Credit...By Walter J. Brown Media Archives, University Of Georgia Libraries

Past Tense

Ed Dwight Was Set to Be the First Black Astronaut. Here’s Why That Never Happened.

For a brief moment, the civil rights movement and the space race came together.

The bone-rattling trip to the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere used to require a steady hand, a powerful jet and the precision of an airman ready to dodge enemy fire.

The dangers were immense. You could black out. Gravitational force could pull blood from your eyes, rendering you sightless. Or you could merely end up in a flat spin and plummet to Earth without ever getting a good view of what lay beyond it.

It was just the sort of challenge that a chiseled 29-year-old aspiring astronaut named Ed Dwight was after.

In 1962, he piloted an F-104 Starfighter, essentially a chrome javelin, with wings so small as to seem gestural, designed to go very fast and very high, ideally in a straight line. A massive engine took up one end; the other was occupied by the pilot.

As he thundered toward the sun, air roared against the fuselage and Dwight felt the familiar lurch of passing through the sound barrier. On cue at 80,000 feet, as the bruised edge of the atmosphere drew closer, Dwight cut the fuel to the engine.

He became a mere leaf, floating along the thinnest layers of Earth’s air. In front of him spread the curvature of the planet, with the black sea of space overhead.

“The first time you do this it’s like, Oh my God, what the hell? Look at this,” recalled Dwight, now 85. “You can actually see this beautiful blue layer that the Earth is encased in. It’s absolutely stunning.”

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Ed Dwight outside his studio in Denver. July 1, 2019.Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times
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Dwight posing with an F-104 Starfighter, which he flew in training at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Circa March 1963.Credit...George Brich/Valley Times Photo Collection, via Los Angeles Public Library
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Dwight in flight training at the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards. Sept. 6, 1963.Credit...Don Cravens/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images, Courtesy National Archives photo no. 63-2936

Dwight only made a handful of flights like this, but all told he spent 9,000 hours in the air. A former altar boy turned airman, he was among the pilots training to become astronauts at the Aerospace Research Pilot School, helmed by Chuck Yeager at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Dwight had the drive, the experience and the solid family back story of all his peers. Unlike every other pilot in the program, he was black.

Two grand stories that America tells itself about the 1960s are the civil rights movement and the space race. They are mostly rendered as separate narratives, happening at the same time but on different courses. In the 5-foot-4 figure of Ed Dwight, they came together for a transitory moment.

The Kennedy administration, a supporter of civil rights, became Dwight’s champion. The black press, eager to mark milestones by lionizing barrier breakers, splashed his face across front pages. Dwight personified American progress at a time when the country was eager to prove that while Russia had beaten us into orbit, the United States was the true superpower. It was a high-stakes contest of Cold War optics.

But the top of the California sky was the closest Dwight would ever get to space. He went from being a prospective astronaut to working on a series of obscure assignments, dealing a major blow to America’s early attempts to integrate the ranks of its space pioneers.

Eight years after Dwight piloted that plane, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the lunar surface, leaving a plaque that read: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” But what if a black person had landed on the moon with them, uttered the words “one small step for man” and set that plaque in place? What kind of leap for mankind would that have been?

To Charles Bolden, a former astronaut who became the first African-American administrator of NASA in 2009, there is no doubt. “To see an Ed Dwight walking across the platform getting into an Apollo capsule would have been mind-boggling in those days,” he said. “It would’ve had an incredible impact.”

It took two decades after Dwight became an astronaut trainee before a black American would go to space.

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Ed Dwight trained to be the first black astronaut, but it never happened. Here’s the story of a historic step that NASA didn’t take.
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Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Almost Moon Man

Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Kelly Prime and Clare Toeniskoetter, with help from Eric Krupke, and edited by Larissa Anderson and Wendy Dorr

Ed Dwight trained to be the first black astronaut, but it never happened. Here’s the story of a historic step that NASA didn’t take.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

There are two stories from the 1960s that America likes to tell about itself, the civil rights movement and the race to reach outer space. Today: The brief moment when those stories collided.

It’s Sunday, July 21.

Emily Ludolph, how did you come upon this story?

emily ludolph

So last fall I’m down in the morgue, which is this massive room three stories underground stacked with filing cabinets full of the photo archives of The New York Times. And it’s not just me down there. It is a scanning team that is digitizing all these photos. The Obituaries team is pulling files on whoever they’re writing about that day. And I was over in the Science section going through these manila envelopes, and I pull one out, and it’s stuffed full of images. And the people who have folders down in the morgue are incredibly well-known people. They are Eleanor Roosevelt and Diego Rivera and Donna Karan, and the name on this folder is Ed Dwight, and I’ve never heard of that name before. So I open it up, and it’s full of these beautiful, black-and-white, glossy photographs of this handsome African-American man. He’s in a flight suit. He’s being photographed next to these big 1960s jet fighter planes. And I’m thinking to myself, who is this guy and why does he have this huge file? So I go back upstairs, and I start going through the digitized archives of The Times, and one of the first headlines that comes up about him is “Negro Astronaut Aiming for Moon.”

archived recording

The president of the United States. [APPLAUSE]

[music]

archived recording (john f. kennedy)

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

archived recording 1

Astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin and Michael Collins, the three men who will make the next and most historic round trip to the moon.

archived recording 2

T minus 10, 9, 8. We have a go for main engine start. We have main engine start. 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, liftoff.

archived recording 3

Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston, over.

archived recording 4

O.K. Neil, we see you coming down the ladder now.

archived recording 5

Roger, we copy.

archived recording (neil armstrong)

It takes a pretty good little jump. That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

emily ludolph

And I’m wondering, what is this guy’s story, and how does it fit into the story of the journey to the moon that we all know?

michael barbaro

And how did you go about answering that question?

emily ludolph

Well, I started by just punching Ed Dwight’s name into Google, and a website comes up, and that website had an email address. And I was like, oh, my God, this guy is alive, because all of these articles are from 1963. So I emailed that email address, having no idea what would come back, and he wrote back to me the same day. So I gave him a call.

[phone ringing]

ed dwight

Ed Dwight.

emily ludolph

Hi, Ed. It’s Emily.

ed dwight

Yeah, uh huh.

emily ludolph

And I thought, oh, my God, he doesn’t want to talk to me at all.

emily ludolph

I’m so excited to talk to you. I’ve been reading a lot of old newspaper articles about you.

ed dwight

Oh, boy. You got to watch that.

emily ludolph

The conversation starts off sort of very reticent.

ed dwight

Well, the story and everything else in my life’s being is rather complex.

emily ludolph

But he eventually opened up, and we ended up spending over an hour on that first phone call with him telling me his entire life story.

ed dwight

I’m originally from Kansas City, Kansas.

emily ludolph

So Ed tells me this story of growing up.

ed dwight

I started school at two.

emily ludolph

And he is clearly incredibly ambitious, incredibly precocious.

[music]

ed dwight

My mom got me a library card at the age of four, and I lived in the library.

emily ludolph

He’s an altar boy at the local Catholic church.

ed dwight

My mom started me working at nine.

emily ludolph

He’s delivering food for his parents’ restaurant. He has —

ed dwight

Two paper routes —

emily ludolph

— two paper routes.

ed dwight

— not one.

emily ludolph

And close to where his family lives is the local airport.

ed dwight

I was just a black kid that was just hanging around. And so when I was about maybe 5 or 6, they started paying me money to clean out your airplanes.

emily ludolph

In addition to his other jobs, Ed will go off to this airport and clean the pilots’ planes.

ed dwight

And they’d give me a nickel or a dime. And when I got to be about 10 or 11, I said, I want to fly. I mean, I don’t want the money. I want to know where you guys go when you leave and where the hell have you been when you come back.

emily ludolph

He loves being at the airport. He loves the airplanes. He loves dreaming about where they’re going when they fly off on these trips.

ed dwight

But this was a white man’s world. Kansas was segregated at the time. And I never for a minute thought that I would ever really fly an airplane. I mean, that just was crazy.

emily ludolph

And then —

ed dwight

But this was my private fantasy.

emily ludolph

— one day he’s on his paper route, and he looks down at his newspaper.

ed dwight

On the front page of one of my newspapers was an African-American pilot.

emily ludolph

And he sees a photograph of an African-American Air Force pilot who’s been shot down in Korea.

ed dwight

And he was on the front page standing on the wing of a jet. He was a prisoner of war.

emily ludolph

And sort of paradoxically, given the subject matter, Ed goes, this is great news.

ed dwight

And I says, oh my, God. They’re letting black folks fly jets.

emily ludolph

They’re letting black guys fly jets.

michael barbaro

And so this is a revelation to him?

emily ludolph

That’s right.

ed dwight

I immediately applied for pilot training.

emily ludolph

So he sets about building a course load for himself toward pilot training. And he goes to the local library, and he gets all of these flight manuals out.

ed dwight

They say manuals they use in training pilots.

emily ludolph

And he’s poring over them. He’s basically memorizing them.

ed dwight

I would take them home and take all the exams at the end of the chapters. I would study the chapters.

emily ludolph

Wow.

ed dwight

So anyway, I went on to join the Air Force.

emily ludolph

He joins the Air Force, and it turns out when it comes time to take his flight certification test, it is the same tests that have been in the back of these library books the whole time.

ed dwight

So sure enough, I miss two questions on the two-hour exam.

emily ludolph

He aces them.

ed dwight

And they immediately call a college, called my mom. You’ve got a kid that’s a genius! [LAUGHS]

emily ludolph

And he very quickly from there starts to rise through the ranks. He goes from second lieutenant to first lieutenant.

ed dwight

Sent my flying time up faster than other guys.

emily ludolph

All of his reviews and ratings are outstanding. He’s getting comments from his superiors that say things like Ed shows leadership tendencies. He’s doing advanced certifications in engineering and mechanics and mathematics. He gets an engineering degree, and he ends up at Travis Air Force Base near San Francisco. So meanwhile —

archived recording

Another spectacular year in the space race.

emily ludolph

— the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union is heating up.

archived recording

The Soviets on October 12, Columbus Day, launched an innovation in space travel, the three-manned space bus.

emily ludolph

In April of 1961, the Russians get the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin.

archived recording

— a 27-year-old Soviet Air Force officer whose name will live in history.

emily ludolph

And when he comes back, he goes on this world tour.

archived recording

Major Gagarin looked as pleased to arrive in Britain as Britain was to greet him.

emily ludolph

Visiting Asia and Africa and everywhere he goes, he’s greeted by these screaming, enthusiastic crowds, ticker-tape parades. He is enormously popular. And back in the U.S., Edward R. Murrow —

michael barbaro

The television anchor.

emily ludolph

— yes, who is, at this point, head of the U.S. Information Agency, which is in charge of sort of the hearts-and-minds story of America abroad, looks at this man being adored by all of these crowds. And he writes to the head of NASA — and we have that letter. He says, “Why don’t we put the first nonwhite man in space? If your boys were to enroll and train a qualified Negro and then fly him in whatever vehicle is available, we could retell our whole space effort to the whole nonwhite world, which is most of it.” This request makes its way over to President Kennedy’s desk, who passes it on to the vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who kind of gathers together all of the heads of the different military agencies. And they say, can you help us find this man? And the search is on.

[music]

michael barbaro

And how do they go about finding this man? What qualifications are they looking for?

emily ludolph

Well, that’s an interesting question, because all the way back at the end of the 1950s, when they are first trying to figure out, O.K., who should be an astronaut? They’re asking themselves, should it be a scuba diver? Should it be a racecar driver? Should we have arctic explorers? Should we host a nationwide competition so anyone can apply? But President Eisenhower, who was a career military man, vetoes this idea. He says they have to be military men. They have to be test pilots. A part of the reason for that is security clearances. It’s test pilots are used to flying things that no one has ever flown before in hostile environments, and they are the best at staying levelheaded and cool when problems arise that no one has ever seen before.

So in making that requirement that they be test pilots — I mean, the military had only desegregated a decade before. Women had never flown combat missions. So it is effectively ensuring that those first classes of astronauts are going to be male and white.

ed dwight

He put together a set of credentials that would eliminate every black pilot in the universe.

emily ludolph

So this request from President Kennedy is essentially impossible to fulfill because the pool of pilots is so small. The qualifications are so stringent.

ed dwight

You had to be under 30. Had to have an engineering degree. Had to have at least 1,500 hours of jet time.

emily ludolph

And NASA writes back. All these different agencies write back. And they say, we don’t have people in the pipeline for this. This is not a problem for the military or NASA, it is a problem for the entire United States — except for the Air Force secretary, Eugene Zuckert, who writes back and says, actually, we do have someone. His name’s Ed Dwight, and he is ready to start training.

ed dwight

I was a star in my unit. I was placed on a fast track for promotion. I had been promoted to captain early, and then I was immediately put in for major.

emily ludolph

Ed has a decision to make, basically, because in the Air Force, he has this incredibly promising career.

ed dwight

I was guaranteed that I was going to be a general had I stayed in the unit that I was in, and there were big plans for me.

emily ludolph

And his superiors at Travis Air Force Base say the space program is brand new. You have this incredibly bright future ahead of you in the Air Force.

ed dwight

What is this?

emily ludolph

And this really could be a career killer for you. But in the end, he decides to go for it.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

[music]

michael barbaro

So once Ed decides to take President Kennedy up on this invitation to be the first African-American astronaut, what happens?

emily ludolph

He is transferred to the Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, which is the top place for training jet pilots in the United States. And the Air Force has put together this kind of graduate school for test pilots that is trying to anticipate what these future astronauts are going to need to know. And that school is helmed by Chuck Yeager —

archived recording

October 14, 1947, Edwards Air Force Base, California. Captain Charles E. Yeager flew the experimental X-1 faster than the speed of sound in level flight.

emily ludolph

— who, apart from Charles Lindbergh, is the most famous person in American flying at this point.

archived recording

Another historic highlight in the aerospace age.

emily ludolph

So when he starts this program —

ed dwight

I made 2,500 speeches.

emily ludolph

— on top of all of the training that he’s doing to prepare him to become an astronaut —

ed dwight

I mean, I was on the road from Thursday till Monday. All the time I was in training —

emily ludolph

But you gave these speeches.

ed dwight

Yes. I was all over —

emily ludolph

Wow.

ed dwight

— the country.

emily ludolph

Ed’s experience is unique because he is programmed into this nationwide speaking tour.

ed dwight

Starting out at, yeah, 6 o’clock in the morning with a quarter-to-12 breakfast all the way to preschool, high school, then ended that particular day in Washington, D.C., going on stage and —

emily ludolph

And he’s talking to universities. He’s talking to elementary school students. His face is on the cover of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times. So he becomes this massive celebrity, but also it’s a really difficult experience for him.

michael barbaro

How so?

emily ludolph

First of all, there’s purely logistics. He’s off doing all of these tours all weekend, but he’s still got to come back and do his flight exams on Monday just like all of his peers who have been studying all weekend for them do. On top of that, Ed is also dealing with the reality of racism in America in the 1960s. And so when he’s traveling, hotel rooms aren’t booked for him. Cars leave without him. Waiters in restaurants won’t serve him. Meanwhile, back at the base he has this incredibly tense relationship with Chuck Yeager, who is this celebrated figure in American flying, and who Ed says was calling him into his office almost on a weekly basis, encouraging him to drop out of the program because he couldn’t handle it, which Chuck Yeager denies.

michael barbaro

So what happens next?

archived recording

O.K., I guess you all know why you’re here today and why we’re here. I’d like to introduce the new group of 14 astronauts we’ve been in the process of selecting for about the last four months.

emily ludolph

Yeager ultimately graduates him, and in October of 1963, NASA announces the next class of astronauts. It includes Buzz Aldrin and four astronauts in total who go on to walk on the moon.

archived recording (speaker 1)

Was there a Negro boy in the last 30 or so that you brought here for consideration?

archived recording (speaker 2)

No, there was not.

emily ludolph

And Ed’s name is not among them.

michael barbaro

Does that mean that this is over for Ed?

emily ludolph

No. Ed still has hope that he’ll be selected for a future astronaut class. So he continues his training.

ed dwight

And everything was working for me. Washington was able to solve all these problems that kept popping up until November the 22nd, 1963.

archived recording

Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.

emily ludolph

Anyone who is alive in America on that day remembers where they were.

archived recording

From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Standard Time.

emily ludolph

And just like everyone else, Ed remembers exactly where he was.

archived recording

This nation is wounded. It will have a century, I think, to absorb the historic impact of this terrible event.

emily ludolph

He was in Seattle. They were doing a flight simulator training at a Boeing plant. Someone came in. Ed remembers what step of the staircase he was standing on when he announced that the president had been shot and they were canceling the training for the day. So Ed is going through the same sort of emotional loss that everyone in the country is going through. And at the same time, over the course of this entire experience, Ed has really felt like there’s been a hand on his shoulder as he’s doing all of these public appearances and speaking tours. That is President Kennedy’s hand. The thing about this public speaking tour that’s been going on this entire time is it very much does fall outside of the chain of military command. He is talking with senators. He’s talking with the White House, but that is because that’s what he’s being asked to do. And after the assassination, he fears that all of that protection has fallen away from him, and he might not be wrong about that.

michael barbaro

What do you mean?

emily ludolph

Well, within a month and a half, Ed has been transferred to a base in Ohio, where he is flying transport planes and doing experiments that are less and less and less related to the space program. The next astronaut selection comes up. Ed is again not picked. And he eventually resigns his commission and leaves the Air Force.

michael barbaro

So what becomes of Ed Dwight?

emily ludolph

Well, he starts this whole new life that includes developing a career at IBM, opening an executive flight company, starting a restaurant called The Rib Cage. And eventually, he goes back to school and gets his M.F.A., and he becomes an artist. He sculpts large-scale public monuments. There are more than a hundred. They’re all over the country, and his specialty is iconic African-American figures.

michael barbaro

Emily, it sounds like after Ed left the space program, he went on to have this very distinguished career, but leaving the program in that moment, right before it achieved some of its grandest ambitions, including putting men on the moon — I have to imagine that that was difficult for him. Is that something that you two talked about?

emily ludolph

Yes. And I think the important thing to remember is that this was just a few years of Ed’s life, and he has gone on and done so many things since then.

He’s now 85.

And when I asked Ed where he was at that time, he says he doesn’t remember.

michael barbaro

He doesn’t remember at all?

emily ludolph

Yeah. It’s kind of surprising. So I spoke to Ed many times and kept asking him that question over the course of multiple interviews, and each time he says he doesn’t remember. And I keep thinking about this story that Ed told me about being a little boy and seeing a picture of an African-American pilot on the front page of his newspaper and how that sort of spurred him on to his entire career. And I wondered just what would it have meant if Ed Dwight had gone on to join the space program and walk on the moon?

I brought that question to Charles Bolden, who was the first black administrator of NASA. And what he said to me was to see an Ed Dwight walking across the platform, getting into an Apollo capsule would have been mind-boggling in those days.

It would have had an incredible impact.

michael barbaro

Emily, thank you.

emily ludolph

Thanks so much.

michael barbaro

After Ed Dwight’s quest to reach space had ended, Major Robert H. Lawrence Jr. was selected as the nation’s first black astronaut in the summer of 1967. But later that year, he was killed in a jet crash during a training operation. In 1983, Dr. Guion Bluford became the first African-American in space the same year that Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Nearly a decade later, in 1992, Mae C. Jemison became the first African-American woman to travel to space. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Ed Dwight’s path had started years earlier.

In 1959, while Dwight was a bomber pilot at Travis Air Force Base in California, a young Navy psychologist named Robert Voas was busy losing his car in the Pentagon’s vast parking lot. Voas had joined NASA with the special task of figuring out who the first Americans in space would be — the Mercury Seven as they would later be known. “We were sort of awed by the feeling that you were involved in the selection program for someone like either Columbus or Lindbergh,” he recalled in 2002, for a NASA oral history project. “They were going to come to not only represent the program, but often that they’d possibly be American heroes.”

Before beginning his search, Voas drafted a memo to his supervisor asking whether to focus solely on technical qualifications or to take “public relations” into account. “Were we concerned at all about having a mix of ethnicity?” Voas said. “Were we concerned about whether both men and women should be included?” Voas said he was told that “the whole emphasis should be on who could most reliably and effectively fly this vehicle,” but his questions about representation and diversity would dog the newly formed space program for decades.

The idea that early astronauts must first be test pilots, like the hotshots at Edwards, was not a foregone conclusion. Voas imagined a nationwide competition that could include deep-sea divers, arctic explorers or racecar drivers. The most important characteristics for the first classes of astronauts headed into the unknown would be the ability to respond coolly if something went wrong and levelheadedness in the face of hostile environments.

Image
A collage of personal photos from Dwight’s time in the Air Force.Credit...Courtesy Ed Dwight

Riding a rocket had little in common with flying a plane, aside from being airborne. “The basic thing you have to understand,” Dwight explained recently, “is everything that happens on that spaceship, from the time you crawl into that seat to the time it touches down, is controlled from the ground. There’s no one thing that makes a good astronaut. I don’t know any person with determination and will that can’t go to space.”

Even Yeager, the aerospace training program’s future commandant, insisted in 1959, “I’ve been a pilot all my life, and there won’t be any flying to do in Project Mercury.”

But President Dwight D. Eisenhower vetoed the idea of an open call. A career army man himself, the president decreed the astronauts would come from military backgrounds. That way, they would have not only the desired discipline, outlook and comportment, but also a proven ability to cope in psychologically challenging situations — and the security clearances necessary for a program with significant classified aspects. With the United States deep into the Cold War, candidates would be the high-profile proxies in a global game of influence.

According to NASA’s chief historian, Bill Barry, this one decision set a course that the space race would follow for years to come. “Once you do that,” he explained, “you bake in all of the stuff that’s already there. For example, that there are no African-Americans who are test pilots. There are no women who are test pilots.”

As Tom Wolfe described them in “The Right Stuff,” the first astronauts were “seven patriotic God-fearing small-town Protestant family men with excellent backing on the home front.” These would be America’s celestial heroes. They had camera-ready wives and families, and projected the camaraderie of an elite corps. Not surprisingly, those first space soldiers were all white.

On April 12, 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. The next month, in an address to a joint session of Congress, President John F. Kennedy announced his intention to put Americans on the moon, declaring it necessary “if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny.”

By that time, the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow had become the director of the United States Information Agency, in charge of fighting the Cold War on the “hearts and minds” front. Watching the handsome Gagarin barnstorm Brazil, Japan, Liberia and other countries — and the screaming crowds that turned out for him — Murrow had an epiphany.

In September, he wrote to the administrator of NASA with what was essentially a bid for international diplomacy: “Why don’t we put the first non-white man in space? If your boys were to enroll and train a qualified Negro and then fly him in whatever vehicle is available, we could retell our whole space effort to the whole non-white world, which is most of it.”

With waves of countries emerging from colonial rule, the United States could not maintain credibility with Ghana, India, Indonesia or Nigeria, for instance, if much of America was still segregated.

“The map’s being divided into who’s pro-Soviet and who’s pro-U.S.A., and our astronauts are good-will ambassadors,” said the historian Douglas Brinkley, who wrote “American Moonshot,” which was published this year. “We’re touting them around to show people the greatness of the American experiment. You put a person of color in space and it’ll show how noble our democracy is.”

In summer 1962, Murrow put his proposal for a black astronaut directly to the president, who passed it along in a memo to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, with the “hope that something might be done.” Johnson’s aide George Reedy dug into the pros and cons. “There can be no doubt of the tremendous value to the United States of having a Negro as an astronaut in a space flight,” Reedy wrote in a confidential memo. However, he added, the administration should “dispose of the concept that NASA can just reach out and grab a Negro and make an astronaut candidate out of him.”

Doing so risked any number of public relations disasters. The man might flunk out, making it look as though he had been set up for failure. He might die — a significant risk — leading to the accusation that African-Americans were being treated as expendable. The worst-case scenario, Reedy wrote, would be if the public caught on to an “artificial selection,” which would undermine the whole endeavor.

And there was a big problem. As Reedy summarized NASA’s position, no African-American applicants had even come close to moving through the agency’s selection process. Kennedy’s executive order in 1961 encouraging the government to take “affirmative action” to promote equal employment opportunities was too recent to have affected the pool of available black pilots. A solution was, Reedy explained, “beyond the scope of NASA activities and is basically a problem for the whole nation.”

Even so, the Navy and Air Force were directed by the White House to scour their ranks for any candidates. The secretary of the Air Force, Eugene M. Zuckert, was by now used to 7 p.m. phone calls asking for “a list of Negro officers by name, above the rank of second lieutenant,” for 6:30 the next morning, he said in an oral history in 1969. The Air Force came back with a surprising answer: A young black pilot was ready to start training at Edwards.

Image
Ed Dwight on a visit to Air Force headquarters, with a model of the Titan III rocket and the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar space vehicle. Circa November 1963.Credit...Bettmann/Getty Images

In Ed Dwight, the White House had found more than Murrow could have hoped for: a charismatic flier with a cum laude aeronautics degree from Arizona State University, and the required flight time and performance ratings.

As a child, Dwight learned Latin and served as an altar boy at his local Catholic parish. He worked a paper route and delivered food from his parents’ restaurant in Kansas City, Kan. Sometimes he earned nickels cleaning private planes at the nearby airport after their white owners returned from hunting trips in Wyoming. “From the time I was a little itty-bitty kid, I was going to the airport every day,” he remembered. “I began to study all the airplanes, and I’d draw all the airplanes. This was my private fantasy.”

Today, at 85, Dwight recalled his early dreams of flying as a full-body memory, stretching up from his toes to the soft pads of his fingers to illustrate the angles of flight and descent. In running shoes and a tracksuit, he darts around his sculpture studio, where he has crafted likenesses of jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong. He is especially spirited when talking about his childhood.

Dwight and his older sister integrated the local Catholic high school, though not before a blacks-only shower was built and Dwight was lectured on not looking at white girls. He went out for the football team and boxed. It seemed the only thing that the diminutive teenager did not excel at was basketball, but he still played.

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From left: Dwight’s sister Theresa in a nun’s habit; Dwight with his son, Edward J. Dwight III; Dwight’s parents holding a picture of their son.Credit...Courtesy Ed Dwight (left, center), Bettmann/Getty Images (right)

“He just charmed everybody,” recalled Dwight’s youngest sister, Liz Chow. “Everybody loved Ed Dwight. He had a kind of a bubbly effervescent type of personality. He walked into a room and it just lit up. I often wondered whether or not there was someone above him, maybe a guardian angel, steering him, because everything he attempted to do he succeeded at.”

What he wanted to do was fly. “But this was a white man’s world,” Dwight recalled of his formative years in the early 1950s. “Kansas was segregated at the time. And I never thought for a minute that I would really fly an airplane. This was crazy.”

But then one day on the front page of a newspaper he saw “an African-American pilot from Kansas City, my hometown, that had been shot down in Korea,” he explained, adding, “He was standing on a wing of a jet, and he was a prisoner of war, and I was like, Oh my God, they’re letting black folks fly jets.”

So Dwight enlisted in the Air Force in 1953. He rose through the ranks, from cadet to second and then first lieutenant. He leaped into procedural vacuums, streamlining operations and preparing manuals. When instructors were absent, he ran instrument training classes. He administered examinations to his fellow pilots and flew extensively in his off-duty hours. He completed correspondence courses in electronic engineering and calculus. In one evaluation, a lieutenant colonel wrote that Dwight’s “aggressiveness, coupled with his unlimited ability, place him in the outstanding category for a young officer.” Another superior wrote, “I would not hesitate to nominate Lt. Dwight to represent me or the Air Force in dealings with the public.” On top of all that, he looked like a movie star.

He also had the superhuman confidence of a true fighter jock. Dwight wrote in his 2009 self-published memoir, “Soaring on the Wings of a Dream”: “Fighter pilots are universally Type-A personalities, independent, aggressive, daring, risk-oriented, total control freaks, and the real good ones are usually arrogant asses. Exercising absolute control over a complex, multimillion-dollar, high-speed machine that requires the ultimate in training, superior intellectual input, and psychomotor reaction requires such a personality. You did not get ‘into’ a fighter, you strapped it onto your ass and it became an extension of your physical body.”

Arriving at the astronaut training program at Edwards, Dwight felt as if he had been personally anointed. President Kennedy had even called his parents to congratulate them, Dwight said.

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Dwight operating a flight simulator at Edwards. Sept. 6, 1963.Credit...Don Cravens/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images, Courtesy National Archives photo no. 63-2939

They were heady times. Many weeks, Dwight would leave his wife and two children behind on Thursday night and take off from Edwards for another leg of a nationwide speaking tour, delivering remarks at Lions Clubs and in elementary schools, where he encouraged black children to study what today we call STEM subjects. The message was clear: I am proof of the promise of civil rights. If a black man can train to be an astronaut, we can do anything.

“Negro Astronaut Aiming for Moon,” The New York Times proclaimed. “Kansas Native in Line as First Sepia Astronaut,” The Indianapolis Recorder announced. The United States Information Agency sent photos of Dwight to newspapers: Dwight racing to his jet, explaining a computer program, contemplating spaceship models with Yeager. Dwight was featured on magazine covers, accepted national awards from the Urban League and was photographed with Charlton Heston. By Dwight’s measure, he was receiving 1,500 fan letters a day. “I had a private secretary,” Dwight told Ebony magazine in 1984. “I was sending out 5,000 press photographs a month, and I made 176 speeches the first year.”

“He was as popular in the African-American press as John Glenn was in the white press,” said Richard Paul, who with Steven Moss wrote the 2015 book “We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program.”

“He really is everywhere — NASA doesn’t put the brakes on it because it’s great publicity,” Moss added. “To be an astronaut in 1962, there was nothing bigger than that. Even if you were three steps away. A mathematician who becomes a mayor is an amazing thing. A technician who becomes the first black elected City Council person in Florida is a big deal. But it’s not an astronaut in 1962.”

It did not matter that Dwight was still a certificate away from even applying to NASA; he was a celebrity.

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Dwight receiving a citation from the Los Angeles Urban League. On the right is Chuck Yeager, then an Air Force colonel and the commandant at the Aerospace Research Pilots School. July 1963.Credit...George Brich/Valley Times Photo Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

His budding fame did not matter to Yeager, though. A colonel when he and Dwight met, Yeager had been a legend in the military since World War II. He was born in Myra, W.Va., a tiny town on the Mud River, deep in Appalachia. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1941, at age 18, and started as a flight mechanic. By the end of the war, in which he once downed five enemy planes in a single day, he was a 22-year-old captain with a battery of medals on his chest, a hero.

Yeager went out to the California desert in 1947, when the base, then called Muroc, was barely more than a dry lake bed and a smattering of improvised barracks. There, that same year, among the fabled pilots of the early jet-testing programs, he broke the sound barrier and became the “fastest man alive.” By 1962, the year he became the school commandant, Yeager was the quintessential military flier, and as much a part of Edwards as the airstrip.

From Day 1, Dwight said, Yeager wanted him gone. Yeager had little patience for White House input on military matters, as he explained in his 1985 autobiography, “Yeager.” Dwight said he immediately felt he was not welcome, that he was not of the group. “He told those guys on the first day, ‘We can get him out of here in six months. We can break him,’” Dwight remembered a classmate telling him.

As Tom Wolfe described in “The Right Stuff”: “Every week, it seemed like, a detachment of Civil Rights Division lawyers would turn up from Washington, from the Justice Department, which was headed by the president’s brother, Bobby. The lawyers squinted in the desert sunlight and asked a great many questions about the progress and treatment of Ed Dwight and took notes.”

“There were days when ARPS seemed like the Ed Dwight case with a few classrooms and some military hardware appended,” Wolfe added, referring to the Aerospace Research Pilot School.

After a weekend of press events, Dwight would fly back to base, where his classmates had been hitting the books to prepare for the week ahead. In addition to speeches, he faced the all-too-typical travails of a black serviceman of his generation. When the test pilot students traveled for training, waiters refused to serve him. Cars left without him, and hotel rooms were mysteriously not booked. The combination of public appearances and private indignities was weighing on Dwight.

“The disadvantage I had was all the other guys in this program didn’t have that distraction,” Dwight said. “I’ve got to get up the next day and have an exam and deliver the goods and let them know that I’m equal to the other guys who didn’t have to go make 10 speeches that weekend.”

But the only thing waiting for Dwight on Monday was Yeager. “Every week, right on the dot,” Dwight recalled, “he’d call me into his office and say, ‘Are you ready to quit? This is too much for you and you’re going to kill yourself, boy.’ Calling me a boy and I’m an officer in the Air Force.”

Yeager denies Dwight’s account of his treatment: He said he did not tell anybody that he would get Dwight out of the program, did not have weekly meetings with him and did not call him “boy.” But he was no champion of Dwight and did question his ability. “Isn’t it great that Ed Dwight found his true calling and became an accomplished sculptor?” Yeager said in an email.

Dwight, though, felt his treatment was so unfair that he later took bias charges to higher-ups. Yeager was incensed. In his autobiography, he wrote: “The Air Force counselor, their chief lawyer, flew to Edwards from the Pentagon to personally take charge of the case. Man, I was hot. I told that lawyer: ‘You do have a case of discrimination here. The White House discriminated by forcing us to take an unqualified guy. And we would have discriminated by passing him because he was black.’”

Dwight garnered scrutiny from some fellow students, recalled Robert Tanguy, a classmate of Dwight’s who retired as a major general. “That was always something that they were wondering about,” he said. “Is Ed down here because he’s black?”

But Tanguy, who flew with Dwight during their training, found nothing unusual about his qualifications. “I thought Ed was a very normal pilot for the program,” Tanguy said. “He was qualified for it. He was an awfully good selection if somebody selected him, because he was a level-headed guy.”

Woody Fountain, who started at Edwards Air Force Base as an engineer around the same time Dwight arrived, played squash with Dwight and saw him at weekend cocktail parties. “We all wanted to relax since there were so few of us black folks out there,” Fountain said. “Ed was right there in the middle of the parties, having a good time. An absolutely funny guy to be around.” Fountain added, ”I was never cognizant of what he was going through.”

Amid the stress of his speaking obligations and his training, Dwight was also having trouble in his marriage. At the urging of the Air Force, he had brokered an agreement with his wife, Sue Lillian, from whom he was estranged by this time. She joined him and their two children at Edwards, but their relationship grew even more tense, particularly under the scrutiny of the news media.

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Ed Dwight with his family. Left to right: his son, Edward J. Dwight III, age 5; his wife Sue Lillian; Dwight; and his daughter, Tina Sheree, age 7. Circa March 1963.Credit...George Brich/Valley Times Photo Collection, via Los Angeles Public Library

Life on the base was an alienating experience, and the usual pilots-and-wives camaraderie at the officers club or backyard barbecues was not a real outlet for the Dwights. He found solace in almost daily calls with his mother. “She took an inordinate amount of time telling me how incredible I was, how I could do anything in the universe I wanted to do and that I was loved,” Dwight recalled.

Dwight also turned to his powerful friends. “I spent hours in the Pentagon, running around there doing lobbying and talking to anybody who would talk to me,” he said. Yeager and other superior officers noticed, with rancor.

Dwight was unfazed. He had a friend in the president, and he was going to be an astronaut.

“I wanted to be on the cover of Life magazine,” Dwight said. “And people were fighting when the issue came out. They were beating each other up to get the magazine.”

He added, “The news guys couldn’t put enough Life magazines on the shelf to supply all these people. That was my deal. I would think about walking down Broadway, and every newsstand, man, and every magazine on it, there’d be no magazines but me.”

Yeager ultimately graduated him. Despite initial concerns about Dwight’s flying ability, and the question of whether astronauts even needed to be pilots, the 30-year-old was now eligible for space. As the commandant wrote, “Dwight hung on and squeezed through. He got his diploma qualifying him to be the nation’s first black astronaut.”

Now it was up to NASA.

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Dwight holds a model of a T-38 jet, his favorite plane. July 1, 2019.Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times
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Holding a photo of himself with his clerk, who ended up marrying Dwight’s sister-in-law. July 1, 2019.Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

In October 1963, the agency held a news conference in Houston to announce the astronauts selected for the next class. The 14 chosen men, including the future moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, filed onstage, all crew cuts, dark suits and smart ties. Dwight was not there. He had been one of the pilots recommended by the Air Force, but, out of the 271 total applicants, he was not among the chosen.

A reporter asked Deke Slayton, the director of NASA’s astronaut office, “Was there a Negro boy in the last 30 or so that you brought here for consideration?” Slayton leaned into his microphone and answered flatly, “No, there was not.” And with that, the space-bound men filed offstage to pose for publicity photos.

Despite that disappointment, Dwight was confident that someone was still watching over his career and held out hope for the next class selection, scheduled for 1965. “Washington was able to solve all the problems that were popping up,” he said. “Until November 22, 1963.”

On that day, Dwight and his classmates were at a Boeing plant near Seattle for a mission simulation. Dwight was waiting for his turn in the simulator, about to put on his spacesuit, when the news arrived that the training exercise was canceled. President Kennedy had been shot. “My heart fell down into my ankles,” Dwight recalled. The pilots trooped into the executive dining room to discuss the news. Dwight, who as a young man had been inspired by Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,” ate quietly by himself.

The hand on Dwight’s shoulder also seemed to have vanished. He could feel his dream slipping away. He tried to reinvigorate old Washington contacts. “I was in this trap of no man’s land,” he said. “The team and all the support system I had seemed to have left me hanging out there.”

Within weeks, Dwight’s career at Edwards ended. By January 1964, he was stationed at Wright-Patterson in Ohio. The hot shot so used to circumventing the Air Force hierarchy was now relegated to running experiments on transport planes.

“It’s this hopeless feeling,” said Charles Bolden, who trained as a pilot in the late 1960s before rising through the ranks to become a general and the first African-American to lead NASA. “You know what the process is and you know what the chain of responsibility and command is and you don’t see any way out of it.” Like Dwight, Bolden also navigated Washington politics, going straight to President Johnson’s office when his career was stonewalled by a bloc of Southern congressmen. “Everything sort of followed the same pattern that all of us have seen who have been among the earlier people to come into any of these programs,” Bolden added.

The next year, Ebony magazine published an article that looked into the case of the forgotten black astronaut. The piece was followed by articles in The New York Times and elsewhere, and the news media caught up with Dwight on the tarmac of the naval air station at China Lake, about an hour’s drive north of Edwards.

The pilot, in his flight suit and folding cap, was ushered to the microphone, as shown in archival footage in the PBS American Experience documentary film “Chasing the Moon.” He stood alone, blinking at a scrum of reporters. A row of white officers dressed in khaki uniforms and aviators watched from the back of the group.

“Why aren’t you an astronaut now?” one of the journalists asked.

“Well, I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Dwight responded. “I have no comment for that question. But other than that, I won’t make any overt statements at this time outlining any overt racial pressures at any time during my training at Edwards.”

“Do you feel that what’s happened to you is a setback for civil rights opportunities in this country?” another reporter asked.

Dwight scanned the cameras, and the row of officers behind them, and answered, “I would rather not comment on that.” He left it there.

NASA has never given a full explanation for why Dwight did not make the cut. The agency did not then, and does not today, disclose the exact criteria for final astronaut selections.

Slayton explained the process in his 1994 memoir, “Deke!” (which was published the year after he died): “I had already developed a point system that we used in making the final evaluations on astronaut candidates. There were three parts: academic, pilot performance, and character/motivation, 10 points for each part, with 30 being the highest possible score. Some of it was cut-and-dried: You got points for a certain amount of flying time and for education. Some of it, by design, was subjective.”

Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian, explained: “They’re looking for a collection of things that they were never forthcoming about how they’re weighted. I suspect that there may not have been any formula for that. They were looking for a package of people who were extremely good at flying, who were highly adaptable, smart.” He added, “By that point, they’re also looking at, ‘Is this person going to be a good spokesman for the agency?’ but also they wanted to have people who would do what they were told.”

In the years since, the agency’s priorities have evolved. NASA spokesman Robert Jacobs said: “The specifics of Ed’s story and why he never flew in space are hard to address nearly 60 years after-the-fact, but we can say that it took decades for the astronaut corps and other areas of the agency to truly be reflective of America’s diversity. Following the Apollo-era, we saw more of an emphasis on science, medicine, engineering, and other disciplines in the astronaut selection process, and that opened new doors. The 1978 astronaut class and the space shuttle era brought in the diversity we didn’t see in the space program of the 1960s. Today, we have an astronaut corps that better represents our diverse cultures.”

In 1966, Dwight resigned his commission in the Air Force, after 13 years. The next year, Robert Lawrence, the second black man tapped to be an astronaut, died when his Starfighter crashed at Edwards. By the time Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Dwight was living in Denver, working at IBM. Unlike every other person in the United States at the time, he says he does not remember where he was when the Eagle landed.

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Dwight working on a sculpture in his studio, a converted airplane hangar in Denver. July 1, 2019.Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times

It was not until 1983, 14 years after Armstrong’s “one small step,” that the United States would send an African-American into space. Today, of the 572 people who have flown into space — 356 of them Americans — just 14 were African-Americans. After leaving the Air Force, Dwight opened a restaurant, started a flight company, went back to school to earn a master of fine arts degree and eventually started a foundry. Today, the man who was on the path to being an astronaut is best known as a distinguished artist, whose specialty is sculpting icons of black history in bronze.

Dwight has also turned an airplane hangar on the edge of Denver into his sculpture studio, where he has worked for three decades. Every morning he parks his Lexus with the vanity plate “SCULPTR” outside. The vast space that once sheltered jets now houses a congregation of Dwight’s sculptures and models: Michelle and Barack Obama, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong. He has populated city parks and downtowns with more than 120 monuments, the cost of which can run into the millions of dollars. His sculptures sell to private buyers for as much as $100,000, Dwight said, but astronauts get a discount.

In the years since he joined NASA, Bolden has become close with Dwight. “He became sort of a role model and a mentor for me,” said Bolden, who got to know Dwight while training in the early 1980s. “Ed understands the trials and tribulations of trying and not making it and being able to go on after that. For a young person who is there but struggling, he plays a critical role in helping you decide not to leave.”

When Bolden was confirmed for the top NASA job before the Senate in 2009, he pointed out a “very special person” at the hearing. “While not actually becoming an astronaut, he was a trailblazer in the attempt to break the color barrier in America’s astronaut program,” he told the committee.

“We don’t know what Ed’s place would have been in space history because we were never given an opportunity,” Bolden said recently.

The historian Steven Moss said that had it gone differently, Dwight “would have had his own altar in the civic religion of American space travel.”

Instead, Dwight is both a person who nearly made history and a person dedicated to preserving it. These days he is busy in his studio, contemplating an even longer history. Plans to build a monument are underway on the windswept coast of Virginia at Fort Monroe, and Dwight is being considered for the commission. There, 400 years ago, a ship arrived carrying 20 enslaved Angolans, who were sold to Virginia settlers in exchange for food. It was the start of our chapter of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in which 12.5 million people were shipped to the New World, with 10.7 million of them surviving the journey. It was the beginning of the African-American story, Dwight said.

“I want that one bad for any number of reasons,” he said. “The spot where their feet actually touched down, this is the most historic piece of earth in America.”

It is because of that first that all the other firsts are necessary.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section F, Page 4 of the New York edition. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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