become a teacher. Knowing this, Montgomery studied to be a linotype operator in college at Tuskegee Institute. He understood the paucity of jobs southern society would allow blacks to hold. Janitor and “concrete work” were the main ones, he said, “but you couldn’t be the boss.” Though he was interested in science, he had learned from a cousin’s experience just how hard it would be to become a doctor. “My cousin had to go to Morehouse in Georgia, because they wouldn’t let him go to the school in Alabama,” he said. His cousin applied for medical school and they told him, “You can’t go here, boy.” Montgomery continued, “They would send you out of the state back in those days. And they paid for it! First, you have to apply to the school to be turned down by the state. And then they would give you an option of going to another school.”¹⁸ With employment options so narrow, he made a conscious choice to study a trade rather than to focus on academics. Then the air force drafted him and during his service he received his First Class Radiotelephone Operator’s license. Despite that valuable asset, when he got out of the service and moved back home, he applied for lots of jobs but “got a letter back from them: ‘We don’t hire blacks.’”

In time, the people who worked at Cape Canaveral would be elevated in the popular imagination to the ranks of America’s technical and intellectual elite. The black press would laud the African American ones with encomia. They were denizens of a “glittering new world”; part of a “team which sends US astronauts forth to master space.”¹⁹ None of that entered into Julius Montgomery’s decision to work in the space program, however; he had a much more prosaic motivation. Montgomery was working at a black radio station in Mobile, Alabama. All he wanted was to find a job that would pay at least $100 a week. One day he got a telephone call from his mother. “‘You got a telegram.’ I said, ‘Read it, Mama.’ She said ‘$96 a week.’ I said, ‘Close enough!’” He gave two weeks’ notice and headed for Florida.

As a southerner, Montgomery grew up under segregation. “I had not talked to a white person in my life until I was in the service,” he said. “No conversation. That’s the way it was” growing up. But because that segregation was complete, because he never encountered white people, he never had to feel their contempt. The government had desegregated the air force before it drafted him, so he had dealt with white people (“I remember walking into this barracks full of all these guys—white guys—and I said ‘Good God!’ I sat on my bunk and said, ‘How in the world will I be able to identify them? They all look alike to me!’”), but the job at Cape Canaveral was going to be different. Would they accept him? Did they think he belonged? Did they even think—some of them—that he was human? “I was a strange person coming into an all-white building. All white.” He entered the lab and eyed his co-workers. They stared back. “Nobody would shake my hand.” His heart was pounding. Who knew the number of Florida Klansmen in the room? One by one as he approached these men, each one turned away. “I got to the last fellow,” he said, “And I said ‘Hello, I’m Julius Montgomery.’ He said, ‘Look, boy, that’s no way to talk to a white man!’” At this point, there are any number of ways a man can react to these people he would be spending every day with for who knew how long. He could lash out; knock the man to the ground. He could go to management. He could storm out, call the NAACP, and file a complaint. But that was not who Montgomery was. This is who he was: he looked the white man in the eye and “I said—I said, ‘Ah, forgive me, oh great, white bastard, what should I call you?’ I really did say that! And I laughed, and he laughed and he shook my hand.”

“Cease and Desist from Such Unfair Labor Practice”

The federal government had tried at least since the Franklin Roosevelt administration to address hiring discrimination within federal facilities like Cape Canaveral. Roosevelt imposed limited forms of affirmative action during the New Deal, and in fact the term “affirmative action” comes from the wording of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.²⁰ The government integrated elements of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and the Agriculture Department’s Soil Conservation Service hired African American technicians (though, tellingly, regulations restricted that second group to only counseling African American farmers).²¹ The most significant action taken by Roosevelt came in early 1941 when, hoping to head off a threatened African American march on Washington for equal rights, the president created the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which sought to end discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin in federal employment and defense contracts.²² A second committee was established by executive order in 1943 (after the first committee collapsed) and its jurisdiction was extended to additional industries and to labor organizations, which it said had the “duty” to eliminate discrimination not only in employment but also in union membership.²³ Oversight by this committee was never strong and contractors often threw out their good intentions on racial integration in the rush to complete federal projects.²⁴ It nonetheless made some impressive inroads at key agencies that laid the groundwork for future progress.²⁵ A southern filibuster finally killed the committee in 1946. ²⁶ The Truman administration created its own committee to oversee federal contractors and federal hiring. Eisenhower dissolved that and replaced it with yet another committee, this one headed by Vice President Nixon, which had taken several actions by the time Julius Montgomery went to work at the Cape.

While the government designed these programs to get African Americans in the door, their success often depended on the ability of people like Julius Montgomery to find ways to overcome the hatred and discriminatory attitudes and behaviors that kept them out of the workforce in the first place. Montgomery’s way worked for him. Repeatedly—as he did that first day—he would size up a situation, and then defuse it. Disarm his opponent with a joke, preferably an audacious one. Over the years, he took plenty of opportunities to tell his co-workers, “Look, I’m part of the educational program to train you guys to act like people. You’ve been acting like rednecks all your lives. So you need training; retraining.”²⁷ Was his approach the best way? There is a counterstory from the same place at about the same time that shows that it just might have been.

The Martyr of Mims, Harry T. Moore

The counterstory is that of a pioneering activist for civil rights who raise...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Man of Firsts: Julius Montgomery
• 2. “There Was a Lot of History There”: Theodis Ray
• 3. Stronger Than Steel: Frank Crossley
• 4. Dixie’s Role in the Space Age
• 5. First of Race in Space: Ed Dwight
• 6. The View from Space: George Carruthers
• 7. “Huntsville, It Has Always Been Unique”: Delano Hyder and Richard Hall
• 8. The Country Spartacus: Clyde Foster
• 9. Water Walkers: Morgan Watson and George Bourda
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Relevant Census Numbers on Employed Professional and Skilled Labor for NASA Host States
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index