NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement

NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement PDF Author: Brian C. Odom
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
American Astronautical Society Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award As NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969, many African American leaders protested the billions of dollars used to fund “space joyrides” rather than help tackle poverty, inequality, and discrimination at home. This volume examines such tensions as well as the ways in which NASA’s goal of space exploration aligned with the cause of racial equality. It provides new insights into the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad.  Essays explore how thousands of jobs created during the space race offered new opportunities for minorities in places like Huntsville, Alabama, while at the same time segregation at NASA’s satellite tracking station in South Africa led to that facility’s closure. Other topics include black skepticism toward NASA’s framing of space exploration as “for the benefit of all mankind,” NASA’s track record in hiring women and minorities, and the efforts of black activists to increase minority access to education that would lead to greater participation in the space program. The volume also addresses how to best find and preserve archival evidence of African American contributions that are missing from narratives of space exploration.  NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement offers important lessons from history as today’s activists grapple with the distance between social movements like Black Lives Matter and scientific ambitions such as NASA’s mission to Mars.  Contributors: P.J. Blount | Jonathan Coopersmith | Matthew L. Downs | Eric Fenrich | Cathleen Lewis | Cyrus Mody | David S. Molina | Brian C. Odom | Brenda Plummer | Christina K. Roberts | Keith Snedegar | Stephen P. Waring | Margaret A. Weitekamp  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement

NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement PDF Author: Brian C. Odom
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
American Astronautical Society Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award As NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969, many African American leaders protested the billions of dollars used to fund “space joyrides” rather than help tackle poverty, inequality, and discrimination at home. This volume examines such tensions as well as the ways in which NASA’s goal of space exploration aligned with the cause of racial equality. It provides new insights into the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad.  Essays explore how thousands of jobs created during the space race offered new opportunities for minorities in places like Huntsville, Alabama, while at the same time segregation at NASA’s satellite tracking station in South Africa led to that facility’s closure. Other topics include black skepticism toward NASA’s framing of space exploration as “for the benefit of all mankind,” NASA’s track record in hiring women and minorities, and the efforts of black activists to increase minority access to education that would lead to greater participation in the space program. The volume also addresses how to best find and preserve archival evidence of African American contributions that are missing from narratives of space exploration.  NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement offers important lessons from history as today’s activists grapple with the distance between social movements like Black Lives Matter and scientific ambitions such as NASA’s mission to Mars.  Contributors: P.J. Blount | Jonathan Coopersmith | Matthew L. Downs | Eric Fenrich | Cathleen Lewis | Cyrus Mody | David S. Molina | Brian C. Odom | Brenda Plummer | Christina K. Roberts | Keith Snedegar | Stephen P. Waring | Margaret A. Weitekamp  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

We Could Not Fail

We Could Not Fail PDF Author: Richard Paul
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292772491
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty. We Could Not Fail tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of how shooting for the stars helped to overcome segregation on earth. Richard Paul and Steven Moss profile ten pioneer African American space workers whose stories illustrate the role NASA and the space program played in promoting civil rights. They recount how these technicians, mathematicians, engineers, and an astronaut candidate surmounted barriers to move, in some cases literally, from the cotton fields to the launching pad. The authors vividly describe what it was like to be the sole African American in a NASA work group and how these brave and determined men also helped to transform Southern society by integrating colleges, patenting new inventions, holding elective office, and reviving and governing defunct towns. Adding new names to the roster of civil rights heroes and a new chapter to the story of space exploration, We Could Not Fail demonstrates how African Americans broke the color barrier by competing successfully at the highest level of American intellectual and technological achievement.

Apollo in the Age of Aquarius

Apollo in the Age of Aquarius PDF Author: Neil M. Maher
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674977823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Winner of the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award A Bloomberg View Must-Read Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year “A substance-rich, original on every page exploration of how the space program interacted with the environmental movement, and also with the peace and ‘Whole Earth’ movements of the 1960s.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock. This lively and original account of the space race makes the case that the conjunction of these two era-defining events was not entirely coincidental. With its lavishly funded mandate to put a man on the moon, the Apollo mission promised to reinvigorate a country that had lost its way. But a new breed of activists denounced it as a colossal waste of resources needed to solve pressing problems at home. Neil Maher reveals that there were actually unexpected synergies between the space program and the budding environmental, feminist and civil rights movements as photos from space galvanized environmentalists, women challenged the astronauts’ boys club and NASA’s engineers helped tackle inner city housing problems. Against a backdrop of Saturn V moonshots and Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius brings the cultural politics of the space race back down to planet Earth. “As a child in the 1960s, I was aware of both NASA’s achievements and social unrest, but unaware of the clashes between those two historical currents. Maher [captures] the maelstrom of the 1960s and 1970s as it collided with NASA’s program for human spaceflight.” —George Zamka, Colonel USMC (Ret.) and former NASA astronaut “NASA and Woodstock may now seem polarized, but this illuminating, original chronicle...traces multiple crosscurrents between them.” —Nature

In This Land of Plenty

In This Land of Plenty PDF Author: Benjamin Talton
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251474
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
On August 7, 1989, Congressman Mickey Leland departed on a flight from Addis Ababa, with his thirteen-member delegation of Ethiopian and American relief workers and policy analysts, bound for Ethiopia's border with Sudan. This was Leland's seventh official humanitarian mission in his nearly decade-long drive to transform U.S. policies toward Africa to conform to his black internationalist vision of global cooperation, antiracism, and freedom from hunger. Leland's flight never arrived at its destination. The plane crashed, with no survivors. When Leland embarked on that delegation, he was a forty-four-year-old, deeply charismatic, fiercely compassionate, black, radical American. He was also an elected Democratic representative of Houston's largely African American and Latino Eighteenth Congressional District. Above all, he was a self-proclaimed "citizen of humanity." Throughout the 1980s, Leland and a small group of former radical-activist African American colleagues inside and outside Congress exerted outsized influence to elevate Africa's significance in American foreign affairs and to move the United States from its Cold War orientation toward a foreign policy devoted to humanitarianism, antiracism, and moral leadership. Their internationalism defined a new era of black political engagement with Africa. In This Land of Plenty presents Leland as the embodiment of larger currents in African American politics at the end of the twentieth century. But a sober look at his aspirations shows the successes and shortcomings of domestic radicalism and aspirations of politically neutral humanitarianism during the 1980s, and the extent to which the decade was a major turning point in U.S. relations with the African continent. Exploring the links between political activism, electoral politics, and international affairs, Benjamin Talton not only details Leland's political career but also examines African Americans' successes and failures in influencing U.S. foreign policy toward African and other Global South countries.

Ain't Scared of Your Jail

Ain't Scared of Your Jail PDF Author: Zoe A Colley
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 081304264X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Imprisonment became a badge of honor for many protestors during the civil rights movement. With the popularization of expressions such as "jail-no-bail" and "jail-in," civil rights activists sought to transform arrest and imprisonment from something to be feared to a platform for the cause. Beyond Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letters from the Birmingham Jail," there has been little discussion on the incarceration experiences of civil rights activists. In her debut book, Zoe Colley does what no historian has done before by following civil rights activists inside the southern jails and prisons to explore their treatment and the different responses that civil rights organizations had to mass arrest and imprisonment. Colley focuses on the shift in philosophical and strategic responses of civil rights protestors from seeing jail as something to be avoided to seeing it as a way to further the cause. Imprisonment became a way to expose the evils of segregation, and highlighted to the rest of American society the injustice of southern racism. By drawing together the narratives of many individuals and organizations, Colley paints a clearer picture how the incarceration of civil rights activists helped shape the course of the movement. She places imprisonment at the forefront of civil rights history and shows how these new attitudes toward arrest continue to impact contemporary society and shape strategies for civil disobedience.

From Sit-Ins to SNCC

From Sit-Ins to SNCC PDF Author: Iwan Morgan
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813043646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
In the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the historic sit-in at Woolworth's lunch counter by four North Carolina A&T college students, From Sit-Ins to SNCC brings together the work of leading civil rights scholars to offer a new and groundbreaking perspective on student-oriented activism in the 1960s. The eight substantive essays in this collection not only delineate the role of SNCC over the course of the struggle for African American civil rights but also offer an updated perspective on the development and impact of the sit-in movement in light of newly released papers from the estate of Martin Luther King Jr., the FBI, and MI-5. The contributors provide novel analyses of such topics as the dynamics of grassroots student civil rights activism, the organizational and cultural changes within SNCC, the impact of the sit-ins on the white South, the evolution of black nationalist ideology within the student movement, works of the fiction written by movement activists, and the changing international outlook of student-organized civil rights movements.

Race in the American South

Race in the American South PDF Author: David Brown
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748628266
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
The issue of race has indelibly shaped the history of the United States. Nowhere has the drama of race relations been more powerfully staged than in the American South. This book charts the turbulent course of southern race relations from the colonial origins of the plantation system to the maturation of slavery in the nineteenth century, through the rise of a new racial order during the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the civil rights revolution of the twentieth century.While the history of race in the southern states has been shaped by a basic struggle between black and white, the authors show how other forces such as class and gender have complicated the colour line. They distinguish clearly between ideas about race, mostly written and disseminated by intellectuals and politicians, and their reception by ordinary southerners, both black and white. As a result, readers are presented with a broad, over-arching view of race in the American South throughout its chequered history.Key Features:*racial issues are the key area of interest for those who study the American South*race is the driving engine of Southern history*unique in its focus on race*broad coverage - origins of the plantation system to the situation in the South today

Between Washington and Du Bois

Between Washington and Du Bois PDF Author: Reginald K. Ellis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813056609
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
James E. Shepard of North Carolina, like Booker T. Washington in Alabama, was one of the most influential African Americans in his state. This study is more than a biography of an influential African American, but an analytical study of a black leader during the age of Jim Crow in the South.

Managing NASA in the Apollo Era

Managing NASA in the Apollo Era PDF Author: Arnold S. Levine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Government publications
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description


My Remarkable Journey

My Remarkable Journey PDF Author: Katherine Johnson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062897691
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The remarkable woman at heart of the smash New York Times bestseller and Oscar-winning film Hidden Figures tells the full story of her life, including what it took to work at NASA, help land the first man on the moon, and live through a century of turmoil and change. In 2015, at the age of 97, Katherine Johnson became a global celebrity. President Barack Obama awarded her the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor—for her pioneering work as a mathematician on NASA’s first flights into space. Her contributions to America’s space program were celebrated in a blockbuster and Academy-award nominated movie. In this memoir, Katherine shares her personal journey from child prodigy in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia to NASA human computer. In her life after retirement, she served as a beacon of light for her family and community alike. Her story is centered around the basic tenets of her life—no one is better than you, education is paramount, and asking questions can break barriers. The memoir captures the many facets of this unique woman: the curious “daddy’s girl,” pioneering professional, and sage elder. This multidimensional portrait is also the record of a century of racial history that reveals the influential role educators at segregated schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities played in nurturing the dreams of trailblazers like Katherine. The author pays homage to her mentor—the African American professor who inspired her to become a research mathematician despite having his own dream crushed by racism. Infused with the uplifting wisdom of a woman who handled great fame with genuine humility and great tragedy with enduring hope, My Remarkable Journey ultimately brings into focus a determined woman who navigated tough racial terrain with soft-spoken grace—and the unrelenting grit required to make history and inspire future generations.