‘Black in Space’ eyes final frontier of civil rights
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — In 1959, Ronald Erwin McNair walked into a South Carolina library. The 9-year-old aspiring astronaut wanted to check out a calculus book, but a librarian threatened to call the police if he didn’t leave. McNair was black.
Years later, McNair was selected to become only the second African-American to travel to space, overcoming segregation, poverty and stereotypes in an intellectual act of resistance that inspired a generation. McNair died in the 1986 space shuttle Challenger tragedy.
McNair’s story and those of other black astronauts are shared in a new documentary that looks at the final frontier of civil rights.
“Black in Space: Breaking the Color Barrier,” scheduled to air Monday on the Smithsonian Channel, examines the race to get black astronauts into the heavens while fighting for human rights on Earth. It shows how the astronauts surmounted racial barriers and hostile commanders to get close to the stars.
“They really are the first of the first,” filmmaker Laurens Grant said. “And they are the elite of the elite.”
The road to get black astronauts into space in the U.S. began under President John. F. Kennedy. His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, pressured an Air Force program to make sure its astronaut project had a person of color.
The Air Force selected Robert Henry Lawrence as the first African-American astronaut. But he died after his F-104 Starfighter crashed in 1967 at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.
No African-Americans would make it to the moon.
During this era, “Star Trek” Communication Officer Lt.
Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols in the 1960s NBC television series, would later speak out in public service announcements to recruit black scientists and pilots to NASA.
Frederick Gregory, now 79, saw some of those ads.
“She was inside my TV one morning. She pointed at me and said, ‘I want you to apply for the NASA program,’” Gregory said. “She was talking to me.”
The Air Force pilot would apply and later become the first African-American shuttle pilot.
Guion Bluford would become the first African-American astronaut to make it into space. The aerospace engineer was as a member of the crew of the orbiter Challenger in 1983.