Black History Month 2019 #5- NASA's Black Pioneers of the 1960s
The Space Race began on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier of intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The Soviet Union beat the US to the first successful launch, with the October 4, 1957, orbiting of Sputnik 1, and later beat the US to have the first human in earth orbit, Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. Subsequently, in 1961 President John F. Kennedy proposed the ambitious goal "of landing a man on the Moon by the end of [the 1960s], and returning him safely to the Earth." At the same time, Kennedy chose federal employment as one of the tools to force integration.
The Space Race created over 200,000 jobs in the Deep South, at the NASA Centers in Alabama (George C. Marshall Space Flight Center), Florida (JFK Space Center), Texas (LBJ Space Center), Mississippi (John C. Stennis Space Center), and Louisiana (Michoud Assembly Facility).
Kennedy placed Vice-President Johnson at the heads of both his National Space Council and the President’s Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, enabling the vice president to implement the strategy. NASA and its contractors were required to hire blacks, creating upper-level job opportunities that had never been available before to them, well before passage of the Civil Rights Act made equal employment opportunity the law of the land.
https://laurenkfoster.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/black-history-month-2019-4-nasas-black-pioneers-of-the-1960s/
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