Black space engineer, housing advocate Ken Kelly dies at 92
Kenneth C. Kelly, a Black 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. The 92-year-old also worked to erase race barriers in the Navy, in California housing and on the newspaper comics pages.
Kelly had Parkinson’s disease before his death on Feb. 27, his son Ron Kelly said.
Kelly was awarded more than a dozen patents for innovations in radar and antenna technology, work that appears in peer-reviewed journals from 1955-1999. 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 massive Mojave Desert radiotelescopes that search for signs of life in space, his son and JPL colleagues said.
After many years working on deep space missions through NASA subcontractors, Kelly worked directly for JPL from 1999 until retiring in 2002, helping to design robotic antennas for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, according to 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 middle-class 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.
“We have pretty much the same hopes, fears, ambitions, strengths and frailties that have typified all of human existence,” Kelly wrote in a letter his white neighbors, urging them to set aside “stereotyped notions,” according to the AP story.
Kelly and his wife Loretta later moved near California State University Northridge, to be closer to his job and have their children attend better schools. 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 whitesonly advertising. To do more from the inside, he became a leading Realtor, helping many 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. A white ally of the Kellys on the Fair Housing Council, schoolteacher Harriet Glickman, had been corresponding with cartoonist Charles Schulz, urging him to 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 was reluctant, fearing the move would seem patronizing to Black people in the wake of King’s death. Glickman recruited Kelly to persuade Schulz otherwise.
Kelly urged the cartoonist to treat the Black character as a “supernumerary” — just another member of the Peanuts gang. Franklin soon appeared on a beach, helping Charlie Brown build a sand castle.
Born in 1928 in New York City and raised by a single mother who worked as a live-in maid, Kelly began living at 13 in the Harlem YMCA, where he was mentored by older black men including photographer Gordon Parks. He tested into Brooklyn Tech high school, then enlisted in the Navy to be trained as an electronics technician. Told he could only be a steward to white officers, he wrote to the chief recruiter and was allowed to take the engineering exam just when President Harry Truman was moving to desegregate the military.