Not everyone shared Cronkite’s exuberance. All that money—and for what? many wondered. So much money spent so that between 1969 and 1972 a dozen white men could take the express train to a lifeless world? Why, Negro women and men could barely go to the next state without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, and service stations that wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the bathroom. Now they wanted to talk about a white man on the Moon? “A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the Moon,” rapped performer Gil Scott-Heron in a song that stormed the airwaves that year.
At the beginning of the decade, the space program and the civil rights movement had shared a similar optimism, a certain idealism about American democracy and the country’s newfound drive to distribute the blessings of democracy to all its citizens. On the cusp of the 1970s, as the space program approached its zenith, the civil rights movement—or rather many of the goals it had set out to achieve—were beginning to feel as if they were in a state of suspended animation. There were real and shining triumphs, certainly: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 pried Jim Crow’s legal grip off the country’s workplaces, modes of transportation, public spaces, and voting box. But the economic and social mobility that had been held hostage by that legal discrimination remained stuck.
In the days leading up to the launch, two hundred protesters, led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, made their way to Cape Kennedy. Abernathy was Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest collaborator and had inherited the mantle of his Poor People’s Campaign, the second phase of the civil rights movement. Abernathy and his fellow activists came to the launch site riding a mule train, challenging NASA’s administrator, Tom Paine, on the worthiness of the space program when the poor and dispossessed in Watts and Detroit and rural Appalachia could barely put food on the table—assuming they had a house to put the table in. The Housing Rights Act of 1968, making it illegal to discriminate in the housing industry based on race, had lingered in Congress for years, vehemently opposed by legislators both in the North and the South. The bill only made it over the finish line in the wake of the 1968 assassination of Dr. King.
Katherine Johnson certainly knew all about the housing issue. Discrimination in housing remained the standard, but postwar economic mobility had given families like hers and Dorothy Vaughan’s the means to move out of once-vibrant developments like Newsome Park and into comfortable, leafy, all-black subdivisions. The exit of professional families ruptured the connection that the less fortunate had to the world of college and middle-class jobs. Newsome Park and the hundreds of neighborhoods like it around the country became increasingly volatile, desperate islands where housing, schooling, and every other state-supplied service were left to deteriorate.
The decision to prioritize a victory in space over problems on Earth was the most widespread criticism against the space program. But even those voices in the black community who expressed admiration for the astronauts, who supported the program and its mission, took NASA to the woodshed for its lack of black faces. No black television commentators, no black administrators, no black faces in Mission Control, and most of all, no black astronauts. Blacks were still smarting over the perceived mistreatment of Ed Dwight, an astronaut trainee who was given his walking papers before he could even report for duty.
Though groups like ACD and Reentry Physics still employed several of the former West Computers, Katherine and others found themselves the only black employees in their branch. They were maybe less visible at work now that segregation had been ended. But they were perhaps more invisible professionally in the black community. The white NASA folks tended to live in enclaves, carpooling together and barbecuing together and sending their kids to school together. They talked about work and imported the hierarchies and nuances of their work lives into their neighborhoods.
The black NASA people spread out among other black professionals, where they were better known as the sorority sister or the member of the church choir or the diehard Hampton Institute alum who never missed a football game. Their neighbors might know they worked at NASA but have no concept of exactly what they did, or how close they were to the headline-grabbing events of the day. Because of the overwhelmingly white public face of the space program, the black engineers, scientists, and mathematicians who were deeply involved with the space race nevertheless lived in its shadows, even within the black community.
Katherine was sensitive to the disconnect. She, like Mary Jackson and many of Langley’s other black employees, had worked hard for years to cultivate interest in math and science and space through the networks of their sororities and alumni associations and churches, with mixed results. In 1966, however, something had happened that looked like it might give them a tailwind.
Star Trek landed in American homes on September 8, 1966, an NBC network prime-time program. While NASA and the Project Gemini astronauts worked their way through twelve missions in the 1960s, in the fictional 2260s, the starship Enterprise set off from Earth on a peacekeeping and deep-space exploration mission, manned by a multinational, multiracial, mixed-gender crew. The corps, led by the suave, unflappable Captain James T. Kirk, included natives of an advanced United Earth, its history of poverty and war now in the past. Enemies in a former Earth Age labored side by side as colleagues and fellow citizens. Chekov, the Russian ensign; Sulu, the Japanese American helmsman; and the half-human, half-Vulcan first officer, Mr. Spock, added an interstellar touch of diversity. And there, on the bridge, a vision in a red minidress opened viewers’ minds to what a truly democratic future might look like. Lieutenant Uhura, a black woman and proud citizen of the United States of Africa, served as the Enterprise’s communications officer.
Lieutenant Uhura, portrayed by the actress Nichelle Nichols, executed her duties with aplomb, managing the ship’s communications with other ships and planets. When the first season ended in 1967, Nichols tendered her resignation to the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, so that she could spend more time tending to her Broadway career. The producer, who wanted to keep Nichols in the cast, refused her resignation, asking her to take the weekend to mull it over.
That weekend Nichols attended a celebrity NAACP civil rights fundraiser in Los Angeles. One of the event’s coordinators let her know that “her greatest fan,” a fellow attendee, wanted to meet her. Expecting some eager, socially awkward adolescent, Nichols instead found herself face-to-face with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: King was a Trekkie! It was the only show that he and his wife, Coretta, allowed their children to watch, and he never missed an episode. Nichols thanked him for his effusive praise before mentioning almost casually that she had decided to leave the show. The words had barely escaped her lips before the Reverend interrupted her cold.
“You can’t leave the show,” King said to Nichols. “We are there because you are there.” Black people have been imagined in the future, he continued, emphasizing to the actress how important and groundbreaking a fact that was. Furthermore, he told her, he had studied the Starfleet’s command structure and believed that it mirrored that of the US Air Force, making Uhura—a black woman!—fourth in command of the ship.