Ed Dwight grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Kansas in the isolated 1930s. The airfield was within walking distance, and as a boy he would often go there to watch the planes and watch the pilots. Most of the planes had returned from hunting trips, and the interior was stained with blood and empty beer cans on the floor.
“They said to me, ‘Hey, can you clean my plane? I’ll give you a dime,'” Dwight, 90, recalls. But when Dwight was eight or nine years old, Dwight asked for more than a dime. he wanted to fly.
“My first flight was the most exciting thing in the world,” Dwight says with a smile. “There were no roads, no stop signs. You were free as a bird.”
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It took many years for Dwight to entertain the idea of becoming a pilot himself. “It was white man’s territory,” he says. But while in college, he saw an image of a black pilot shot down in South Korea on the front page of a newspaper.
“I said, ‘Oh my god, they’re putting black people on the plane,'” Dwight said. “I immediately went to the recruiting office and said, ‘I want to get on a plane.'”
With that decision, Dwight set in motion a chain of events that would almost lead him to become one of the first astronauts. As Dwight rose through the ranks in the Air Force, he was hand-picked by President John F. Kennedy’s White House to join Chuck Yeager’s test pilot program at Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert.
Former NASA astronaut Ed Dwight on February 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
The legendary astronaut breeding ground that inspired “The Right Stuff” may have turned Dwight into one of the most famous Americans and the first black man to go into space. However, at Edwards University, Dwight was discriminated against, even though Kennedy defended him. Dwight eventually lived a civilian life and largely disappeared from history.
But in recent years, Dwight has finally begun to receive praise. National Geographic’s new documentary “Space Race,” which premiered Monday on the National Geographic Channel and streamed Tuesday on Disney+ and Hulu, chronicles the story of black astronauts and their first pioneer, Dwight. Masu.
“When I left, people said, ‘It’s over. We’ve eliminated that guy. He’s off the map,'” Dwight said in a Zoom interview from his home in Denver. “Now it comes back full force as one of the stories I never knew.”
It wasn’t until 1983 that the first African American, Guion Bruford, reached space. But 20 years earlier, Dwight found himself at the cusp of 20th century America, where the space race and the struggle for social justice converged.
In “Space Race,” astronaut Bernard Harris, who became the first black man to fly in space in 1995, wonders how different Dwight might have been if he had become an astronaut in the tumultuous ’60s. .
“Space fulfills the hope within all of us as humans,” Harris says. “So if there had been a black man in space at that time, things would have been different.”
Lisa Cortés, who directed the film with Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, said: “Ed is very important for all those who come after him to recognize and accept the shoulders on which they stand.” Masu. “There’s a history that we know about and a history that hasn’t had the opportunity to be highlighted before.”
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957, it shook its Cold War rivals into action.
When the United States began pursuing its space program, political leaders were conscious of the image that American astronauts could project about American democracy. The first astronauts, the Mercury Seven, were all male and white.
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When the Aerospace Research Pilot School was established in November of that year, the White House required the Air Force to select black officers. Only Dwai met the criteria.
In November of that year, Dwight received a letter out of the blue inviting him to train to become an astronaut. Kennedy called his parents to congratulate him.
Despite his reservations, Dwight attended. He was celebrated on the covers of black magazines such as ‘Jet’ and ‘Sepia’. Hundreds of letters poured in praising him as a hero. However, during training he was treated with hostility by officers.
“They were all instructed to give me the cold shoulder,” Dwight says. “Yager held a meeting with students and staff in the auditorium and announced that Washington was going to shove this N-word down our throats.”
Yeager, who passed away in 2020, claimed that Dwight was not as good as other pilots.
Dwight was one of 26 astronaut candidates recommended to NASA by the Air Force. However, in 1963, he was not among the 14 selected. Astronaut Dwight’s future took an even more dramatic turn when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.
Kennedy was killed on Friday. Dwight said the documents to be shipped to Germany were in his mailbox by Monday. He soon met with Bobby Kennedy in Washington, and Kennedy had the Pentagon cancel these orders.
Eventually, Dwight was assigned to Wright-Patterson in Ohio in January 1964. Although Dwight graduated from the program with approximately 9,000 total flight hours, he never became an astronaut. He retired from the Air Force in 1966.
When asked if he felt bitter about his experience, Dwight exclaimed, “No way!”
“Here’s this little guy, 5 feet 4 inches tall, flying a plane. And the next thing you know, this guy is in the White House meeting with all the senators and congressmen, standing in front of all the industry leaders. , I’m letting you pet me,’ pat me on the back and shake my hand,” Dwight says. “Are you kidding me? How could I be bitter about anything? It opened up the world to me.”
He received his Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Denver in 1977. Much of his work is about great black historical figures such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Barack Obama. Several of his sculptures have flown into space, with a recent one aboard the Orion spacecraft. NASA named an asteroid after him.
Dwight is filled with gratitude. His only recommendation is for all congressmen and senators to go on suborbital flights so they can see Earth from above. He thinks that from that height, everyone will realize the absurdity of racism.
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“I want you to go through what I went through and you’ll have a different perspective on this country and how sacred it is,” Dwight says. “We’re flying around the galaxy on this little ball.”
