Orville Taylor | Rich history of black aviators

It took me a good five years after its release for me to watch the film The Tuskegee Airmen. The poster half-filled with the face of Laurence Fishburne conjured images of the syphilis experiments of the 1930s when black men were used as lab rats, and thus, Tuskegee became a four-letter word for me. My knowledge of Tuskegee initially came as I studied W.E.B. Dubois and his disagreements with founding principal of the eponymous institute, Booker Taliaferro Washington (Booker T). Interestingly, the doctor, who began the notorious programme, was named Taliaferro; what sick irony!

Later, as my understanding of how our Marcus Garvey drew cutlass with Dubois over his disdain for Booker T, I tended to side with Dubois, because Booker T, the ‘Great Accommodator’, advocated black Americans settling for vocational occupations in the first instance, rather than going for high-end professions such as medicine, academia and aviation. In a famous 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech, Booker T sounded like a functionalist sociologist. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Peeved by this concession, as a graduate student in the United States (US), exactly a century later to the date, a big part of me wanted to be one of those fingers, and it was neither the index, the thumb nor pinkie.

Yet, after a third viewing of Fishburne playing an authentic sounding Jamaican/Caribbean professor in Higher Learning, and identifying with him as I taught and mentored African-American student athletes, I sat spellbound through the slightly fictionalised epic of this all-black squadron.

Then, an even more exciting story is that there is a Jamaican reality right in the middle of all this. Imagine! One of those heroes was Jamaican! Well, Brian McCrae Jr, whose parents migrated from Santa Cruz, St Elizabeth, and Kingston in 1919 and met in Harlem, was one of these history makers. Despite my slight disappointment that he was the protagonist Hannibal Lee, played by our ‘Jafakean’ Fishburne; McCrae needs no embellishment.

BLIP ON THE RADAR

Still, the Tuskegee Airmen are only a blip on the radar of black aviation history. No disrespect to these brave men but World War II was between 1938 and 1945, and the USA entered the fray in 1941, with the squadron finally seeing combat in 1943. Black people have been flying for more than a century.

Bessie Coleman, born in 1892, had to go to France 1920, where she obtained her pilot’s licence in 1921. Though she is often reported as the first American of colour to be so certified, Emory Malick, whose race might have been kept in the historical ‘dark’, built a plane and flew it in July 1911. He received his international pilot’s licence the following year. However, Charles Ward Chappelle also had made a long-distance aeroplane in 1911.

William Robinson Clarke, born in 1895 in Jamaica, scraped together his plane fare as a truly patriotic British subject in 1914 to fight in World War I. Already a Jamaican-trained auto mechanic, he enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in 1915, began pilot training in December 1916 and by April 1917 earned his wings. A bullet to the spine cut short his flying career, three months later while on a reconnaissance flight. Miraculously, he survived, was honourably discharged in 1919 with the Silver War badge, returned to Jamrock and served as head of the Royal Air Forces Association. He died in 1981.

He, along with American Eugene James Bullard, who flew for France, Italian Domenico Mondelli, an Ethiopian/Eritrean, Martiniquan Pierre Réjon and Turk Ahmet Ali Çelikten, who is likely the first, having being licensed in 1914, are the black military air pioneers.

BLACK AVIATORS

Many other black aviators polka-dot flight history. These include James Banning and Thomas Allen, who in 1932 became the first black pilots to fly across America. Cornelius and Willa Brown Coffey, who created the Coffey School of Aeronautics in Illinois, training many blacks, including some Tuskegee pilots. Yet, it took a 1963 Supreme Court decision for Marlon Green to finally cross the colour line for any large American airline.

However, it would be another 30 years before Patrice Clarke Washington debuted as the first American black female captain, and it was for cargo carrier UPS in 1994. By then, Yola Cain was already the first Jamaican woman to gain a commercial pilot licence in 1975, a full seven years before her. Cain broke ground as our first female military pilot the following year. Later, Maria Zaidie Haddad became a commercial pilot in 1976, first officer in 1986 and completed a 40-year career with Air Jamaica, having made history as our first female captain in 1996. As a shameless plug; inasmuch as Air Jamaica ran at a loss for most of its 40-plus years, it never had a crash or significant incident leading to passenger deaths.

Finally, in 2007, Jamaican Barrington Irving became, at 23 years, the first black and youngest pilot to fly solo around the globe.

We fly by night; but our history is no fly by night.

- Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.