By Lee A. Daniels

As I’ve done for years, Sunday I quietly celebrated the coming of October 4, because I’ve always considered what happened on that date an integral part of the black freedom struggle—and my own good fortune.

On that day 52 years ago, the Soviet Union announced that it had successfully shot into orbit the world’s first man-made satellite: Sputnik.

For a nine-year-old black boy in Chicago who was a devotee of that city’s Adler Planetarium, Sputnik couldn’t have been more welcome. Suddenly, dreams of space and space travel were no longer a fantasy. Suddenly, the numerous trips to the planetarium and my repeatedly poring over the section on astronomy in the pages of our World Book Encyclopedia had a deeper meaning. Sputnik had slipped the chains of gravity. Its beep-beep-beep signal enabling the Soviet space engineers (and the Americans, too) to track its trajectory also foretold that man himself would soon be able to free himself of the Earth. My mind was already wandering out there among Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto and Uranus, looking back on our small blue orb.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the federal government, frightened by the prospect of Soviet control of space – and thus, domination of the Earth itself – immediately began pouring money into its spectacularly-to-that-point unsuccessful space program, into development of more military armaments, and into both improving the curriculum of the nation’s elementary schools and building a vast, monied federal scholarship and loan program to spur more American youth to go to college.

It was that latter activity which immeasurably helped make my future and that of many of my black peers possible.

The government’s moves, amplified by voluminous press coverage, sharply intensified the society’s growing focus on higher education as a necessity and a uniquely American right by making it a matter of national security as well.

As a result, within a few years college enrollments, which had experienced marked growth since World War II, soared. For example, in 1960 the percentage of Americans 25 and over who had at least graduated from college was just under 8 percent. By 1970 it had jumped to 11 percent.

Black youth were part of that explosion. In 1960 just 3.5 percent of blacks 25 and over had a bachelor’s or higher degree. A decade later, that figure was 6.1 percent. Further, by then black Americans, who were less than 13 percent of the American population as a whole, were nearly 10 percent of Americans in college.

That cohort included my brother and me, sons of a money-poor working class couple. In the late 1960s we would matriculate at two of the most expensive colleges in the land on what amounted to a financial free ride.

I’m convinced that the message from the larger society that America’s youth needed to go to college—though perhaps propounded without any thought of its impact on black youth—also  found fertile soil among us because of the civil rights movement and the role black youth played in it.

One could not miss that black youth were in the forefront of the mass-action Movement then exploding across the country.  The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in the Brown v. Board of Education was about our right to equal schooling. That very fall, black teenagers were braving the white mobs to integrate Central High in Little Rock. In New Orleans in 1960, four black girls, none older than seven. Entered previously all-white elementary schools amid the jeers of hostile white mobs. In the early 1960s, black and white college students in significant measure would staff the freedom rides and sit-ins and swim-ins and pray-ins that brought the Movement out of the courts and into the streets.

It would be another six years before I began to consciously connect the launching of Sputnik with all of these things; to connect the “space race” – the technological and military competition between the USA and the USSR – with the domestic race America was having with itself.

That was the race race—a race, as Martin Luther King, Jr. warned the nation at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963—to live up to the true meaning of its ideals before it was too late:

“We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” he declared.  “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to  make real the promises of democracy.  … There will be neither rest nor  tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”

Hindsight makes it clear. In 1957 America was just eight years away from President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act, the great law which restored the vote to black Americans in the South, made America a democracy in fact not just rhetoric, and produced the blossoming of black progress still not fully appreciated. Johnson, who had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with great pomp and symbolism, put his name with equal fanfare to the voting rights legislation on August 6.

Which meant that the race race just beat the deadline.

Five days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Watts, Los Angeles’ sprawling, sun-splashed, palm-treed black ghetto exploded, ushering in five years of “long, hot summers” and marking the historical line between the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the social and political militancy of the late 1960s.

We know what the civil rights movement supplied to a large cohort of black Baby Boomers like me: First, an ideological framework for considering our place in America; and second, role models, old and young, showing what neither our school textbooks nor the movies nor the newspapers did—that people with determination, intelligence, courage and ambition came in shades of black and brown, too.

What I recall with equal gratitude is that in 1957, that little artificial orb from our Cold War enemy not only fired my dreams of space but also made me realize that school-work had meaning; that thinking and scholastic achievement was a way to make dreams come true and to make one’s way in the world.

A decade later, with my residence at an ivied college campus heavily underwritten by federal funds that Sputnik had loosed from the U.S. treasury, I understood I was just one of the voluminous number of its black-American beneficiaries. Since then, I’ve always believed Sputnik’s beep-beep-beep signal had sent black youth a particular message. Just as it had slipped the bounds of the Earth’s gravity to open to humanity a new world, so it was our duty to cross boundaries of possibility and make a new world for us and our people.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.