In 1961 President Kennedy picked Ed Dwight to become America’s first Black astronaut candidate, but NASA never selected him, so he spent decades sculpting bronze instead — and finally flew to space at 90

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s administration pushed the space program to put a Black man into astronaut training. The pilot chosen was Ed Dwight, an Air Force test pilot with an aeronautical engineering degree who had joined the service in 1953. That d…