It shouldn’t be surprising that race was a key subplot in Alabama’s part in the drama leading to the Apollo 11 moon shot 50 years ago. Race was part of every drama in Alabama in the 1960s.

But consider this timeline.

On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space riding a Mercury Redstone rocket built by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

That same month on May 14, seven blacks and six whites got on a bus in Washington, D.C., bound for New Orleans. It was the first Freedom Ride.

Ten days after that on May 24, the bus was fire-bombed in Anniston, Ala.

The following day May 25, President John F. Kennedy told Congress that America would go to the moon.

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And one week after that, a white crowd rioted in Montgomery as the “freedom riders” reached that Alabama city.

Kennedy had just won the presidency in 1960, and he was immediately caught up in two big challenges. He wanted and needed to show the world that America’s system was the answer to global Communism. And he also wanted to support black Americans in their push for civil rights.

Apollo 11 Splashdown Celebration at Huntsville. Von Braun, Dr. W, Being carried to The Speaker's Platform. (MIX FILE)

Going to the moon would be part of the proof that America’s system was best. And Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, would use the space program to advance black progress in the American South.

It made sense. The South was critical to the Apollo program, and it was the stage for the civil rights drama. Alabama had Wernher von Braun and the German team that would design the moon rockets on a military base in Huntsville. Florida had one of the best locations in America to launch those rockets into space. And Houston would lead the manned spaceflight program with Texas native and Vice President Lyndon Johnson running the National Aeronautics and Space Council.

It took the decade and 400,000 people across America to make Kennedy’s vision of a lunar landing a reality, and the South would change more during that decade than anywhere in America.

Historians say NASA took specific steps to hire black team members in Alabama. It created a “contractors’ group” to pressure other contractors to hire black employees. It hired a man named Charlie Smoot as “the first black recruiter” to seek black professionals across the country.

And the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville reached out to historically black colleges and universities and invited representatives to Huntsville in 1963. They allowed black students to join the center’s co-op program, and the program’s first recruits are part of NASA and American space history. They were Walter Applewhite, Frank C. Williams, Jr. Wesley Carter, George Bourda, Tommy Dubone, William Winfield and Morgan Watson.

There were only a few blacks employed at Marshall at that time, and the story goes that no one in town would rent the first six black co-op students an apartment or a hotel room. They describe attending concerts in town where the audience was divided by a rope with blacks on one side and whites on the other.

The carrot was federal dollars, but Johnson was willing to use the stick if the carrot didn’t work. According to one story, Johnson told then U.S. Sen. John Sparkman of Huntsville that the Marshall center could go away if doors weren’t opened to blacks in Huntsville.

As told by longtime Huntsville Times reporter and editor Bob Ward, Sparkman got the word to key businessmen. He had just left Johnson’s office, Sparkman said, and the new president was “madder than hell because they (Marshall Center) can’t get anybody to come to Huntsville (for employment interviews) other than lily-white males, mostly.”

Johnson reportedly threatened to make NASA in Huntsville “cease to be” if doors weren’t opened in the town to blacks. A plan was made, and a black funeral home owner named R.E. Nelms was asked to order a meal at the local King’s Inn hotel restaurant. Nelms went on the night planned – his steak was reportedly “inedible” – but word went to Washington that Huntsville restaurants were now serving blacks.

Despite the plans, recruiters and advisory councils, other reports say black hiring never got above 3 percent of the workforce on the Apollo program.

The book “We Could Not Fail: The first African Americans in the Space Program” says von Braun personally “actually paid attention to the issue” and was committed to change. The Marshall center’s actions “would go above and beyond anything done elsewhere by NASA in the South,” according to authors Richard Paul and Steven Moss.

In 1964, Charles Smoot recruited Earnest C. Smith to Marshall Space Flight Center where he took a position as aerospace engineer in the Astrionics Laboratory. There, he performed analyses and evaluations of the guidance, control and navigations systems for the Saturn launch vehicles.

But progress came ever so slowly when it came at all. The book reports on a study by researcher and sociologist Peter Dodd by the Academy of Arts and Sciences, who was reportedly shocked to find technological progress had little effect on social views.

In Huntsville, Dodd found a tech-savvy workforce of with little sympathy for blacks seeking more fair treatment. To NASA workers, blacks seeking equality were a group they would probably have to engage, but of no real personal concern. The people who didn’t work for the space program were more conservative, and they blamed NASA in part for the pressure for change put on their community.

This NASA pressure could be convenient, the book said. Locals could blame “Yankees” and “outsiders” for the changes in their communities; reformers could use the push-back to shame the federal government into more action.

A key player locally in the change was Clyde Foster, who was called “The Country Spartacus” in the book. Foster pressured NASA to give black employees the training they needed to advance, and NASA responded with another training program at Alabama A&M University in Huntsville. Trainers came from as far as Nashville, and the book says 100 black employees to the training and qualified for better jobs thanks to Foster.

Von Braun was genuinely committed to integration, many believe. He sat on the stage at Miles College in Birmingham during the early 1960s to support its plan to build a new physics building even though Miles students were leaders of the boycotts and protests disrupting the city.

Did NASA really make a difference in Alabama’s racial journey? Looking back from the vantage point of time, the book concludes that whatever the motive, the agency’s efforts were real. But they were perhaps ineffective. The agency tried and failed, the book says, and then it tried again and failed “less badly.” The reasons were both complex and simple. The forces that reformers were fighting were deep and entrenched. That was the complicated part. The simple part was the agency had that other big priority at the time – the race to the Moon.

(Updated on July 3, 2019 to make corrections in the location of Kennedy’s 1961 speech referred to in the timeline, which was made to Congress, and to report that NASA invited black students to join an existing co-op program. Also, NASA in Huntsville did have black employees at the time of the co-op program reference.)

We’e celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 with stories through the month. You can find the full collection of stories, from AL.com staff and others, here: Apollo 11 Anniversary.