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my
sisters/ we
always
talked & talked
there
waz never quiet
trees
were status symbols
I’ve
taken to fog/
the
moon still surprisin me
Ntozake
Shange, “Sense of Heritage”
There
is a reason, after all, that some people wish
to colonize the
moon, and others dance before it
as before an ancient friend.
I
say there is no darkness but ignorance.
Shakespeare,
Twelfth Night, Act 4, Scene 2
Yuri
Gagarin, 12 April 1961
If
only the Covington Catholic high school students had knowledge of
American history, then Indigenous elder Nathan Phillip wouldn’t
have feared them as they surrounded him. It would have been for elder
Phillip one big open-air classroom session no different than the
large lecture halls at universities. Instead, as evident by the
expression of superiority on the face of the student staring down
elder Phillips, the privileging of alternative facts and personal
beliefs seemed to outweigh existential knowledge. How a little Howard
Zinn’s A People's History of the United States or Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States could have gone a long way to uniting the decedents of
America’s conquerors and the conquered peoples.
A
little less lying. Less suppression of the facts.
Sometime
in June of 1969, I applied and received my social security card and
became an employed citizen for the first time that summer, working as
a nurse’s aide, cleaning out bed pans and removing soiled
sheets. Mayor Richard J. Daley initiates a city-wide program whereby
high school students would gain work experience, not to mention, a
little pocket money. “Staying out of trouble” or “off
the streets” wasn’t an incentive, at least for us girls
on the Southside in the Catholic parish of St. Anselm where adults
operated a surveillance program. Any infraction was reported to “the
proper authorities,” that is, to parents and grandparents, if
the observer didn’t abide the “outside” authority
of nuns or priests.
Saving
to put aside money for the personal items I’ll need in my dorm
room at college, I’m thinking about being the first in my
family to fly off to college. A black and a girl.
In
July of 1969, Apollo 11, with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin,
and Michael Collins, head for the moon and a scheduled lunar walk on
its surface. I’d been watching these NASA launches since the
Mercury program began in in 1958. Astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil
Grissom fly in a suborbital pattern around our planet while on
February 20, 1962, John Glenn, in Friendship 7, took the Mercury
spacecraft into Earth’s orbit. So on July 20th, I’m
sitting in my grandfather’s armchair in front of our black and
white television, watching the first Moon boot steps down from
Eagle’s ladder. Then the next foot. Both feet firmly on the
moon. There’s a human life form from Earth on the Moon.
I’m
all of 15 years old, but I’m with him. I’m on the moon
with Armstrong and Aldrin.
Wernher
von Braun is hurriedly invited to come live in the US, work for the
US space program, provide the US with value intelligence regarding
rocket science.
At
Peenemünde Army base, the man responsible for orchestrating the
building of the V-2 rocket, work that began on August 28, 1948, is
also the man overseeing the carving out of anhydrite rock two
underground tunnels at Dora Mittelbau—with the slave labor of
prisoners from Buchenwald. Von Braun is determined to build his V-2
to travel five times the speed of light. Look out London, Brussels,
Paris. Many of the inhabitants of these cities, however, never had
time even to look up.
Von
Braun, Patrick Hicks writes in “V-2 and Saturn: A Tale of Two
Rockets,”, was “the center
of gravity for the V-2 program at Peenemünde: all major
decisions orbited around him, and he made sure his rockets hit their
intended target.”
But
the body count begins at home, at the site of creation. Ten thousand
Jews dig through the anhydrate, and no matter how many die where they
worked from tuberculous, typhoid, or pneumonia, writes Hicks, there
are replacements, almost as emaciated as the workers. When the dead
bodies were more than anyone could ignore, let alone walk over, Nazi
officials at the Dora Mittelbau camp asked headquarters for help. We
need our own oven! And more engineers arrive to build an oven to
dispose of human beings worked to death in the world’s largest
underground laboratory for the making of the V-2.
Von
Braun joins the Nazi Party in 1937, and he excels once he’s put
in charge of the camp at Dora Mittelbau. Heinrich Himmler pays a
visit and, so pleased at what he sees, Himmler promotes the young von
Braun to SS-Sturmbannführer von Braun. Hitler pays a visit and
the scientist presents a film in which the V-2 rocket soars off the
launch pad. Hitler promotes von Braun to “professor on the
spot.”
It’s
all good for von Braun, but not so for thousands of others. As Hicks
reports, von Braun’s V-2 kills 1,696 in Belgium, 1,403 in the
UK, 76 in France, and 19 in Holland. Twenty thousand mainly Jewish
prisoners lost their lives in the building of the V-2 rocket. At the
end of World War II, however, the Americans didn’t want to know
about the atrocities committed at Dora Mittelbau. The US Army may
have been stunned at the wonders uncovered in the tunnels, but it
“kept the crimes against humanity that occurred at Dora
classified.”
The
Russians! The Russians!
The
US “opened its arms to these men.” Walter Dornberger, von
Braun’s partner and “enthusiastic” Nazi, along with
Arthur Rudolph, who maintains a “constant supply of prisoners
at Dora,” are waved in.
Welcome!
Lady Liberty welcomes you all!
The
narrative of Operation Paperchip makes it possible to justify the
work permits of Nazi scientists as long as there’s no mention
of underground “tunnels” or “Jewish labor” or
the “V-2” or that ravine filled with human ashes at Dora
Mittelbau. In fact, Hicks argues, “sticky questions are made to
disappear” because these scientist were recognized as
“indispensable” for the development of space program that
would launch Americans beyond Earth’s orbit and on to the moon.
The
scientists, enjoying ticker-taped parades and awards, are promised
the moon: wealth and luxury, anything you desire! “Propellant
and sheet metal were given priority over blood and bone; certain
numbers were given priority over others.”
It
doesn’t seem likely that the two events, the Holocaust and the
Saturn V lifting off for the moon, happened, writes Hicks. But both
did happen. The horror of the Holocaust and the awe of the moon walk
in 1969.
Neither
events are impossible.
Months
before Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael
Collins are to land on the moon, the three, training in a remote
“moon-like desert” out West, encounter an Indigenous
elder. (Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind ).
For
several tribes, this territory is home.
What
are you doing here?
We
are part of a research expedition. Shortly, we’ll travel to the
moon.
The
elder is silent and then asks if the astronauts would do him a favor:
relay a message to the “‘holy spirits’” on
the moon. Our peoples who have gone on are there.
Of
course, and the astronauts are instructed to repeat, again and again,
the message in “tribal language.”
“‘What
does it mean?’”
Oh,
I can’t say, It’s a secret known only by member of the
tribes “‘and the moon spirits are allowed to know.’”
Back
at the base, the astronauts look around for a translator and find
one.
What
does it mean?
And
before the translator speaks, he laughs. “Uproariously.”
What
does it mean!
“‘Don’t
believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to
steal your lands.’”
Fifty
years ago on July 20, 1969, the Eagle lunar module lands on the moon.
Not long after, Armstrong becomes the first human to stand on that
lunar surface. Back on the spacecraft, Command Module Pilot Michael
Collins monitors from above. He’s taken what for me is an
amazing photo: in the foreground is the Eagle hovering above the
lunar surface and, in the distance, in the jet black of space, is
crescent-shaped sphere. Earth. All of life is on that small
sphere—except for the photographer, astronaut Micheal Collins.
In
Huntsville, Alabama, at what is now named the Wernher von Braun
Center, it’s namesake and his team is ecstatic.
I
wish the Nazi Wernher von Braun never existed, only the Saturn V
creator, scientist Wernher von Braun.
Nothing
good can come of deliberately ignorance!
I
didn’t know anything about von Braun when I was a young
follower of NASA’s early manned- space exploration programs.
I’m not even aware of the number of victims of the Holocaust.
And as for the “Soviet Union”--it’s an enemy with a
weapon that can wipe us out. So for years, we’re subject to
drills in which we hide under our desk or quickly walk, in line,
class by class, to the fallout shelter in the recreation center. I’m
not at all aware, at 15 years old, of the extent to which the
combined regimes of fascism and totalitarianism have systemically
tortured and killed over 15 million people and displaced millions.
And I read newspapers and books.
In
the 1950s and 1960s, the nuns made sure to educate us by presenting
us with documentaries featuring the sword - wielding crusaders,
ridding the world of evil doers. When it wasn’t the heroic
faces of those whose skin matched that of our teachers/religious
guardians, the nuns and priests, it was dark-skinned “Africans”
we were made to look upon with pity. In contrast to the nuns and
priests, and those victorious crusaders, Africans lived in an
unfortunate place, almost as distant from “civilization”
as the moon is from Earth. It was a jungle-like place where the
“uncivilized” had yet to come down from the trees and
walk on the Earth.
Closer
to home, nuns discuss decisions about our development with “Mother
Superior” as if as if our African American parents,
grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors who fled the brutal
conditions of Jim Crow segregation and the practice of lynching in
the South were mere apparitions without historical memory.
While
privy to snippets of stories about the normalization of injustice in
the South, I had never heard the story about NASA hiring black women
as mathematicians. These women are there for the Mercury Project.
They are at Mission Control in Houston, and they are there at
Huntsville. Mathematician Dorothy Vaughan is there at Langley
Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory. So are fellow mathematicians
Kathleen Johnson and Mary Jackson. Christine Darden is at the Control
Room at Langley’s Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel.
“I
can put names to almost 50 black women who worked as computers,
mathematicians, engineers or scientists at the Langley Memorial
Aeronautical Laboratory from 1943 through 1980,” writes Margot
Lee Shetterlyii (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race ) in the
Guardian, February 7, 2017. War had the African American women
marching off to NASA after the agency put out a call for
mathematicians.
I
tuned in to Star Trek on the television.
I
was five when then Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson created the NASA Act
of 1958—still too young to recognize in President John F.
Kennedy’s “Moon Speech,” May 25, 1961, both the
race to beat Russia and the challenge of our curiosity to want to
know what’s beyond our home planet. The exploration of space,
Kennedy said, is “one of the great adventures of all time.”
Humans
have been responsible for creating the worst possible conditions for
all life on this planet. Out of sheer ignorance, fear, we have as our
heritage wars and massacres that wipe out millions because of
religious or racial differences. Class differences. Gender
differences. “Imagined orders,” writes Harari. No good
reason whatsoever to be so ignorant. So violent.
How
is the definition of civilization to suggest the expending of mental
and physical energy to starve whole populations of people as Stalin
did in the Ukraine and in Poland? And currently, as the US and
Europeans manage by way of embargoes against it’s “enemies,”
subject children to a starvation diet, how do these “powers”
recognize themselves as “superior” beings? The von
Braun’s today, following the money, work as scientists and as
engineers for the US and Europe, devising high-tech weaponry that
will end up with dictatorships who, in turn, stomp their proverbial
iron boots on segments of their populations.
And,
nonetheless, despite the atrocities, humans walked on the moon!
It
wasn’t an all white, all male enterprise; it wasn’t all
about competition and military prowess.
I’ve
always considered the manned-space exploration program the best thing
humans have ever accomplished. Too see the inside of those 1960s and
1970s spacecrafts, to see the “technology” then, the
metal, wires, switches, is to wonder how was it possible to
accomplish the feat once, let alone 16 more times, through Apollo 17.
In all, “the two most important flights,” states Micheal
Collins, “were Apollo 8 and Apollo 11–8 about leaving and
11 about arriving.”
And
approximately 25,000 humans diggers of anhydrite rock at Dora
Mittelbau existed despite the cover up of the atrocities committed
there. This history can’t be dismissed, erased, hidden. This
violence of ignorance is foundational to our society. Isn’t it?
But we know now, don’t we?
Despite
the suppression of knowledge, I was there at NASA with the African
American women, contributing and witnessing the awesomeness of the
human potential for good.
Nichelle
Nichols, the actress who played Lieutenant Uhura on the original Star
Trek television series, notified Gene Roddenbery, the show’s
creator of her plans to leave the show. Word gets around. It’s
no longer a rumor.
A
week later, she is backstage after some event had ended and someone
asks if she had a few minutes to speak with a fan. A big fan! Nichols
assumes its a Trekkie. Another Trekkie. So Nichols turns to face this
big Trekkie fan.
It’s
Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. - another Trekkie fan!
“‘I
am the biggest Trekkie on the planet,’” King tells
Nichols. In the King family, everything comes to a halt when it’s
time to watch Star Trek. “‘And I am Lt. Uhura’s
most ardent fan.’”
King
was “shaken” by the news that Nichols had given notice to
leave the show, so he had to see her; she had to know that she
couldn’t just “abdicate” her position “on the
groundbreaking series.”
King
added: “‘You are changing the minds of people across the
world, because for the first time, through you, we see ourselves and
what can be.’”
Lt.
Uhura remained aboard the Enterprise as its chief communications
officer.
Star
Trek is canceled after three years on air; however, Nichols went on
to assist NASA in their efforts to recruit more women and people of
color to the space program. She assists with the recruitment, for
example, of Sally Ride, the first women astronaut while her role as
Uhura influences the first black female astronaut, Mae Jamison as
well as Whoopi Goldberg who plays the role of Guinan in Star Trek:
The Next Generation.
There
are always possibilities…
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