NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement ed. by Brian C. Odom and Stephen P. Waring (review)

The volume NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement, coedited by Brian C. Odom and Stephen P. Waring, brings together robust literatures on two key topics in twentieth-century United States history: civil rights activism aiming to dismantle white supremacy and space exploration agendas working to widen humanity’s reach beyond the planet. Through eleven stimulating essays, the volume convincingly maintains that the two processes were, in fact, deeply entangled—materially, ideologically, and geographically. U.S. politicians ensured that the massive space infrastructure would be built in the American South, a region that drew national attention and increased censure for its stark racial inequality, even as civil rights activists demanded the recognition of dignity alongside the redistribution of resources to counteract systemic discrimination in housing, education, and employment. Many African American activists exploited the inherent contradictions in the national space ambitions within the Cold War context: they punctured holes both in the United States’ Cold War propaganda aimed at courting allies in the global South against the Soviet Union and in the government’s claim to lack necessary resources to meaningfully address racial inequality on Earth. As chapter 3 by David Miguel Molina and P. J. Blount points out, the “lunar topos” trope effectively called to mind how “if NASA can land on the Moon, then why can’t the U.S. state eradicate poverty” and other forms of racial inequality (p. 50).

The essays dive into this question in different ways while also grappling with the challenge set out by the influential work of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, who penned the foreword. Hall’s “Long Civil Rights Movement” framework pushes for longer, broader, and deeper histories of the social revolution for racial equality that is so often misremembered and misrepresented as a narrow struggle from Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Hall applauds the effort among the contributors to apply lessons from her framework to the space historiography, including a “self-critical” approach “aimed at strengthening key governmental institutions by confronting their past failures and their efforts to live up to their most lofty missions” (p. xiii). Odom, Waring, and other contributors exert similar efforts to expand the time line of these intersecting histories and widen the cast of characters involved in shaping them—building from the interest in “hidden figures” treated in Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York, 2016) and in the 2016 Hollywood film. Margaret A. Weitekamp’s state-of-the-field essay indexes these developments in recent decades while also flagging horizons for further research: investigating new biographies, different technologies, and international contexts.

Working at least partly in these registers, the individual chapters reflect on particulars of the broader story, asking who shaped the space endeavor, how people imagined and forged a relationship between civil rights and the space race, and how different technologies and nations shaped it. Molina and Blount analyze the political work of universalizing gestures to “mankind” in the face of particular exclusions in U.S. society. Brenda Plummer marshals considerable evidence highlighting how racial inequality took new forms in the wartime defense and space industries that became just the latest in a series of rebuilding periods associated with the “New South.” Narrowing in on the seemingly exceptional case of Huntsville, Alabama, Matthew L. Downs shows this effort playing out in a place that sought to distance itself from Governor George Wallace by insisting (if failing to follow through) on municipal and organizational commitments to equal employment opportunities. Turning to the international context, Cathleen Lewis and Keith Snedegar examine the Cold War battle to put the first Black astronaut in space and the push to defund the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) satellite tracking station participating in...