Reaching Up, Not Down
by David Sims
CHUCK YEAGER has died at the age of 97. He was from West Virginia, the state where I live. He was an Air Force ace and test pilot. He was also the first man to break the sound barrier in the experimental aircraft X-1. He risked his life for his country many times, both in combat and otherwise. He was a true American hero.
Soon after Yeager’s death, however, the rabid anti-White left began spitting on his reputation. Why? Because while he was in charge of an astronaut training program, he didn’t reach down far enough to include a certain Black applicant as a member of the US astronaut team at NASA. Why not? Because that Black man, Ed Dwight, wasn’t qualified enough to be competitive for that role.
But the leftists are trying, now, to rewrite history and put undeserved blame on Chuck Yeager.
Former US President John F. Kennedy used manned spaceflight as a means of garnering goody points as a “civil rights” leader. That’s the source of the pressure that was brought to bear on the Air Force in general, and on Yeager in particular, to find a Negro who could be one of NASA’s astronauts.
The nearest the Air Force could come to such a person was Ed Dwight. Dwight’s academic skills were poor. He did not have an engineering background. His school grades were low. But he had already been Affirmative-Actioned into the rank of captain, and he could, somewhat, fly certain military aircraft. There were other Air Force pilots who could fly fighter jets much more skillfully than Ed Dwight could. But none of them were Black, so they could not be used to satisfy President Kennedy’s demand for a Black astronaut.
The story of how Ed Dwight got shoehorned into the NASA astronaut program, where he got special tutoring that none of the other astronaut trainees got, and where he barely squeaked by despite this special tutoring to graduate at the very bottom of his class (26th of 26 trainees), is related in in the book Whitey on the Moon, by Paul Kersey, in the sections entitled “The Wrong Stuff — the Ed Dwight Story: John F. Kennedy’s Crusade to Find and Promote a ‘Negro Astronaut'” and “Yeager Bombed Ed Dwight.”
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Source: Author
For further reading:
Yale's "Diversity": White Students, Step Back
The White Commander
Psychological Factors in Establishing a Presence on Mars
This Is Rocket Science
Possible Racial Spoofing at NASA/JPL During Cassini End-of-Mission Video
Trump Signs NASA Bill Aimed at Sending People to Mars
The Great Dispossession
Afronautica Deceptiva
Dwight was a skilled jet pilot with a full engineering BS degree. He graduated 8th out of 16 in his Aerospace Research Pilot Class in December 1963 and was assigned as Director of Flight Test at the USAF Bomber Command at Wright Patterson AFB. He wore the same color uniform and the same officer bars that I did. He didn’t measure up to the exacting NASA astronaut standards and was not ‘shoe-horned’ in. The issue here ought to be the vicious fake ‘racist’ charges against Yeager, not any hypothetical flaws in a man who volunteered to lay his life on the line for his country [have you ever done that?].
Here’s my quota essay on the Yeager smear.
https://www.quora.com/Was-Chuck-Yeager-a-racist/answer/James-Oberg-1?prompt_topic_bio=1
In all fairness, Tom Wolf’s “The Right Stuff” is the most widely disseminated account of the Ed Dwight experience. I don’t recall that account indicating whether Dwight successfully completed the ARPS. Some of the other accounts in Wolf’s book lead me to believe it is not the most authoritative research of the topic. I am a life long follower of the space program and I had never heard of Ed Dwight until I read TRS. Wikipedia indicates that Dwight earned an Associates degree in engineering which does not require the same intensive treatment in a subject as a Bachelors degree. This suggests that Dwight was not as proficient in engineering as Mr. Oberg (who has written many fine works on the space program) indicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Dwight When the qualifications and skills… Read more »
Search for pictures of sr-71 blackbird. Search for pictures of mud huts. Tell readers how the people who created the sr-71 stole mud hut technology to do it. Tell us why we need dwight for anything
Never a Negro on Luna or even in near-earth
orbit. A Negro from South Carolina managed
to get a few miles above the Florida flatlands
in 1986. The attempt was called “Challenger.”
He did not stay very long up there…
Ed Dwight was supposed to be the “first Negro” to walk on the moon… If JFK had not been shot cargo known as Ed Dwight would likely have been transported to the moon to be the first sub-human to drag his knuckles across the lunar surface….
…and as good karma would have it, a Jew
named Ilan Ramon did make near-Earth orbit.
This Hebrew was aboard the doomed orbiter
“Columbia” where – of all possible places –
met his end over Palestine….the one in
Texas, but not the one in the Levant. Still
however, it is the thought that counts!
Most Blacks can’t even swim…..