“Just like every other Black kid, you don’t get something and you convince yourself it wasn’t that important anyway,” Charles Bolden Jr., a former NASA administrator and Dwight’s friend, told The Washington Post.
Then, last week, Dwight broke another barrier when, at 90, he became the oldest person to travel into space. When he finally saw the view from 62 miles above Earth from a Blue Origin vessel, the atmosphere ended and his achievement began. Back on solid ground, friends said he spoke about how much it mattered to finally enter the cosmos.
When Dwight was first offered a seat on the May 19 flight, he thought about declining the offer. (Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.)
“I’m a really busy guy,” said Dwight, who became an accomplished sculptor after his astronaut training. “It didn’t make a lot of difference to me at the time.”
A group of current and former Black astronauts — including Bolden, NASA’s Victor J. Glover Jr. and Leland D. Melvin — helped change his mind. Dwight had trained for years to go to space — he should finish what he started, he recalled his friends saying.
Bolden remembers Dwight telling them how he had lied to himself for all these years about how it didn’t matter. Having lunch with one of the astronauts the day before the launch, Bolden said Dwight admitted it: “There’s this hole in me. I didn’t realize it was there because I had convinced myself it was okay.”
Dwight didn’t spend time as a child in Kansas City, Kan., dreaming about becoming an astronaut. In part, because no human had ever been one.
Dwight was an Air Force pilot when his commander in chief called upon him.
As Dwight describes it: President John F. Kennedy was looking to garner more Black votes when civil rights leader Whitney Young realized the nation’s military academies were graduating talented Black engineers who wouldn’t be accepted into graduate school.
The solution was to train a Black astronaut.
The White House began searching for a Black pilot with all of the qualifications. It landed on Ed Dwight.
“I had to be talked into it,” he said. “I wasn’t interested. I had a great military career going.”
NASA was three years old at the time, and “nobody knew anything about space,” Dwight said. His mother, Georgia Dwight, talked him into it.
Dwight’s acceptance to the space program was headline news in the Black press. Jet magazine interviewed his mother, who recalled what her son said when he learned he would be an astronaut trainee: “Mother, I may be the first man on the moon.”
He entered the program as a pilot with 2,000 hours of airtime and an aeronautical engineering degree from Arizona State University.
As he expected, Dwight quickly met resistance.
“There were forces of darkness that didn’t want this to happen because they thought it would spoil the sacred nature of the space-exploration effort,” he said. “It could have hurt NASA quite badly.”
Dwight said NASA wanted no part of sending a Black man to space, so the Air Force created the Manned Orbiting Laboratory run by Col. Charles E. “Chuck” Yeager.
He entered the program to an icy reception from his fellow pilots. Dwight was the White House’s special pick, and none of them were talking on the phone every day or two to Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general.
And then there was Yeager. The first person to go faster than the speed of sound was also quick to let Dwight know how he felt in weekly meetings.
Dwight remembers Yeager often pulling from his jacket a piece of paper with names listed: “I got 150 White boys here that are more competent than you,” Dwight remembers him saying. Yeager also implored Dwight “to give up your spot to one of these deserving White boys.”
In 2019, Yeager denied the racism but agreed that he did not think Dwight should have been in the program.
“Isn’t it great that Ed Dwight found his true calling and became an accomplished sculptor?” Yeager told the New York Times in an email. Yeager died in December 2020.
Dwight remained in the program, protected by the Oval Office until Nov. 22, 1963 — the day President Kennedy was assassinated.
Dwight recalls the mood shifting immediately: “The president is gone, now we can get rid of Dwight.”
Three days after the assassination, Dwight received orders shipping him to Germany to be the United States’ liaison to its space program. Germany did not have a space program at the time.
Dwight said he flew to Washington, where Bobby Kennedy cooled him down.
When Dwight returned to Edwards Air Force Base in California, he had orders sending him to help Canada’s nonexistent space program. The Canadian space agency was created in 1989.
Many of the men in his graduating class went to space, including David Scott.
The U.S. government spent nearly a quarter-million dollars to train Dwight, according to a June 1965 story in Ebony magazine. The piece showed how Dwight had been sent out to pasture, the 31-year-old pilot testing bomber instrumentations in Ohio because NASA didn’t want him.
The magazine also mentioned a 15-page report that Dwight submitted to the Air Force detailing the racial discrimination he faced.
One of the reported instances was a meeting with a high-ranking officer, who said: “Who got you into this school? Was it the NAACP, or are you some kind of Black Muslim out here to make trouble? … Why in the hell would a colored guy want to go into space anyway? As far as I’m concerned there’ll never be one to do it. And if it was left to me, you guys wouldn’t even get a chance to wear an Air Force Uniform.” (A 2013 book claimed that Yeager was the officer.)
Dwight resigned from the program in 1966.
‘Presence of greatness’
Dwight moved to Denver, started sculpting and began telling himself he didn’t need to go to space.
He became a prolific sculptor, with works commissioned by federal and state agencies for national parks and statehouses, depicting Black heroes such as Frederick Douglass and A. Philip Randolph. Many of his pieces center on space, showing shuttles shooting skyward.
Bolden, the former NASA administrator, said he met Dwight in 1980. He remembered being a high school kid in Columbia, S.C., reading Ebony and Jet stories about Dwight and beaming with pride that a fellow Black person was preparing for space.
In 1986, when Bolden was on his first shuttle mission, Dwight gave him a bronze and silver sculpture of a T-38 training plane shooting toward the stars.
Congress confirmed the recommendation for Bolden to lead NASA in July 2009. In his Senate nomination speech, Bolden described Dwight as “a trailblazer in an attempt to break the color barrier in America’s astronaut program.”
Bolden said two other Black astronauts, Bernard A. Harris Jr. and Melvin, helped get Dwight to space.
Bolden said Harris and others convinced Blue Origin Senior Vice President Michael Edmonds how special it would be to let Dwight finish his mission.
Bolden was there with three other Black astronauts to see Dwight leave this planet. One of them was Glover.
“While he was off the planet, I was weeping. It was tears of joy and resolution,” Glover, whose plans include going to the moon for NASA, told The Post.
Glover said he met Dwight in 2007 during an award presentation. Glover said he remembers thinking how nice it was to receive the sculpture of two fighter jets from the sculptor himself. Only later did Glover learn Dwight’s identity and story.
“I was in the presence of greatness and didn’t even know it,” Glover said.
The two stayed in touch. During his 168 days aboard the International Space Station, Glover kept a public service medal that Dwight received from Space Force.
Glover has been amazed that Dwight isn’t bitter and that he can joke about the situation.
“Sixty years he sat with this and navigated it with dignity and grace and class, and that is impactful to me,” Glover said.
Dwight said space was just like he thought it would be. He was curious about liftoff. The weightlessness was nothing new to him because, as a military astronaut, he had floated plenty of times. What he most wanted was the view.
“It was fantastic, and I’m glad I did it,” he said.
Blue Origin honored the man, said Bolden, by naming Dwight’s seat after his call sign: Justice.
