New York Times
Campaign Urges NASA to Rename the John C. Stennis Space Center
By Allyson Waller
For 32 years, a NASA rocket testing center in southern Mississippi has carried the name of John C. Stennis, a former United States senator who was a champion of racial segregation for most of his time in Congress.
Now, as the nation navigates a moment of reckoning over statues and other symbols of its racist past, William Pomerantz, vice president for special projects at Virgin Orbit, is leading an effort to strip the Democratic senator’s name from the John C. Stennis Space Center near Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.
“You Google him and the very first results that show up, whether it’s the Wikipedia page or however you got your search engine settings tweaked, pretty much all of them within the first paragraph are going to use the terms of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘segregation,’” Mr. Pomerantz said.
Mr. Pomerantz made his case for renaming the Stennis Space Center on Twitter on June 24, the day NASA announced that it was naming its Washington, D.C., headquarters for Mary Jackson, its first Black female engineer and a pivotal figure in helping the first American astronauts reach space. The campaign to rename the Stennis Space Center was reported by SpacePolicyOnline.com.
Mr. Stennis, who died in 1995 at 93, represented Mississippi in the Senate from 1947 to 1989. His New York Times obituary described him as “the last of the Senate’s Southern barons” and said he was for a time the most influential voice in Congress on military affairs.
He also joined many Southern Democrats in opposing civil rights legislation. He was one of 19 senators who signed the Southern Manifesto, which said the Supreme Court had abused its power and infringed on states’ rights when it ruled, in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal. He later voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Over the years, his opposition to civil rights softened somewhat. In 1982, he voted to extend the Voting Rights Act, telling The Times that he “didn’t want to go back to all the days of misunderstanding.”
Asked about Mr. Pomerantz’s campaign, a NASA spokeswoman said in an email that the agency was engaged in “ongoing discussions” about the names of its facilities.
“NASA leadership is sensitive to the discussions of racism, discrimination and inequalities going on around the world, including conversations about renaming facilities,” the spokeswoman said. “We are having ongoing discussions with the NASA work force on all of these topics. NASA is dedicated to advancing diversity, and we will continue to take steps to do so.”
Mr. Stennis’s daughter, Margaret Womble, said the call to remove her father’s name from the space center and a similar effort to rename the U.S.S. John C. Stennis, a Navy aircraft carrier, were “going too far.”
“My father was a segregationist at a period in history, but I can tell you there was nothing racist about him,” Ms. Womble, 82, said in an email.
One of Mr. Stennis’s grandchildren, John Syme, said he also opposed the call to rename the space center. He said his grandfather’s vote to extend the Voting Rights Act and his support of Mike Espy’s successful 1986 campaign to become Mississippi’s first Black representative in Congress since Reconstruction were signs that his stance on segregation had changed.
“Of course I’m proud of all the things that are named for my grandfather and his service to this country,” Mr. Syme said. “And as he used to say, on balance he did far more good for this country over all and its people than the harm of his stance on integration and segregation.”
On Thursday, the Republican members of Mississippi’s congressional delegation — Senators Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith, and three of the state’s four members of the House of Representatives — issued a joint statement opposing the removal of Mr. Stennis’s name from the space center.
One of 10 NASA field centers, the Stennis Space Center has had several names since its inception in 1961 as Mississippi Test Operations. Initially built as the test site for rockets to be used in the Apollo program, the center was renamed the Mississippi Test Facility in 1965. In 1974, it became National Space Technology Laboratories. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed an executive order renaming the center for Mr. Stennis.
Today, the site houses a rocket engine testing complex.
Mr. Stennis led the Senate Armed Services Committee and the influential Appropriations Committee at various points in his career, and served as president pro tem of the Senate before his retirement. NASA’s chief historian, William P. Barry, said Mr. Stennis “was a major influence on NASA’s budget” because of his committee positions.
“He was a person you didn’t want to make angry at you,” he said.
Mr. Barry said Mr. Stennis was a “chief proponent in expanding the network of facilities” at the Mississippi site and was instrumental in keeping the center open after NASA considered closing it at the end of the Apollo program.
Mr. Pomerantz said that his wife works for NASA. His employer, Virgin Orbit, has worked with the space agency on research projects and on an effort to launch small satellites into orbit. He said that Mr. Stennis’s influence over NASA’s budget was not enough to justify having a NASA field center named for him.
“If there are only going to be 10 human beings that have a NASA center named after them, it doesn’t seem like he necessarily contributed enough to NASA to be in that Top 10,” Mr. Pomerantz said.
Margaret A. Weitekamp, the curator and chair of the space history department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said that having Mr. Stennis’s name on the Mississippi center sends a powerful message to the people who work there, particularly people of color.
“One needs to put oneself in the shoes of an African-American engineer who is at the top of their game, working for NASA and asked to go to work every day with the name of an ardent segregationist on their workbench,” she said. “That’s the person the agency has decided to stay with.”
Amani Garvin is an engineer at Ball Aerospace, a commercial, defense and civil space contractor based in Boulder, Colo., that has worked with NASA and the U.S. military. Ms. Garvin, who is Black, said she could see how the center’s name could make a young engineer or scientist feel uncomfortable.
While Ms. Garvin finds Mr. Pomerantz’s campaign “noble,” she said that renaming centers is just “the face of the issue” when it comes to Black people being a part of the aerospace industry.
“If the roots are spoiled so is the fruit,” she said.