Bernard Benedict James, aerospace engineer and Black WWII veteran, dies at 101
LOS ANGELES — Bernard Benedict James sat his young children down in the family living room decades ago in their La Mirada home, where he’d written a set of math equations on a blackboard.
The Harvard-educated aerospace engineer was working for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the time and wanted to give his 10 children an impromptu lecture on mathematics.
“I was just learning about fractions in primary school, and my dad started to put up math about black holes,” his son David, now a 59-year-old visual effects artist, said recently.
But before the math lessons, and before James worked on two missions that sent astronauts into space, the World War II veteran spent two years in prison after hastily being convicted of mutiny and insubordination, a Black soldier who dared question a white superior officer.
James and his family worked tirelessly over the ensuing decades to
