Space engineer broke racial barriers in L.A. housing
Kenneth C. Kelly, an early-day electronics engineer whose antenna designs contributed to the race to the moon, made satellite TV and radio possible and helped NASA communicate with Mars rovers and search for extraterrestrials, has died. He was 92.
The engineer also worked to erase race barriers in the Navy, California housing and the newspaper comics pages. As a Black resident in Los Angeles, his efforts to buy residences in largely white neighborhoods had been repeatedly rebuffed.
He was battling Parkinson’s disease when he died Feb. 27, his son Ron said.
Kelly was awarded more than a dozen patents for innovations in radar and antenna technology, work that appears in peer-reviewed journals from 1955 to 1999. His early work at Hughes Aircraft helped create guided missile systems and the ground satellites that tracked the Apollo space missions, he said in an oral history recorded by his family.
His two-way antenna designs at Rantec Microwave Systems enabled consumers to have DirecTV and Sirius XM connections, and are featured in the Mojave Desert radiotelescopes that search for signs of life in space, according to his son and colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
After many years working on deep-space missions through NASA subcontractors, Kelly worked directly for JPL from 1999 until retiring in 2002, helping design robotic antennas for two Mars rovers, said Joseph Vacchione, who manages the JPL’s antenna test range.
Kelly appeared in an Associated Press article in 1962 after he moved his family into Gardena, a middleclass suburb that had excluded Black people. To overcome a racist covenant and the repeated refusals of real estate agents, he had to ask a white colleague at Hughes to make the purchase on his behalf.
Kelly and his wife, Loretta, later moved near Cal State Northridge. According to the 2017 oral history, the agent wouldn’t sell him the lot, so he had to repeat the demeaning experience of having white friends buy it for him before signing over the mortgage.
Kelly became president of the San Fernando Valley Fair Housing Council, testing listings to prove discrimination, lobbying authorities and going to court to prevent whites-only advertising.
He also became a leading Realtor, helping Black families move into new suburbs in the 1970s.
Kelly had another role in promoting racial harmony after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Harriet Glickman, a white schoolteacher who served on the Fair Housing Council, recruited Kelly to persuade cartoonist Charles Schulzto add a Black character to his comic strip. At the time, Black people were all but invisible in mass media.
Letters published by the Charles M. Schulz Museum show the cartoonist feared the move would seem patronizing to Black people in the wake of King’s death. But Kelly urged the cartoonist to treat the character as another member of the Peanuts gang. The character, Franklin, soon appeared on a beach, helping Charlie Brown build a sandcastle.
Kelly, who was born in 1928 in New York City, broke racial barriers to serve in the Navy as an electronics technician and later got hired at Hughes Aircraft.
Kelly formed a society of Black scientists and engineers who launched outreach programs to minority students in Los Angeles.
Kelly, who was married three times, is survived by his wife Anne, son Ron, stepson Steve and two grandchildren. He was predeceased by his son David.