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A special New York Times project on the story of Edward Dwight Jr., as told by Emily Ludolph in today’s paper, almost never happened. It just so happened that last November, Emily was digging through The New York Times’s archives for a different assignment when she came across a photograph of a handsome young pilot paired with a headline from 1965 that caught her eye. It was a story about something that almost did happen: “Negro Pilot Finds Bias in Air Force: But Absolves NASA on Being Dropped as Astronaut.”



“I know about the moon story, and I had no idea who he is and how he fits into it,” Ms. Ludolph said.



“A single photograph can lead you down such an amazing rabbit hole,” said Veronica Chambers, the editor of Past Tense, a Times initiative that uses our archives to tell new stories. “And that’s, to me, part of the treasure of the archives — is that there are just so many stories waiting to be discovered.”



Mr. Dwight was an Air Force pilot who came close to becoming the first black astronaut to go to the moon. He recounted the difficulties he faced being the only person of color during his aerospace training at the heights of both the Space Race and the civil rights movement.

“An astronaut is such an important character in the American mythos,” Ms. Ludolph said.



Mr. Dwight’s role in the Space Race intersected with what Ms. Ludolph called “some of the biggest players of American history,” like President John F. Kennedy (who personally called Mr. Dwight’s parents to congratulate them on their son’s acceptance to the space program), Whitney Young and Edward R. Murrow.



So, Ms. Ludolph continued to dig. She found that after leaving the military, Mr. Dwight received a Master of Fine Arts degree and became a successful sculptor specializing in African-American issues. A Google search showed his current location: Denver.



“Ed may have felt that history had forgotten him because he never actually got to go to the moon,” Ms. Chambers said.

Ms. Ludolph was quite nervous to make the initial call to Mr. Dwight — worried, perhaps, that that time in his life might be too painful to recall decades later.