The recent passing of Katherine Johnson reminded me of Julius Montgomery, who, like Johnson, surmounted barriers and made his mark in the race for space as the first African American to employed at Cape Canaveral—and not a janitor.
In 1956, three years after Johnson began her rise to NASA, which evolved from NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), Montgomery joined a team of technical professionals, then called “range rats,” who were responsible for repairing the electrical systems in malfunctioning missiles and satellite equipment.
It wasn’t an easy entry to the space program, as Richard Paul related in his profile of Montgomery. “As he remembered it, ‘I was a strange person coming into an all-white building. All white.’ As he entered his new workplace, the RCA Development Lab, ‘Nobody would shake my hand,’ he recalled. One by one each of his coworkers turned away. ‘I got to the last fellow,’ he said, ‘and I said ‘Hello, I’m Julius Montgomery.’ He said, ‘Look boy, that’s no way to talk to a white man!’” In a story indicative of who Julius Montgomery was––one he told many times during his life, ‘I said, ‘Ah, forgive me, oh great, white bastard. What should I call you?’ And I laughed, and he laughed and he shook my hand.”
He faced another obstacle two years later after his team sought to open a school to keep the professionals abreast with the latest developments. The plan was to call it the Brevard Engineering College with the notion of leasing classroom space at a public high school near the space center. But the timeless menace––Jim Crow laws––interceded to disrupt such a program.
A county superintendent refused to allow Montgomery to be part of the initiative and promised to shut the effort down before it was even launched. In order to allow the college to open, Montgomery stepped aside and withdrew his application. Three years later, after Brevard had its own facilities, Montgomery became the first African American student at the school now known as the Florida Institute of Technology.
Born on May 30, 1929 in Homewood, Alabama, Montgomery was the oldest of 12 children of Edward Perkins Montgomery and Queen Ester Jackson Montgomery. Their residence in Rosedale, the city’s oldest neighborhood, was first settled by former slaves after the Civil War.
Montgomery was afflicted with a terrible stutter that tended to isolate him from others. But with a determined effort, he overcame the problem and at the same time acquired the self-confidence that would be there when other challenges arose. He attended the Tuskegee Institute, now known as Tuskegee University, a historically Black college; he studied linotype and graduated in 1951.
Following graduation, after a brief stint working as a printer, Montgomery joined the Air Force until 1956. His tenure in uniform prepared him to be a radio engineer and he subsequently was employed in that capacity in Mobile, Ala. Seeking to improve himself with more lucrative jobs was blunted by repeated rejections because of his race. He had also gathered quite an expertise as first class radio-telephone operator, and believed this could secure him a job with the RCA, (Radio Corporation of America) and an avenue to a position in the space program.
According to his obituary in The New York Times, “He passed the entry-level test, and RCA offered him a job for $76 a week. He didn’t respond. When RCA came back with an offer of $96 a week (about $924 in today’s money) to work as an electronics technician in its development lab, he accepted and headed for Florida, becoming the first Black professional employed at the space center.”
In this post, he had a top-secret clearance for the Air Force, rewiring and servicing the receiving stations that took down signals from spy satellites. Along with his breaking barriers at Cape Canaveral, Montgomery threw his cap into the political arena, and after several years of failure to win an election, he finally won a seat in the Melbourne City council in 1969. This quest took him 13 years and it would be 35 years before another African American would serve on the council. He was also president of the city’s NAACP chapter and often invited as a panelist to events sponsored by the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
On these occasions, he often shared the stage with Black astronauts, whom he deemed “the bravest people I’ve ever met.” They always cited him as the bravest.
Much of this information on Montgomery is a chapter in “We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program,” a book authored by Richard Paul and Steven Moss in 2015. He had settled in Melbourne, just south of Cape Canaveral and in 1960 married Gertrude Elizabeth (King) with whom he had two daughters. His wife died in 2003 and he then formed a close relationship with Annie Lewis, his companion until her death in 2015.
Before his death on Jan. 22, 2020, Montgomery had long been acknowledged by the Florida Institute of Technology for his sacrifices, including honoring him with the first annual Julius Montgomery Pioneer Award for community service. In fact, he died just days after the school awarded him an honorary doctorate of human letters. He was 90.