About this item

This "surprising and insightful" history profiles ten African American engineers, mathematicians, and others who worked for NASAs space program (Lauren Helmuth, New York Times Book Review) .The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. NASA itself became an agent of social change, with President Kennedy opening its workplaces to African Americans. In We Could Not Fail, Richard Paul and Steven Moss profile ten pioneer African American space workers whose stories illustrate the role NASA and the space program played in promoting civil rights.Paul and Moss recount how these technicians, mathematicians, engineers, and an astronaut candidate surmounted barriers and navigated being the sole African American in a NASA work group. These brave and determined men went on to help transform Southern society by integrating colleges, patenting new inventions, holding elective office, and reviving and governing defunct towns. Adding new names to the roster of civil rights heroes and a new chapter to the story of space exploration, We Could Not Fail demonstrates how African Americans broke the color barrier by competing successfully at the highest level of American intellectual and technological achievement.



About the Author

Richard Paul

As Director of Research and Professional Development at the Center for Critical Thinking and Chair of the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, Dr. Paul is an internationally recognized authority on critical thinking, with eight books and over 200 articles on the subject. He has written books for every grade level and has done extensive experimentation with teaching tactics and strategies, and devising, among other things, novel ways to engage students in rigorous self-assessment.Dr. Paul has received four degrees and has given lectures on critical thinking at many universities in both the United States and abroad, including Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and the universities of Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, British Columbia, Toronto, and Amsterdam. He taught beginning and advanced courses in critical thinking at the university level for over 20 years. He has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including Distinguished Philosopher (by the Council for Philosophical Studies, 1987), O.C. Tanner Lecturer in Humanities (by Utah State University, 1986), Lansdown Visiting Scholar (by the University of Victoria, 1987), and the Alfred Korsybski Memorial Lecturer (by the Institute for General Semantics, 1987).His views on critical thinking have been canvassed in the New York Times, Education Week, The Chronicle of Higher Education, American Teacher, Reader's Digest, Educational Leadership, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. For more information about Dr. Paul and the work of the Center and Foundation for Critical Thinking, go to www.criticalthinking.org



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