Leonard Grant, Jr.

Guest post by Bryan Rogers

For this historical re-enactment, I’ve chosen to create a fictional composite figure. My character is Leonard Grant Jr., an eighteen-year-old high school graduate grudgingly in search of employment during the construction of the Manfred Olson Planetarium on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus. He would have rather been studying astronomy as a freshman at UWM, but a combination of economic pressures and racial discrimination prevented his enrollment. The eldest of nine children born to Gloria and Leonard Grant in 1947, Junior carries more than just his father’s name. He carries the weighted expectations of a harsh, emotionally distant father to sacrifice his educational aspirations to instead earn a steady paycheck to support his younger siblings following his father’s abrupt job loss. Junior ends up working on the construction crew that helps build the state-of-the-art planetarium instead of working towards an undergraduate degree in aeronautical engineering.

The Grants had migrated from Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1946, drawn north by the promise of economic opportunity and away from the naked racist subjugation of the American South where Leonard Sr. and Gloria worked as sharecroppers near the same plantation where their ancestors had toiled under and escaped enslavement only two generations back. Leonard’s older brother, Julius had secured employment at the Seaman Body plant (later American Motors) on Richards and Capitol Drive, where Leonard was eventually hired as a factory worker days after he and Gloria had arrived in Milwaukee. He was fired from the assembly line in 1964, just months before the first national autoworkers union strike erupted against American Motors (which incidentally led to the last-ever union contracts signed with the company). In the eighteen years since their migration, Gloria had given birth to eleven more children, three of whom died during childbirth, and so Leonard Sr’s unemployment forced the eldest son, almost overnight, off the college path and into the job market.

The family rented a house on 17th and Meinecke in the neighborhood around North Division High School. Every Sunday they attended service down the block at the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, which had recently been designed by Alonzo Robinson, Milwaukee’s first black architect. Junior remembered one sermon in particular where Pastor John Walton preached on the passage from Job 26:7 – “He stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing.” This “nothing”-ness which surrounded the earth (the image of which he had never seen) terrified Junior. When he asked his mother about the “nothing” later that same evening, Gloria led the child silently to the backyard, craned her head towards the sky until he, too, looked upward. She took his hand in hers and pointed towards the brightest star on the horizon and said softly, “honey, there may be nuthin’ up there, but this one here. This star led our people to freedom.” After his mother walked back inside the house, the little boy sat on Earth for what felt to him like an eternity, enveloped in the nothingness around him as his terror transmuted into a penetrating wonder. That night, he glimpsed a faintness of life emerging from the emptiness of space. 

From then on, stargazing became a nightly ritualed obsession for young Leonard. He learned about constellations and the ancient mythologies that connected civilizations to the stars. He became fascinated by the space race and avidly checked out all the science fiction books he could find at the public library on 26th and Center. He dreamed of being of a space explorer, an astronaut, or even an aeronautical engineer! He entered North Division High School in 1961 and by his junior year, he caught word from a cousin down in Baton Rouge about this so-called “Negro recruiter” named Charlie Smoot. Hired by NASA to attract African-American scientists and engineers to come south as part of the agency’s efforts at racial integration, Smoot had got seven black engineering students into NASA’s Cooperative Education Program. As part of the program, the students split time between their all-black Southern University–Baton Rouge and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Hunstville Alabama. That night, out back behind his childhood home, the sixteen year-old dreamt his own North star.

Leonard Jr. ran to the library the next day and begged the librarian to secure a copy of the previous week’s Chicago Defender newspaper with the headline that read “Negro College Youth To Boost First Moongoer Into Orbit?” He cut out and pasted the article’s opening lines to the inside cover of his stargazing journal, convinced that the same star which had freed his ancestors was now pointing him back to the place they’d fled.