DON GONYEA, HOST:
There's an important part of the story of how America got to the moon that you probably don't know. A new podcast from LAist Studios and Reasonable Volume wants to change that. Called The Other Moonshot, it reveals the untold story of three Black aerospace engineers in Los Angeles and the crucial roles they played in the Apollo program. One of those men is Charlie Cheathem, the godfather of the show's host, Joanne Higgins. Here's Joanne with an excerpt of The Other Moonshot.
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JOANNE HIGGINS: Everything you've heard about the moon landing usually starts on a stage at Rice University in Houston, Texas, September 12, 1962. President Kennedy is at the podium wearing a black suit.
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JOHN F KENNEDY: Distinguished guests and ladies and gentlemen. For we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.
HIGGINS: The people behind him are wiping their foreheads with handkerchiefs and squinting into the sun. That day, he gave one of his most impassioned speeches.
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KENNEDY: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.
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HIGGINS: It was meant to inspire the country. It didn't work on everyone.
CHARLIE CHEATHEM: I don't believe a sane government is going to do any kind of crazy crap like going to the moon.
HIGGINS: Charlie was 33 years old when he heard that speech. He was living on the edge of Compton. He was working as an engineer at North American Aviation, a major American aerospace manufacturer. But Charlie was not inspired. He thought the whole thing was nuts.
CHEATHEM: The notion of going to the moon, I didn't think our creator was going to let us go off the face of the Earth and screw up the heavens. As a Black man, they can't handle the [expletive] down here on earth. So I don't want nothing to do with that thing.
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GIL SCOTT-HERON: A rat done bit my sister Nell with whitey on the moon. Her face and arms began to swell, and whitey's on the moon. I can't pay no doctor bills, but whitey's on the moon. Ten years from now, I'll be payin' still.
HIGGINS: To be fair, most Black people were not big fans of the moonshot.
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SCOTT-HERON: 'Cause whitey's on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but whitey's on the moon.
HIGGINS: This spoken word poem is by the great American poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron. "Whitey On The Moon," published now by Ace Records, was released in 1970. It channeled almost a decade of frustration - what it was like watching America's achievement in aerospace overshadow the struggle for equality.
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SCOTT-HERON: How come I ain't got no money here? Whitey's on the moon.
HIGGINS: Both Gil and Charlie, they wanted the government to deal with the challenges down here.
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SCOTT-HERON: To whitey on the moon.
HIGGINS: In 1962, the Voting Rights Act had not been written yet. School desegregation was less than 10 years old.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: The white population are determined to prevent colored students from going to the school their own children attend. Picketing the school, they clash with the police.
HIGGINS: That's footage from 1957, taken by Movietone News, showing the violent school desegregation in Arkansas. Kennedy believed his moonshot would open up opportunities for people of color. That's why Black Americans voted for him, because he promised to focus on civil rights. But the government seemed to be going back on that promise. Instead of fixing the problems here on American soil, millions of dollars were being spent on rockets.
Despite Charlie's initial reaction to Kennedy's speech, he went on to become one of the most important aerospace engineers on the Apollo Project, a remarkable transformation for someone who did have, and still has, very complicated feelings about one of America's greatest achievements. I was really intensely curious about what it was like for him, and how did he do it? This was a question I'd been trying to get an answer to all my life. Most of that time, I knew the basic outline of how Charlie became an aerospace pioneer.
The story starts in Southern California at North American Aviation, where Charlie worked. The company was awarded a contract to work on the moonshot. They were responsible for the second-stage rocket and one of the most important pieces, the command module, which housed the astronauts. At North American Aviation, most of the people Charlie worked with were white. But there were a handful of Black engineers, including Charlie, who were instrumental in getting Apollo to the moon.
When I think about the Apollo rocket mission in the 1960s and what it took to get there, the version I play in my head is like that scene in the movie "The Right Stuff," where Ed Harris is walking through the airplane hangar, flanked by a crew of flannel-wearing pilots. They're ready to change the world. But in my version of the story...
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HIGGINS: ...Charlie is Ed Harris, strutting in slow motion with a crew of well-dressed Black engineers by his side - engineers like Nate LeVert, science fiction lover, Air Force veteran, avid golfer.
NATE LEVERT: Boy, look at that. My unit's going to fly.
HIGGINS: Nate designed the engine propellant system for the second-stage rocket and worked on all of the Apollo launches. Shelby Jacobs, novelty pipe collector, skier, champion bridge player, rocket propulsion engineer.
SHELBY JACOBS: I was never limited to my own limitations.
HIGGINS: Shelby designed the camera system that went up in the Apollo 6, the same camera system that took the very first photos of the Earth's curvature from space.
JACOBS: I didn't ask to work on the cameras. They came and got me, because they knew that I was a can-do kind of guy.
HIGGINS: In my mind, the first wave of Black engineers of North American Aviation, like Charlie, Nate and Shelby, they all get the heroes walk, because the Apollo mission had a problem. And this team of engineers, these are the heroes who have come to save the day. In my head, that's what should have happened.
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HIGGINS: In reality, their drive and persistence got them in the door. But the door was only open because the government mandated it. North American hired Black workers as a part of a 1961 executive order by John F. Kennedy. It required government contractors to take, quote, "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are treated without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin." Kennedy wanted space to be for everyone. But was it?
CHEATHEM: See, when people out willing to do bad [expletive] to you, which they did daily to me in the company, and my other fellow Black people, it rips your guts out.
HIGGINS: I grew up listening to Charlie, and I knew a lot of his story. But most people have never heard of him. I mean, you can't even Google his name, something that really rubs Charlie the wrong way. Somehow he and Nate and Shelby and others, they've been forgotten. This is my attempt to correct the record. I wanted the world to know about these incredible men who were born in the early 1900s, who grew up on farms, whose parents picked cotton, who were told because of their skin color, they could not become engineers ever and who refused to listen. They took us on an unforgettable ride to places that no human had ever been before. Frankly, the time for them to tell their stories is running out.
JACOBS: What happened to us in aerospace, it's been a hell of a ride.
HIGGINS: We're going to reveal the untold story of the men behind one of our greatest scientific achievements and one of our biggest societal failures.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Ignition sequence starts - five, four, three, two, one, zero. Launch commit. Liftoff. We have liftoff.
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KENNEDY: And it is one of the great adventures of all time.
GONYEA: That was an excerpt from The Other Moonshot, a podcast from LAist Studios and Reasonable Volume. You can find all the episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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