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Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

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Reverend Ralph Abernathy, made their<br />

way to Cape Kennedy. Abernathy was<br />

Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest<br />

collaborator and had inherited the mantle<br />

of his Poor People’s Campaign, the<br />

second phase of the civil rights<br />

movement. Abernathy and his fellow<br />

activists came to the launch site riding a<br />

mule train, challenging NASA’s<br />

administrator, Tom Paine, on the<br />

worthiness of the space program when<br />

the poor and dispossessed in Watts and<br />

Detroit and rural Appalachia could<br />

barely put food on the table—assuming<br />

they had a house to put the table in. The<br />

Housing Rights Act of 1968, making it<br />

illegal to discriminate in the housing<br />

industry based on race, had lingered in<br />

Congress for years, vehemently opposed<br />

by legislators both in the North and the

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