On a Wednesday afternoon in November 1963, I sat down with Capt. Edward J. Dwight Jr. at the Pentagon.
According to washingtonpost.com, at just 30 years old, Dwight was a seasoned U.S. Air Force jet fighter pilot with over 1,500 flight hours and the distinction of being the first African American chosen for astronaut training.
Despite the barriers of racism that initially kept him grounded, his journey to space would eventually take flight, though it would take over six decades to do so.
I was 26 and a cub reporter at The Washington Post. As one of only four Black reporters at The Post at the time, I was assigned to cover the story. Also, the editors knew of my interest — and experience — in aviation.
It was a different America back then.
In 1955, when I was 17, I soloed a Piper J-3 Cub. But to fly solo, and later obtain a student pilot’s license, I needed a physical exam, including a vision test, by a certified Federal Aviation Agency physician. The only FAA-approved doctor in Wichita Falls, Tex., where I was living at the time, was White, and I was required to use the back door from the alley to enter his office.
In 1963, The Post’s practice was to assign Black reporters to cover Black news, including the growing importance of the civil rights struggle — and now the news of the world’s first Black astronaut trainee.
READ: News: African American, Randy Hazelton’s Entrepreneurial Odyssey from Bankruptcy to Prosperity With Airport Restaurants
It was a breakthrough assignment for me as a young reporter, particularly because of my lifelong interest in flying.
After the article was published, I lost track of Dwight. He faced overt racism in the training program, and less than three weeks after our interview, he lost his protector in the Oval Office when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was soon “de-selected” from the program, and he resigned from the Air Force in 1966. He became a sculptor and historian.
And then, 61 years after he was first picked to train to exit Earth’s orbit, he finally made it to space on board the Blue Origin New Shepard-25 capsule on May 19, becoming the oldest person ever — at age 90 — to leave the planet’s atmosphere.
READ: News: African American Travel Companies To Support for National Black Travel Day
“I really felt good,” Dwight said in a phone interview. It was our first conversation since a brief chat in 2019, after a photo of the two of us together following our 1963 meeting appeared in a PBS documentary about the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969.
“The trip on the Blue Origin capsule fulfilled my imagination . . . blasting off and being able to look down on Earth from the edge of space,” he told me. “It was absolutely fantastic.”
“It was a long time coming,” he added.
Race and the space race
With the space race in full swing by 1963, civil rights leaders convinced Kennedy that Black Americans needed to be a visible part of America’s space program. Their efforts led to Dwight’s selection, which came with much fanfare.
But it was criticized by some senior Air Force officers.
“It was disappointing,” Dwight said, “and so petty.”
Col. Charles “Chuck” Yeager, who broke the sound barrier in 1947, was vocal in his opposition to Dwight being in the program. In his autobiography, Yeager wrote that Dwight “wasn’t a bad pilot, but he wasn’t exceptionally talented either. Flying with a good bunch in a squadron, he would probably get by. But he just couldn’t compete in the space course against the best of the crop of experienced military test pilots.”
More painful to Dwight, his selection was not welcomed by some of the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed all-Black U.S. Army Air Forces unit that had distinguished itself in combat during World War II. Eighteen years after the war’s end, the original Tuskegee Airmen exceeded the 30-year age limit for astronaut training, but some still resented being passed over.
“It was particularly painful because NASA and the Pentagon actively promoted my selection, but I did not receive the same enthusiasm from former Tuskegee Airmen,” Dwight said.
He added, “I was besieged by letters from them asking, ‘Who are you?’ I was the first in my class to solo. I had accumulated 1,500 hours flying in jet aircraft. That’s who I was.”
He recalled, “I met many U.S. senators, including [staunch segregationist] Strom Thurmond, and members of the House of Representatives — all of them patted me on back and wished me well by saying ‘good luck.’”
But he said Benjamin O. Davis Jr., then a major general serving as Air Force director of manpower and organization and the former Tuskegee Airmen commander, declined to meet with him.
Dwight told me NASA and the State Department widely circulated my 1963 article, along with a photograph of me interviewing Dwight, to U.S. embassies abroad and foreign embassies in Washington to show African Americans were part of the U.S. space program and counter perceptions of pervasive racial prejudice. The photo and article helped reduce vandalism of overseas tracking stations in Africa and Asia, Dwight said.
Today, African Americans are routinely involved in the space program, as pilots and mission specialists and in leadership positions.
From 2009 to 2017, the NASA administrator was Charles F. Bolden Jr., an African American retired Marine Corps major general, fighter pilot and astronaut on four space flights. Bolden, along with other Black astronauts, was honored for being involved in America’s space program at a ceremony at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., on July 27. Dwight was invited, but medical issues prevented him from attending.
‘Vindicated’ after an illustrious career
After leaving the Air Force in 1966, Dwight, still in his 30s, worked in real estate and operated a barbecue restaurant, among other jobs. He also fashioned art from scrap metal and reignited his interest in Black history.
George L. Brown, Colorado’s first Black governor, commissioned him to create a statue for the state Capitol in 1974. Four years later, Brown commissioned a statue of himself.
Dwight also fashioned a statue of Frederick Douglass that is on display at the abolitionist’s historic Anacostia home in Southeast D.C.
Since then, Dwight has created many more sculptures adorning public spaces across the United States. All told, there are 128 public and large-scale pieces, plus smaller gallery pieces. In the D.C. area, these include the Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Memorial showing Haley, the author of “Roots,” reading to three children, at the Annapolis City Dock, and a sculpture titled “Black Madonna,” on display in the Our Mother of Africa Chapel in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, on Catholic University’s campus.
His bust of A. Philip Randolph, who led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African American labor union, normally on display in the concourse of Union Station, is being repaired after being damaged by vandalism.
Dwight said his rich, multifaceted life — pilot, historian and sculptor — would not have played out this way had he not been de-selected from the astronaut training program.
While he still carries memories of how he was treated in 1963, his recent trip to space has cast a new light on his past.
“Now, I feel vindicated and a sense of justice after various things — forces of darkness — were put in my way,” he said. “Now, I’ve come full circle, and looking back, I opened the conversation about Black Americans in space. I helped put the issue on the table.”
BY Jesse W. Lewis Jr.
