My wife Jenny has just made me aware of a lost chapter of American history that is at once uplifting and downcasting, both inspiring and ... sort of ... not ... inspiring.
A new documentary by Ken Burns (or whatever) tells the story of the old Negro space program, in large part through interviews with the original Blackstronauts themselves:
A lot of people today, they don't think about it. They say "Oh, they're putting a man on the moon" or "Oh, they're putting up another space shuttle." But you see, they don't realize that in the early days of the space program, NASA was whites-only ... It was it a different time, you understand. See, in 1957 if you were black — and if you were an astronaut — you were out of work.
You can watch the nearly 11-minute film (which was excluded from the Sundance Film Festival on the pretense that it was not submitted to the Sundance Film Festival) at www.negrospaceprogram.com.
Very well-done parody.
Posted by: Evan | November 03, 2005 at 06:34 PM