“If you impress the crowd, the coach can’t put you on the bench.”
It was a lesson that Shelby Jacobs had carried with him since his high school years in the early 1950s. Even though only 1% of his class was black, he’d managed to become a 3-sport varsity athlete and a senior class president off undeniable hard work and merit. But when his high math and science aptitude scores gained him a scholarship to UCLA, his principal balked, saying “there are no black engineers, so you should take up a trade.”
Undeterred, Shelby attended UCLA anyway, and in three years, he was designing engines, hydraulics, pneumatics and propulsion systems for a NASA contractor. But there, he didn’t find it quite as easy to excel or fit in. As only one of eight black engineers in a company of 5,000, he struggled between seeking the camaraderie of his few black colleagues and becoming further marginalized, or strategically associating himself with successful white engineers and tolerating their constant microaggressions, and sometimes, outright racism in the workplace.
By 1965, Shelby’s juggling act had earned him the opportunity of a lifetime. NASA was launching the Apollo 6 mission in 3 years and needed to solve the problem of how to capture footage of the rocket separation sequence from an unmanned craft. Shelby designed, tested and ultimately perfected the camera system that captured the first iconic footage of the Earth’s curvature and the rocket’s segments burning in the atmosphere, re-igniting the Space Race.
In just a few minutes of film, Shelby Jacobs forever impressed the world.
It was April 4, 1968 – the same day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
That day held both his proudest moment and a sobering reminder that there was still so far to go.
For the next 28 years, Shelby continued in the space program, working his way up to the executive levels until he quietly retired in 1996. 10 years ago, as the “hidden figures” of the U.S. space program began coming to light, Shelby was officially honored by NASA as an Unsung Hero, and has used that recognition to make appearances, fund scholarships, and advocate for employing, protecting and fairly compensating more women and minorities in professional and technological fields.
Even though he’s 80 years old today, Shelby Jacobs’ personal mission isn’t over yet, because when he changed the world in 1968, “the doors of opportunity were not wide open –– they still aren’t.”
Editor’s Note: In a lovely moment of serendipity, Mr. Jacobs recently discovered that John Reid, one of the first black helicopter pilots in the Navy, was a member of the crew that recovered his film canisters from the ocean upon the camera’s separation from the spacecraft.
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