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by Dr. Bernard E. Powers

posted by Anna V. Miller

Ed Dwight Returns From Space Finally

On May 19^th, 2024, Blue Origin the aerospace manufacturer made special news with its latest flight into space. The six member crew included ninety-year-old African American Ed Dwight, the oldest person ever to fly into space. That fact is significant enough but there is much more to Dwight’s story. His life is a window on critically important aspects of America’s twentieth century racial history, and it has a special connection to South Carolina. Stories like this one perfectly illustrate the truth of William Faulkner’s insight into history when he observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Even as a youngster Ed Dwight broke barriers when in the late 1940s he integrated the local Catholic high school in Kansas City, Kansas and graduated in 1951. Two years later, after completing an associate’s degree in engineering, he enlisted in the Air Force and eventually completed a degree in aeronautical engineering from Arizona State University. While in the Air Force he became a pilot and attained the rank of captain. By the early 1960s Dwight’s record of achievement earned spot at the prestigious Edwards Air Force Base Aerospace Research Pilot School which was an incubator for future astronauts. As a test pilot he learned to fly the most sophisticated airplanes in the United States military arsenal and taught others to do so.

This was the height of the Cold War as the United States, and the Soviet Union competed militarily and diplomatically for influence around the world. In that contest for “hearts and minds,” America’s woeful state of race relations in the 1950s and early 1960s became the country’s Achilles heel. Domestically, mass civil rights demonstrations, including sit-ins and freedom rides challenged racial segregation and the White South violently defended the status quo. The Soviets used these scenes to great advantage, particularly in the developing world where their propaganda routinely denounced American hypocrisy. President John F. Kennedy, a supporter of civil rights and the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) recognized this problem and urged the Pentagon to diversity the rising corps of astronauts with an African American. Ed Dwight became that first candidate. However, by late 1963, after completing the first phases of the program and securing the recommendation of the Air Force, for reasons that have never been fully explained, NASA did not select him for advanced astronaut training. Many, including Dwight, believe the decision was simply based on race.  After President Kennedy was assassinated Dwight was transferred from Edwards Air Force Base and in 1966 he resigned from the Air Force.

After working in the corporate world for years, Dwight’s second passion for art was reawakened and he enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Denver where he earned a degree in sculpture. Using both technical and artistic skills he embarked upon a highly successful second career as a sculptor.  His specialty is creating commemorative works of art focusing on African American history and its iconic leaders. In the last half-century Dwight has created a most impressive body of work which includes over 120 memorials and public monuments and 18,000 gallery sculptures dispersed around the country. Often the figures depicted are well known subjects. Dwight has sculpted at least seven statues of Martin Luther King Jr. and several of abolitionist and Civil War heroine Harriet Tubman. Others are less familiar such as Mary F. Lumpkin, the Richmond freedwoman who provided the initial land for the freedman’s school that eventually evolved into the HBCU Virginia Union University.

Ed Dwight was motivated by a profound regret that more was not known about the African American experience, but he was also driven by the knowledge that certain aspects of its history had been consciously suppressed. He relished the opportunity to use public art as a corrective to these socially constructed and racist silences. An example is his memorial to the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, the worst the nation has ever witnessed. This multi-figurative monument includes elements from the riot but also a twenty-five foot Tower of Reconciliation which depicts the long struggle of African Americans in Oklahoma against injustice.

African American Monument Columbia, SC

Ed Dwight’s work can be found in South Carolina also. In 2001 his panoramic monument to the black history of South Carolina was unveiled on the state house grounds in Columbia. Consisting of twelve semi-circular panels on granite walls with a tall obelisk in the center, each displays a different theme from the seventeenth century to the present. To date it is the only monument of its kind erected at a state capital. The installation was part of a legislative compromise that relocated the Confederate Flag from atop the capitol building to the Confederate Soldiers’ Monument on the state house grounds.

The Denmark Vesey and the Spirit of Freedom Monument is another of Dwight’s creations. Denmark Vesey was a free black who planned a slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822. Before the plans could mature, word leaked out and he and thirty-four others were tried and executed. In the 1990s Burke High School social studies teacher Henry Darby organized a community group to properly commemorate Denmark Vesey in a city park. Many whites criticized the project, and it took about eighteen years to complete. Ed Dwight showed a deep commitment to this project and persevered with the committee through those years. Finally, during Black History Month in 2014 he unveiled this important figurative monument to great public accolades in Charleston’s Hampton Park.

Ed Dwight at the Vesey Monument Unveiling

Dwight’s most recent contribution to African American public art here, a fourteen foot bronze statue memorializing Harriet Tubman was installed in June at Beaufort’s Tabernacle Baptist Church. Tubman has long been recognized as an escaped slave whose numerous forays into the South led many other enslaved people to freedom. Although few know it, she liberated far more people in South Carolina than any other place. During the Civil War she was in the Beaufort-Port Royal area working for the Union Army as a nurse and spy. In the latter capacity she gathered information about Confederate military operations, geography and planter resources which were strategically valuable to the Union forces. Early in June 1863, she played a leading role in the Union Army’s raid against plantations on the Lower Combahee River in which over 750 enslaved people were liberated. This latest monument to Tubman is located proximate to a bust of Robert Smalls, another distinguished African American Civil War hero.

Ed Dwight is also an American hero on multiple fronts. Upon his return from space on May 19^th he stepped from the space capsule and said, “I thought I really didn’t need this in my life. . . . but, now, I need it in my life …. I am ecstatic.”  He was finally an astronaut. Mission accomplished. It was a full circle moment for Ed Dwight, for the first time reconciling this episode from the past and the present. He is in the record book as an astronaut who made history. Fortunately, he is also a sculptor whose many works in the landscape will help others through the ages to learn more about their history.

Selected Sources:

“Ed Dwight Was Going to Be the First African American in Space. Until He Wasn’t” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ed-dwight-first-african-american-space-until-wasnt-180974215/, accessed August 8, 2024.

“Ed Dwight shows ‘the angst, all the emotions’ of black heroes in sculpture”           https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/28/ed-dwight-honouring-americas-black-heroes-in-sculpture, accessed August 7, 2024

“African American Monument-The South Carolina Picture Project” https://www.scpictureproject.org/richland-county/african-american-monument.html accessed August 4, 2024

“Ed Dwight, America’s first Black astronaut candidate, finally goes to space 60 years later”  https://www.cpr.org/2024/05/19/ed-dwight-americas-first-black-astronaut-candidate-finally-goes-to-space-60-years-later/, accessed August 8, 2024.

Ed Dwight Sculptor and Historian https://www.eddwight.com/ accessed August 5, 2024

Edda Fields-Black, Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War Oxford University, 2024