NASA’s Johnson Center Appoints First Black Deputy Director

Explore Our Galleries

An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

Breaking News!

Today's news and culture by Black and other reporters in the Black and mainstream media.

Click Here

Ways to Support ABHM?

Click Here

August 12, 2018

30-year NASA veteran Vanessa Wyche will take on the role.

By NewsOne Staff

Vanessa Wyche was named new deputy director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Credits NASA

Black women are continuing to break barriers in the realm of STEM. On Wednesday, NASA announced that Vanessa Wyche has been appointed as the deputy director of their Johnson Space Center; making her the first African-American woman to take on the role, Chron reported.

Wyche has been working at NASA for nearly three decades, the news outlet writes. The 54-year-old started her NASA journey as a project engineer for their space life sciences department. She then went on to hold positions that included the director of Human Exploration Development Support, the assistant director of the Johnson Center, and most recently the director of the center’s Exploration Integration and Science Directorate. In this new role, Wyche will be responsible for overseeing the direction of the Houston-based center which is the epicenter of human space flight research. The center, which is one of NASA’s largest facilities, has a staff made up of nearly 10,000 civil service and contractor workers.

Wyche—a graduate of Clemson University—is excited about taking on the position. “I am incredibly humbled to take on this role at JSC, and also excited to assist Mark with leading the home of human spaceflight,” she said in a statement, according to the news outlet. “I look forward to working with the talented employees at JSC as we work toward our mission of taking humans farther into the solar system…”

Read the full article here

More from Vanessa Wyche here

Read more Breaking News here

Comments Are Welcome

Note: We moderate submissions in order to create a space for meaningful dialogue, a space where museum visitors – adults and youth –– can exchange informed, thoughtful, and relevant comments that add value to our exhibits.

Racial slurs, personal attacks, obscenity, profanity, and SHOUTING do not meet the above standard. Such comments are posted in the exhibit Hateful Speech. Commercial promotions, impersonations, and incoherent comments likewise fail to meet our goals, so will not be posted. Submissions longer than 120 words will be shortened.

See our full Comments Policy here.