The Gibbes Art Museum is now on my Visit List, looking at winter 2026 or spring 2027.
Through our complicated history, through light and shadow, we have persevered – humanity intact.
Art is the reason.
Here's a bit of largely unknown history about a sculptor who created Gateway to Freedom: The International Memorial to the Underground Railway for the City of Detroit, located in Hart Plaza, just north of Windsor, Ontario, Canada:
The International Memorial to the Underground Railroad
Created by Ed Dwight
Ed Dwight Was Going to Be the First African American in Space. Until He Wasn’t
The Kennedy administration sought a diverse face to the space program, but for reasons unknown, the pilot was kept from reaching the stars
Shareef Jackson
Smithsonian Magazine, February 18, 2020
In the early 1960s, U.S. Air Force pilot Ed Dwight was drowning in mail. “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,” Dwight, now 86, recalls. Fans from around the world were writing to congratulate Dwight on becoming the first African American astronaut candidate. “Most of my mail was just addressed to Astronaut Dwight, Kansas City, Kansas.”
The letters, however, were premature. Dwight would never get the opportunity to go to space—despite the publicity and hype—for reasons that remain unclear even to this day.
Dwight was working at the time as a test pilot at Edwards in the Mojave Desert of California, the U.S. Air Force’s premier experimental flight base and a pathway to entering the astronaut corps of NASA. He trained in the Aerospace Research Pilot School, run by aviation icon Chuck Yeager, the first person to break the sound barrier. Edwards holds a legendary status, then and now, as the premier flight test facility of the Air Force, where the likes of Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper, two of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, and Neil Armstrong, selected in the second group of astronauts, trained as test pilots in experimental jets over the vast high desert that often served as an impromptu runway. During his time at Edwards, Dwight flew jets such as the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, a supersonic aircraft capable of soaring into the high atmosphere where the pilot could observe the curvature of the Earth.
“The first time you do this it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what the hell? Look at this,’” Dwight recently told the New York Times. “You can actually see this beautiful blue layer that the Earth is encased in. It’s absolutely stunning.”
Snip…
Around this time, Kennedy encouraged leaders in all the military branches to work to improve diversity among their officers. When the first group of NASA astronauts were selected in 1959, the nation’s military officer pilots, initially the only people who could apply to be astronauts, included no people of color. But as Murrow advocated for a black astronaut, Dwight was rising to the rank of captain in the Air Force, armed with an aeronautics degree from Arizona State University and enough flying hours to qualify for the flight test school at Edwards.
Continues…
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ed-dwight-first-african-american-space-until-wasnt-180974215/
This used to be a photo of Africa from space but, for some reason, NASA took it down:
ETA another image, from European Space Agency:
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