America Is for Everybody
America Is for Everybody,” proclaimed the US Department of Labor brochure that landed on Katherine Johnson’s desk in May 1963. On the cover, a black boy of eight or nine, barefoot and dressed in a striped short-sleeved shirt and worn dungarees, sat on the ties of a dusty railroad track, his apparent circumstances and open-faced glower a rebuke to the promise of the title. Inside, President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson waxed poetic in statements about the Negro’s epic hundred-year journey up from slavery. Photos of black employees who “occupied positions of responsibility” at NASA, all of them involved with the space program, accompanied the text. At NASA’s High-Speed Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base—the place where pilot Chuck Yeager first cracked through the sound barrier in 1947—engineer John Perry manned an X-15 simulator. Mathematicians Ernie Hairston and Paul Williams conferred on “orbital elements, capsule position, and impact points” at Goddard. One picture showed Katherine Johnson sitting at her desk at 1244, pencil in hand, “analyzing lunar trajectories and computing trip time to the Moon and return to Earth by a space vehicle.” The document, created by the Labor Department to commemorate the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, certainly also served as another propaganda tool for the US government to improve its image on racial relations. What could provide greater evidence of America’s growing commitment to democracy for all than the hard-at-work photos of Katherine Johnson and the seven other NASA employees—all men—profiled in the booklet? The resonances and dissonances of the images in the book were sharpest there at Langley, ten miles from the point where African feet first stepped ashore in English North America in 1619, less than that from the sprawling oak tree where Negroes of the Virginia Peninsula convened for the first southern reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. In a place with deep and binding tethers to the past, Katherine Johnson, a black woman, was midwifing the future.
Katherine wasn’t the only one working with purpose in 1963: so was the grand old man of the civil rights movement, A. Philip Randolph. As Gordon Cooper brought Project Mercury to a successful conclusion in 1963 with a twenty-two-orbit flight, Randolph made plans for another march on Washington. Unlike 1941’s ghost rally—the march that never happened, the impetus for Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 opening federal jobs to Negro employees—Randolph was going to see this one through. Working with activist Bayard Rustin, allied with Martin Luther King Jr., Randolph brought together a group that would come to be seen as the pantheon of leaders from the most energetic phase of the civil rights movement, including Dorothy Height, John Lewis, Daisy Bates, and Roy Wilkins.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was held August 28, 1963, attracting as many as three hundred thousand people to the nation’s capital. Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez all took to the stage, musical witnesses to the idealism, hope, and persistence of a movement that drew its strength from its desire to force America to live up to its founding principles. Marian Anderson sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” her rich contralto flowing like honey over the massive gathering, mesmerizing the crowd just as she had Dorothy Vaughan and her young children at Hampton Institute in 1946. The morning schedule was interrupted with news that was cause for grief, reflection, and a kind of sober hope: ninety-five-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois had died early that morning in Ghana, the country he had adopted as his home after battling the State Department to keep his American passport. From his birth in 1868, Du Bois’ life bridged the years of Reconstruction and the twentieth-century movement. Mary MacLeod Bethune, A. Philip Randolph, Charles Hamilton Houston, and so many more had built their life’s work on Du Bois’ foundation. Now, it was time to pass the torch again.
Thirty-four-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ascended the platform to address the crowd, easing into his prepared remarks. Then Mahalia Jackson, sitting behind King on the podium, shouted out “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” King pushed his written speech aside, gripped the lectern with both hands, and gave his country seventeen of the most memorable minutes in its history. There was America before King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and there was America after; King’s message would ever after remind all the citizens of the nation that the Negro dream and the American dream were one and the same. Backstage at the march at the end of the day, seventy-four-year-old A. Philip Randolph was speechless, the tears in his eyes the only adequate expression of what it meant to him to see this day come to pass.
It’s doubtful that Randolph ever knew how directly the 1941 March on Washington influenced the group of people whose work was the lifeblood of America’s space program, but back at the Langley Research Center, a handful of black women could testify to the connection. “Dear Mrs. Vaughan: Our records indicate that you recently completed 20 years of Federal Government service,” wrote Langley’s director, Floyd Thompson, in the summer of 1963. A gold-and-enamel lapel pin adorned with a ruby was to be bestowed upon her at the center’s annual awards ceremony, which recognized employees hitting milestones of service with the center.