Reflect

Ronald McNair is remembered and honored for being one of the first Black astronauts in NASA’s space program and as one of the crew members who was killed in the tragic 1986 Challenger mission. Nearly 30 years before heading into space, McNair did something even more courageous: As a 9-year-old boy, he walked to the segregated public library in Lake City, South Carolina and refused to leave when the librarian told him he wasn’t allowed to check out books because of the color of his skin. The police — and his mother — were called, and Ronald McNair walked out of the library with a new library card and a stack of books. From a place of immense courage, this child said no to injustice. It’s an inspirational story now, but it’s important to remember that the story’s positive ending was far from guaranteed. Ronald McNair’s moral courage somehow overrode fear. Susan Sontag describes the great stories of those who have said no as “the center of our moral life and our moral imagination,” leading to our own “moral courage.”