Discrimination in housing remained the standard, but postwar economic mobility had given families like hers and Dorothy Vaughan’s the means to move out of once-vibrant developments like Newsome Park and into comfortable, leafy, all-black subdivisions. Katherine Johnson certainly knew all about the housing issue. The bill only made it over the finish line in the wake of the 1968 assassination of Dr. The Housing Rights Act of 1968, making it illegal to discriminate in the housing industry based on race, had lingered in Congress for years, vehemently opposed by legislators both in the North and the South. Abernathy and his fellow activists came to the launch site riding a mule train, challenging NASA’s administrator, Tom Paine, on the worthiness of the space program when the poor and dispossessed in Watts and Detroit and rural Appalachia could barely put food on the table-assuming they had a house to put the table in. Abernathy was Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest collaborator and had inherited the mantle of his Poor People’s Campaign, the second phase of the civil rights movement. In the days leading up to the launch, two hundred protesters, led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, made their way to Cape Kennedy.
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