There were! I highly recommend Richard Paul and Steven Moss' fine work, We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program (University of Texas Press, 2015). This book contains biographies of such luminaries such as Frank Crossley, a black metallurgical engineer who developed materials for NASA during the 1960s, and Julius Montgomery, who worked for some of the US government's military applications in 1956, namely as a "range rat" sent to analyze why missile testing failures occurred (p. 22).

This book is more than a collection of biographies of black luminaries in science and engineering, though. It also asserts that NASA played a key role in desegregation efforts during the 1960s, and also fills out histories of the African American press by analyzing how it portrayed and valorized these (literal!) rocket scientists. I highly recommend it!

Another author you could look at is Kim McQuaid. This person has written several good articles on NASA's interaction with the Civil Rights movement, positing that by the 1970s, the agency made a conscious effort to recruit more women and minorities to better its public image. See:

McQuaid, Kim. 2007. “Race, Gender, and Space Exploration: A Chapter in the Social History of the Space Age”. Journal of American Studies 41 (2). Cambridge University Press: 405–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27558000.

McQuaid, Kim. 2006. “The Space Age at the Grass Roots: NASA in Cleveland, 1958-1990”. American Studies 47 (3/4). Mid-America American Studies Association: 113–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40643956.

Also interesting for a history of African Americans in the space sciences generally is "Careers of African Americans in Academic Astronomy" by Robert Fikes Jr., who sketches the careers of several prominent people in astronomy and aeronautics, though they worked in academia rather than for NASA specifically. Here's the citation:

Fikes, Robert. 2000. “Careers of African Americans in Academic Astronomy”. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 29. The JBHE Foundation, Inc: 132–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678866.

I hope this helps!

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