How Naming the James Webb Telescope Turned Into a Fight Over Homophobia

This dispute has, in a completely up to date vogue, grown harshly private. Whereas not at all times naming him, opponents in tweets and texts have assailed Dr. Oluseyi, citing unsubstantiated accusations of misconduct from his time as a professor at Florida Institute of Know-how.

Dr. Oluseyi, 55, rose from abject poverty to acquire a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford, the primary in his household to graduate from highschool. Many college students at Florida Tech described him as an inspiring instructor, with a booming voice and an outsize persona.

However the previous couple of years have provided a tough journey. He emphatically denied that he behaved badly as a professor and repeatedly urged a reporter to ask any query about his previous.

“The revolutionaries,” Dr. Oluseyi mentioned in an interview, “have change into the prosecutors.”

The Previous Is Not the Previous

Mr. Webb, who died in 1992, minimize an advanced determine. He labored with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to combine NASA, bringing in Black engineers and scientists. In 1964, after George Wallace, the white segregationist governor of Alabama, tried to dam such recruitment, Mr. Webb threatened to drag high scientists and executives out of NASA’s Marshall Area Flight Middle in Huntsville.

Fifteen years earlier, nevertheless, Mr. Webb encountered completely different pressures as an underneath secretary on the State Division through the Truman administration. The political proper, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, sought to dismantle the legacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In attacking the State Division, they tried to ferret out staff they claimed had been Communists and what they referred to as “perverts” — homosexual People, in what grew to become generally known as the lavender scare.

“The lavender scare, just like the pink scare itself, was an assault on the New Deal,” famous David Ok. Johnson, a historical past professor on the College of South Florida and writer of “The Lavender Scare: The Chilly Battle Persecution of Gays and Lesbians within the Federal Authorities.”

“Then,” he added, “it changed into an ethical panic.”

These had been bleak instances. In twenty years, between 5,000 and 10,000 homosexual staff had been pushed out of presidency, careers and lives wrecked.