The short version: Fuck Chuck Yeager - Rest in Piss, pig. How the fuck a man with only a high school education can judge the academic prowess of a man with a bachelors in aeronautical engineering, I don't know. Apparently, the second group of astronauts was expanded to allow in Ed Dwight, who ultimately said "fuck ya'll" and booked.
Ed Dwight on PBS' "American Experience: Chasing The Moon": "Chuck Yeager, he was one of my heroes, was the first man to go through the speed of sound. Yeager had called in the entire instructor staff. And he announced that Washington is trying to cram the N-word down our throats. He said, Kennedy is using this to make racial equality. So, do not speak to him. Do not socialize with him, and, in six months, he will be gone."
The Colin Powell:
From J. Alfred Phelps’s book
They Had A Dream: The Story of African-American Astronauts, the Kennedy Administration was very aggressive in looking for “Negro” candidates to place in the NASA astronaut candidate program. It all began with a telephone call from the White House to the Department of Defense. There was no arrogance in the caller’s voice; only a simple question:
‘Does the Air Force have any Negroes in the new aerospace research pilots’ course being set up at Edwards Air Force Baser in California?’ After what was probably an extended pause came the answer: ‘No, there aren’t any.’
It was an ordinary enough question, but the call came from an extraordinary source... The innocuous-sounding call thus became something of an edict. (p. 6)
Luckily for the Kennedy Administration, the Air Force found
Ed Dwight, a black test pilot. However, the legendary Colonel Chuck Yeager questioned Captain Dwight’s abilities. Yeager later maintained that Dwight’s abilities were so lacking ‘we set up a special tutoring program to get him through the academics, as I recall, he lacked the engineering [background] that the other students had.’ Yeager further observes that Dwight worked hard, as did his tutors, but adds that ‘Dwight just couldn’t hack it. . . didn’t keep up in flying.’ Yeager claims to have worked with Dwight on his flying, but he noted that ‘our students were flying at levels really beyond his experience. The only prejudice against Dwight,’ Yeager recalls, wagging a literary finger, ‘was the conviction that he was not qualified to be in the school’ in the first place. (p. 20)
According to Colonel (now General) Yeager, Captain Dwight did not represent even the top ranks of black test pilots. However,
Charles Sanders at Ebony magazine alleged Captain Dwight was subjected to a racially demeaning lecture and pointed to racism as the reason he was ultimately cut from the astronaut program.
In
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe identified the “Ed Dwight case” as a deliberate attempt by the Kennedy White House to subvert the meritocratic culture of the astronaut program. He writes that Colonel Yeager had received word that President Kennedy was “determined” that NASA “have at least one Negro astronaut.” The result was a massive push by the federal bureaucracy to artificially promote Captain Dwight.
Every week, it seemed like, a detachment of Civil Rights Division lawyers would turn up from Washington, from the Justice Department, which was headed by the President’s brother Bobby. The lawyers squinted in the desert sunlight and asked a great many questions about the progress and treatment of Ed Dwight and took notes. Yeager kept saying he didn’t see how he could simply jump Dwight over these other men. And the lawyers would come back the next week and squint some more and take some more notes. There were days when ARPS [Aerospace Research Pilots School] seemed like the Ed Dwight case with a few classrooms and some military hardware appended. A compromise was finally struck in which Dwight would be admitted to the space-flight course, but only if every man who ranked above him was also admitted. That was how it came to pass that the next class had fourteen students instead of eleven and included Captain Dwight. Meantime, the White House, apparently, was signaling to the Negro press that Dwight was going to be ‘the first Negro astronaut,’ and he was being invited to make public appearances. He was being set up for a fall, because the chances of NASA accepting him as an astronaut appeared remote in any event. The whole thing was baffling. On the upper reaches of the great ziggurat the subject of race had never been introduced before. The unspoken premise was that you either had the right stuff or you didn’t, and no other variables mattered.
Captain Chuck Yeager besides the Bell X-1 in 1949. 
