Dwight was born on September 9th, 1933, in Kansas City, where he grew up near Fairfax Airport. This municipal airport was turned into an Army Air Force base during World War II. Being in close proximity to the airfield, he often went there to marvel at the planes, hoping that one of the pilots would give him a ride.
Making history as the oldest to ever do so, 90-year-old Ed Dwight finally fulfilled his dream to reach space
“They’d say to me, ‘Hey kid, would you clean my airplane? I’ll give you a dime,'” Dwight shared his memories. But he aspired for more; he wanted to fly.
It took years before Dwight decided to become a pilot himself, mainly because at the time, it was considered to be the domain of white men. That changed when he stumbled upon a newspaper image of a Black pilot in Korea.
In 1961, Dwight was chosen by President John F. Kennedy to train as an astronaut, but was ultimately not selected for NASA
“Oh my God, they’re letting Black people fly,” Dwight thought back then. “I went straight to the recruitment office and said, ‘I want to fly.’ My first flight was the most exhilarating thing in the world. There were no streets or stop signs up there. You were free as a bird.”
His hard work and remarkable progress in the Air Force led him to be handpicked by President John F. Kennedy’s White House to join Chuck Yeager’s test pilot program at Edwards Air Force Base in California’s Mojave Desert.
At that time, with America’s focus on the space race, all eyes of Black America were on Dwight.
“I received about 1,500 pieces of mail a week, which were stored in large containers at Edwards Air Force Base. Some of it came to my mother in Kansas City. Most of my mail was just addressed to Astronaut Dwight, Kansas City, Kansas,” he recalled. Despite the immense public attention, the opportunity to become the first Black astronaut vanished since he was never selected for the space program for reasons that remain unknown to this day.
From 1966, Dwight spent a decade as an entrepreneur before transitioning to sculpture as a means to depict the story of Black history. He spent decades creating large-scale monuments of iconic Black figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. He created more than 20,000 gallery works, and 130 public works were installed in museums and public spaces across the U.S. and Canada.
On the 19th of May, Ed Dwight became the 21st Black American astronaut to fly into space and the oldest one in history to do so.
No one knows what a difference he would have made if he had actually flown to the edge of the space decades ago, yet now, Dwight definitely left a deep mark in people’s hearts by showing that it’s never too late to blast off toward your dreams; it’s just a matter of persistence and time.
Image credit: Blue Origin
