For the third time in the century, the United States found itself trailing technologically during a period of rising international tension. On the cusp of World War I, the country’s inadequate supply of aircraft had given birth to the NACA. The mediocre American aircraft industry of the 1930s rose to preeminence because of the challenge of World War II. What would it take for the country to prevail against this latest threat? Sputnik was proof, American policymakers assumed, that the Soviet Union had intercontinental ballistic missiles—many of them, hundreds perhaps, with the power to hurl an atomic weapon at US cities. A new term began to make the rounds in policy circles, the press, and private conversation: the missile gap.
Black newspapers and their readers wasted no time in making the link between America’s inadequacy in space and the dreadful conditions facing many black students in the South. “While we were forming mobs to drive an Autherine Lucy [the black woman who integrated the University of Alabama in 1956] from an Alabama campus, the Russians were compelling ALL children to attend the best possible schools,” opined the Chicago Defender. Until the United States cured its “Mississippiitis”—that disease of segregation, violence, and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption—the paper declared, it would never merit the position of world leadership. An editorial in the Cleveland Call and Post echoed that sentiment. “Who can say that it was not the institution of the Jim Crow School that has deprived this nation of the black scientist who might have solved the technological kinks delaying our satellite launching?” wrote the paper’s editor and publisher, Charles H. Loeb.
But segregation couldn’t restrain Christine’s curiosity. Along with the anxiety that the Russians’ accomplishment provoked, Christine felt a sense of wonder, even a thrill, to see the skies above open so wide. The world beyond Earth had always been a mysterious place, silent, dark, and cold, the realm of magic and gods. Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist granted amnesty by the United States after World War II in exchange for helping the country build a dominant missile program, functioned as the nation’s head space cheerleader. A series of articles that von Braun contributed to Collier’s magazine in 1952—“Man Will Conquer Space Soon!”—presented space travel as the natural next step for the restless inhabitants of the Earth. American television viewers tuned in religiously to science fiction television programs like Space Patrol and Tales of Tomorrow. But Sputnik was anything but fiction, and it was happening today.
Christine also took umbrage at the Soviets’ excursion into the heavens. From her core came the desire to rise up to meet the gauntlet they had thrown down. She was an American, after all, and the Russians were the enemy! We can’t let them beat us, she thought, echoing the sentiments of virtually every American citizen. It would take time for her to work it out, but somehow, even in those first moments of learning of the Soviet accomplishment, she believed that this was her fight too.
The Soviet Union also thought it was Christine’s fight. Four days after launching Sputnik into orbit, Radio Moscow announced the addition of one more city to its timetable of destinations that would be overflown by their satellite: Little Rock, Arkansas.
Three years earlier, before Christine’s parents had enrolled her as a student at the Allen School, another headline-making event had intruded upon her daily life. On May 17, 1954, she was still enrolled at the Winchester Avenue School in Monroe, North Carolina, her hometown. The principal of the school stepped into her eighth-grade classroom, interrupting the lesson with an announcement. “I just came to let you all know that the Supreme Court just ruled on Brown v. Board of Education, and you will be going to school with white students in the future,” he said. The same report that sparked conversation among Katherine Goble and her colleagues left Christine and her classmates agape.
Located twenty-five miles down a winding road from Charlotte, Monroe, population seven thousand, was typical small-town South. Everyone in the Newtown neighborhood, where Christine lived, from the doctor to the street sweeper to the teachers at the Winchester Avenue School, was black. Most of the black men in Monroe earned their living working for the railroad line that ran through the town. Black women held jobs in the Monroe Cotton Mill or as domestic servants. Virtually everyone and everything white in Monroe, including the white school and white residents, such as future US senator Jesse Helms, son of a former fire chief, existed across the dozen or so railroad tracks that sliced through the town like a combine. How will we, thought the students at Winchester—with our rickety desks and dog-eared secondhand textbooks, our poorly equipped to nonexistent science laboratories—how could we compete with the white kids from the other side of the tracks?
The principal spoke with such gravity that Christine and her classmates worried they might have to pack up their books and decamp for the other side of town at that very moment. Segregation was the only world they had known. Discrimination was the force that concentrated them in Newtown, that enrolled them in the Winchester school, that sent Christine’s parents to be educated at Knoxville College rather than the University of Tennessee. Discrimination they had come to expect, if not accept. But the prospect of integration planted a new fear in the souls of Christine and fellow members of the Brown v. Board of Ed generation: that as blacks, they would not be good enough—smart enough—to sit next to whites in a classroom and succeed.
Christine’s parents, Noah and Desma Mann (unrelated to West Computing’s Miriam Mann), were the products of the same Negro institutions and the same values—“education, honesty, hard work, and character”—that formed their contemporary, Dorothy Vaughan. In the early years of their marriage, the Manns traveled around Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina, moving from one teaching job to another. Desma left teaching to care for what would grow to become a family of five children. Noah Mann, eager to make enough money to cover his household’s costs and provide for his children’s future, eventually took a more lucrative job as a sales rep based out of the Charlotte office of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company, the same successful black-owned company that had underwritten the home loans of black home buyers in Hampton, including in Mimosa Crescent, Katherine Goble’s neighborhood.