Young, Gifted, and Black
October 5, 1957, was the kind of day that never failed to delight Christine Mann, a rising senior at the Allen School for girls in Asheville, North Carolina. While the rest of her boarding school classmates still clung to the last precious moments of sleep, Christine left her dorm and headed to her daily job at the library, setting out the newspapers and magazines that the school received each day. As she walked across the campus, the world moved from shadow to sun, the purple-blue peaks that stood watch over the town shrugging off the mist that lent the Great Smoky Mountains their name. The light of day revealed fall’s early brilliance, chartreuse, gold, and orange leaves eclipsing the dark green of summer. The scarlet of the maple trees appeared in just a few brilliant spots; in a month’s time, the red would spread like a fever, dominating the landscape.
Christine collected the periodicals left in the newspaper box and unlocked the library door. Her daily job of setting out the newspapers was simple but came with responsibility, as it meant that the faculty entrusted her with the keys to the library. The quiet time she spent alone there, a modest brick building filled with walnut furniture and fragrant with the must of old books, was the best part of her job. Every morning before the library filled with students, she perused the newspapers, taking in the events of the previous day.
Since the beginning of the school year, newspapers around the country had bled with coverage of the crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. Nine black teenagers trying to integrate all-white Central High School had turned the state’s capital city into a military battleground. At the command of the governor, Orval Faubus, the Arkansas National Guard had been called out to prevent the black students from entering the school. Three days later President Eisenhower trumped the state, federalizing the state’s guard and sending in US Army troops to escort the nine through the school’s doors. The crisis unfolded over days, each morning a new installment, and always accompanied by photos that were as difficult to look at as they were to look away from: images of black students Christine’s age, their arms heavy with books, struggling to maintain composure as a phalanx of military men protected them from the screaming, spitting, bottle-throwing white crowd that surrounded them. All for wanting the key to what Central High School and the all-white schools across the South had kept locked away from black students like her. Christine allowed herself to walk in their shoes for a moment, wondering how she would deal with the taunts, the bottles, the epithets, and the humiliation. It would come as a relief to finish the article and find herself back in the haven of Allen’s library.
As Christine read the Little Rock coverage, so did the rest of the country—and the world. In Europe, and in the capitals of Asia and Africa, people devoured the particulars of the Little Rock crisis. Photos of the black students being threatened with violence for the pursuit of education, along with the details of lynchings, subjugations, and other injustices issuing forth from the South, undermined the United States’ standing in the postwar competition for allies. No matter how hard the United States tried, despite the best efforts of its diplomatic corps and its propaganda machine, it seemed impossible to divert the eyes of the world from the ugliness unfolding in Little Rock and all of its implications for the legitimacy of American democracy. That is, until a Soviet gambit changed the conversation.
“Red-Made Satellite Flashes Across US,” printed the Daily Press in Newport News. “Sphere Tracked in 4 Crossings Over US,” ran the New York Times headline. It took no time for the mysterious name to pass from Soviet mouths to American ears: Sputnik. Radio Moscow announced a timetable, revealing exactly where the satellite would fly over Earth, and when. Christine had fallen asleep in one world and awakened in another. October 4, 1957, was the midnight of the postwar era, and the end of the naive hope that the conflict that was ended by an atomic bomb would give way to an era of global peace. The morning of October 5 was the official dawn of the space age, the public debut of man’s competition to break free of the bonds of terrestrial gravity and travel, along with all his belligerent tendencies, beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
That morning of October 5, absorbing the impact of the initial headlines, Christine experienced a mix of emotions. Fear, certainly: she was just three years old when a B-29 Superfortress dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, forever linking the name Hiroshima with annihilation. She and her generation were the first in the history of the world to come of age with the possibility of human extinction as a by-product of human ingenuity. As hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union increased, it began to feel like a probability. Black-and-yellow triangular fallout shelter signs proliferated in public spaces, pointing the way to underground refuge from radiation. Christine dutifully submitted to civil defense drills at school, ducking and covering under her desk, practicing the maneuver that adults said would protect her and her classmates from that telltale flash “brighter than the sun.”
While students and teachers hoped their desks and basements would stand up to the power of a nuclear blast, the country’s leaders also prepared for a possible attack—in high style. In one of the Cold War’s most unbelievable episodes, in 1959 President Eisenhower authorized the construction of a secret bunker deep under the Greenbrier hotel, the resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where Katherine Goble, her father, Joshua Coleman, and Dorothy Vaughan’s husband, Howard, had all worked. Dubbed “Project Greek Island,” in the event of an attack on Washington, DC, senators and congressional representatives were to be evacuated from the nation’s capital by railroad and delivered to the Greenbrier’s bunker. There was no room in the bunker for spouses or children, but it was stocked with champagne and steaks for the politicians themselves. The luxury underground fortress remained operational and ready to receive its political guests until a 1992 exposé by Washington Post reporter Ted Gup blew the operation’s cover.
Initially, President Eisenhower tried to pooh-pooh the Russians’ “small ball in the air” as an insignificant achievement, but the American people would have none of it. Sputnik, some experts declared, was nothing less than a technological Pearl Harbor.