The Rocket City's Second Century

For most of its first hundred and forty years, Huntsville was a mid-sized Alabama city dependent on cotton, then textiles, then not much. In nineteen forty, approximately thirteen thousand people lived here. The Great Depression had left the region, like much of the rural South, in a long economic trough. The watercress trade, Huntsville's modest agricultural specialty during those lean years, was its answer to want.

What arrived next was not the result of local effort. The Army selected land south of the city in nineteen forty-one for chemical munitions production. A decade later, it brought the German rocket team. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center opened in nineteen sixty. Each of these choices was made in Washington, not in Huntsville, but each of them landed here. The city grew accordingly: from thirteen thousand people in nineteen forty to two hundred and fifteen thousand by twenty twenty. Over four hundred percent growth in eighty years.

What that growth required, and what it got partly by force and partly by pressure and partly by the work of people who had no power and demanded it anyway, was an expansion of who could participate. The engineers at Marshall, for decades, were disproportionately white and largely male. The students who integrated the lunch counters in nineteen sixty-two did not ask Marshall for permission. William Hooper Councill did not have a space program to leverage when he started teaching freedpeople in eighteen sixty-seven.

Huntsville is not, in the end, simply a story about rockets. It is a story about what a city does with the advantages it is handed and the injustices it inherits, and how slowly the distance between those two things closes.