Many in the generation of Negro students who came of age in a decade defined by Brown v. Board of Education and Sputnik—the ones who in the future would be known as the civil rights generation—were drawn into the engineering profession for the “economic and social mobility” that was the result of the national demand for technical skills. Most of them were southerners; for them, there was no need to adjust to living conditions that they had known all their lives. In the mid-1960s, with “dreams of working at NASA,” greater numbers of black college students found their way to Langley. Many of
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