Ronald Mcnair 1950-1986

With the odds of race and circumstance stacked against him, Ronald McNair attended segregated schools in Lake City, S.C. (current pop. 5,636), and itched to explore a world beyond and above his own. Irene Jones, his first- grade teacher, remembered him as a bright loner who, on the playground, would "lie flat on his back, stare up at the sky and just smile." That was Sputnik time, when America was racing to catch up to the Soviets. Later it would rely on the help of seven crew-cut white pilots, extraordinary role models for a rural Southern black youth who picked tobacco...