Whitey Ford
07-02-2019, 02:01 PM
Kennedy wanted Apollo to help integrate the South, but did it work?
It shouldn’t be surprising that race was a key subplot in Alabama’s part in the drama leading to the Apollo 11 moon shot 50 years ago. Race was part of every drama in Alabama in the 1960s.
https://i.imgur.com/GwhBbR3.jpg
Historians say NASA took specific steps to hire black team members in Alabama. It created a “contractors’ group” to pressure other contractors to hire black employees. It hired a man named Charlie Smoot as “the first black recruiter” to seek black professionals across the country.
And the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville reached out to historically black colleges and universities and invited representatives to Huntsville in 1963. They helped create the first black co-op program, and the program’s first recruits are part of NASA and American space history. They were Walter Applewhite, Frank C. Williams, Jr. Wesley Carter, George Bourda, Tommy Dubone, William Winfield and Morgan Watson.
Johnson reportedly threatened to make NASA in Huntsville “cease to be” if doors weren’t opened in the town to blacks. A plan was made, and a black funeral home owner named R.E. Nelms was asked to order a meal at the local King’s Inn hotel restaurant. Nelms went on the night planned – his steak was reportedly “inedible” – but word went to Washington that Huntsville restaurants were now serving blacks.
Despite the plans, recruiters and advisory councils, other reports say black hiring never got above 3 percent of the workforce on the Apollo program.
The book “We Could Not Fail: The first African Americans in the Space Program” says von Braun personally “actually paid attention to the issue” and was committed to change. The Marshall center’s actions “would go above and beyond anything done elsewhere by NASA in the South,” according to authors Richard Paul and Steven Moss.
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/kennedy-wanted-apollo-to-help-integrate-the-south-but-did-it-work.html
It shouldn’t be surprising that race was a key subplot in Alabama’s part in the drama leading to the Apollo 11 moon shot 50 years ago. Race was part of every drama in Alabama in the 1960s.
https://i.imgur.com/GwhBbR3.jpg
Historians say NASA took specific steps to hire black team members in Alabama. It created a “contractors’ group” to pressure other contractors to hire black employees. It hired a man named Charlie Smoot as “the first black recruiter” to seek black professionals across the country.
And the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville reached out to historically black colleges and universities and invited representatives to Huntsville in 1963. They helped create the first black co-op program, and the program’s first recruits are part of NASA and American space history. They were Walter Applewhite, Frank C. Williams, Jr. Wesley Carter, George Bourda, Tommy Dubone, William Winfield and Morgan Watson.
Johnson reportedly threatened to make NASA in Huntsville “cease to be” if doors weren’t opened in the town to blacks. A plan was made, and a black funeral home owner named R.E. Nelms was asked to order a meal at the local King’s Inn hotel restaurant. Nelms went on the night planned – his steak was reportedly “inedible” – but word went to Washington that Huntsville restaurants were now serving blacks.
Despite the plans, recruiters and advisory councils, other reports say black hiring never got above 3 percent of the workforce on the Apollo program.
The book “We Could Not Fail: The first African Americans in the Space Program” says von Braun personally “actually paid attention to the issue” and was committed to change. The Marshall center’s actions “would go above and beyond anything done elsewhere by NASA in the South,” according to authors Richard Paul and Steven Moss.
https://www.al.com/news/2019/07/kennedy-wanted-apollo-to-help-integrate-the-south-but-did-it-work.html