NASA's Leverage and the Schools

The federal government's presence in Huntsville created a pressure on segregation that did not exist in the same form elsewhere in Alabama. The Marshall Space Flight Center was a federal installation. Federal employment practices prohibited racial discrimination. And NASA's administrator, James Webb, was looking at what those practices actually produced on the ground.

Webb investigated equal employment opportunities for Black workers in Huntsville and found them inadequate. He made a pointed statement: some research work would have to be moved from Huntsville to New Orleans if the situation did not change. The threat was real enough. Marshall Space Flight Center then opened its engineering education programs to Black students at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University and at Oakwood College, the historically Black Seventh-day Adventist institution north of the city.

There is a version of this history that makes it sound like the space program led Huntsville's integration. The more precise account is that federal contract leverage was used to open specific doors in a specific sector, for a specific group of qualified Black engineers and students, while the city around them remained segregated in housing, schools, and public life until the courts and the protestors forced further change.

Webb and von Braun, on at least one occasion, confronted Governor George Wallace together in front of the press and lectured him on racial integration. Whether that changed Wallace's calculations is not recorded. What is recorded is that the city's schools did not desegregate until a federal judge ordered it in August nineteen sixty-three, and that Wallace sent state troopers to prevent it until a restraining order stopped him on September ninth.