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David McGlathery was a trailblazer for the rights of African-Americans in Alabama. After graduating magna cum laude with a math degree from Alabama A&M University in 1961, he landed a job at Marshall Space Flight Center, working among the German rocket team that put man on the moon. In an 2003 interview for the Marshall Star, MSFC’s newsletter, he said he was the first black man hired to a full professional position there.It was that job that led him to seek graduate courses at UAH. He was the first black man to try to integrate the University of Alabama system.”I wanted to take graduate courses to try and be a better engineer, a better mathematician – a better scientist,” McGlathery said in the 2003 interview. In a 1993 interview with the Birmingham News, McGlathery said he was not looking for trouble. “I didn’t want a high profile,” he said. “I was just a person who wanted to go to school.” McGlathery had first applied to UAH in late 1962 and had some support from inside NASA, but was asked by the university to withdraw his application for that term. He agreed and applied again the following spring.

McGlathery nearly beat James Hood and Vivian Malone, who were the first black students to attend the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, at integrating the University of Alabama system, but delays pushed his enrollment back. On June 13, 1963 – two days after then-Gov. George Wallace took his infamous stand in the schoolhouse door, trying to block Hood and Malone’s entrance into the building – McGlathery quietly ended segregation at the Huntsville campus.
McGlathery eventually earned a master’s degree in systems engineering management from the Florida Institute of Technology campus at Redstone Arsenal.
In 2003, on the 40th anniversary of his role in desegregating the university, he was described as a senior aerospace engineer and the longest-serving black employee at Marshall.
He also spent more than 40 years serving as pastor of Pine Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Harvest.