Julius Montgomery, 90, broke color barrier at Cape Canaveral

Julius Montgomery had already broken one color barrier when he faced another.

In 1956, he had become the first African American who was not a janitor to be hired to work at the Cape Canaveral space facility in Florida. He was part of a team of technical professionals, known as “range rats,” who repaired the electronics in malfunctioning ballistic missiles and satellite equipment.

Two years later, his team wanted to start a school to keep the space workers upto-date. Brevard Engineering College, as it was to be called (Cape Canaveral is in Brevard County), planned to lease classrooms at a public junior high school near the space center.

But public officials in Florida — a state still in the grip of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan — had control over who walked into their classrooms. And they didn’t want black people.

The county’s superintendent of schools said he would not allow Montgomery to participate, and he threatened to shut down the college before it even got started.

Montgomery withdrew his application so the college could open. Three years later, in 1961, Brevard secured its own facilities and admitted Montgomery, who became the first student to integrate the college, known today as the Florida Institute of Technology.

The school has long acknowledged that it would not exist were it not for Montgomery’s sacrifice. In 2006, it honored him with the first annual Julius Montgomery Pioneer Award for community service.

Montgomery died Jan. 22 at a nursing home in Melbourne, Florida, just days after Florida Tech awarded him an honorary doctorate of humane letters. He was 90. A daughter, Gaye Montgomery, said the cause was heart failure.

His breaking the color barrier at Cape Canaveral and his sacrifice in helping the college get off the ground were not Montgomery’s only pioneering achievements. He was also the first African American to win a seat on the City Council of the new, expanded city of Melbourne, after the old city merged with the adjacent Eau Gallie in 1969.

Montgomery had started running for office when he moved to the area in 1956, when few African Americans held public office anywhere in the South. At the time, Florida had one of the country’s highest lynching rates per capita, according to Richard Paul, an author, with Steven Moss, of “We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program” (2015). Montgomery is the subject of one of the book’s chapters.

It took Montgomery 13 years of campaigning, off and on, to win his seat on the council. And it would be more than 35 years before another African American was elected to that body.

Montgomery attended the Tuskegee Institute, the historically black institution now known as Tuskegee University, where he studied to be a Linotype operator. He graduated in 1951.

He worked briefly as a printer before joining the Air Force that year, serving until 1956.

“He did top-secret work for the Air Force, rewiring and servicing the receiving stations that took down signals from spy satellites,” Paul, the author, said in a phone interview.

After the Air Force, Montgomery worked briefly as a radio station engineer in Mobile, Alabama. He applied for other jobs at other companies, but was told they didn’t hire black people.

He also applied for a job with the Radio Corporation of America at Cape Canaveral, figuring that his license as a first-class radio telescope operator might make him a good fit for the space program. He passed the entry-level test, and RCA offered him a job for $76 a week. He didn’t respond. When RCA came back with an offer of $96 a week (about $924 in today’s money) to work as an electronics technician in its development lab, he accepted and headed for Florida, becoming the first black professional employed at the space center.

He settled in Melbourne, just south of Cape Canaveral. In 1960 he married Gertrude Elizabeth (King), with whom he had two daughters, Gaye and Lisa Montgomery. After his wife died in 2003, he developed a close relationship with Annie Lewis, who was his companion until she died in 2015.

His daughters survive him, as do two grandchildren and six of his siblings: his sisters Doris Cook, Artney Turner, Rita Poole and Holly Montgomery, and his brothers Edward and Carl Montgomery.

After retiring from RCA in 1988, Montgomery started a general contracting business. He held positions in several organizations, including president of the Greater Melbourne chapter of the NAACP. He also spoke about his career at events around the country, among them a 2010 panel discussion at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington with, among others, astronaut Leland Melvin, one of 14 African Americans who have gone into space.

“I’ll tell you,” Montgomery told Melvin afterward, according to Paul. “You astronauts, you’re the bravest people I ever met.”

“No, sir,” Melvin replied. “I heard your story out there. You are the bravest person I ever met.”