we re here to talk about our book, we could not fail: the first african-americans in the space program. it looks at nasa s role in civil rights in the years before the civil rights act passed, and that s an important distinction. because before the civil rights act passed, discrimination was not against the law. it was legal to say, no, you can t use this toilet, you re black. or, no, you can t come into this restaurant, you re black, which is an important distinction that will become even more so as we talk about the achievements of some of the people in this book. we ll be talking about the rules put in place by the kennedy administration to try and address workplace discrimination and how they were implemented by nasa and by its contractors. but more importantly, we ll be talking about the people whose lives were touched by those rules. our book tells the stories of ten men, most of whom came to work in the space program during the years that we call the civil rights era