AirSpace Podcast Season 4, Episode 9: Flyer

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Matt: Welcome to AirSpace from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, I'm Matt.

Emily: I'm Emily.

Nick: And I'm Nick.

Emily: In the early days of aviation flying was expensive and dangerous. And even if you could come up with the money, there were often establishment barriers like racism and sexism in the way.

Matt: In Chicago, a group of Black aviators who called themselves the Challenger Air Pilots Association, created a club and a community that has since helped thousands of Black pilots learn to fly.

Nick: And when the government started to invest in civilian and military pilot training programs, the Challenger Club was instrumental in lobbying to include Black aviators in those programs.

Emily: We're looking back to the 1930s in the skies above Chicago today on AirSpace.

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Emily: So the story of what becomes the Challenger Air Pilots Association starts off with two auto mechanics, and a broken down car in Detroit, Michigan. Nick: If we were making a movie out of this, this would be a really fun scene in the first act. This would be where it all starts to come together. So we've got these two mechanics, Cornelius Coffey, and John C. Robinson. And before this moment, they've got sort of similar paths to each other, but also to what we normally hear as the genesis of a great aviator or pilot later on. They either rode in an airplane at an early age, or they saw a barnstormer at an early age, and they're both interested in this. They both, kind of, gravitate towards being a mechanic because that's the closest they can get at this moment, and that brings us to the setting of today which is, they're in Detroit, Coffey's in Detroit, he's been working as a mechanic, he's built up an incredibly loyal clientele to the extent that this doctor in town who had been taking his car to Coffey for some time, broke down and refused to let any other mechanic see it. Like, Robinson was there, but he's like, "No, no, no, no, no. I want this other guy, he's the only one that touches my car." Robinson is a little bit steamed at this point, but waits around because he really wants to see who's this other hot shot mechanic, like, what on earth does this guy have that I don't have? And so Robinson's there, Coffey arrives, they meet, they start to talking and it turns out, they've got a lot in common.

This is Cornelius Coffey from an oral history done by historian, Ted Robinson for the Smithsonian in 1990.

Cornelius Coffey: So he said, "Well, I'm from Chicago." I said, "Yeah." So he said, "yeah," he said, "I just come over here," he said, "I've been mixed up with some bootleggers in Chicago." and he said, It got a little hot and he said, "I came over here til the heat’s off." So we got to talking and one thing the other, and I found out then that he had been trying to get into aviation.

Nick: They were both interested in learning to fly.

Matt: So if we flash forward a few years, Robinson and Coffey are now both in Chicago. Coffey has helped Robinson to get a job, and in the late 1920s, the two of them have built or bought and usually have... not intentionally wrecked, several different airplanes and learned the basics of flying from other aviators that would teach them. But they figured their next logical step was to get formal mechanics training, and so they applied to Chicago's Curtiss Wright School of Aviation in 1929.

Oral history audio Cornelius Coffey: Now in the meantime, Curtiss put an ad in Aero Digest.

Ted Robinson: The magazine, Aero digest.

Cornelius Coffey: The magazine.

Ted Robinson: Right.

Cornelius Coffey: So we wrote in, I say we, Johnny and myself wrote in inquired about the master mechanics course. And they wrote back and told us, you know, we could make a down payment, so much in a week until they would notify us to report. So we sent the money in, by money order. And when they told us to report for class assignment, that's when we walked in and they said, "Hey, there's got to be some mistake,” says “we can't accept your money, so we have to give you your money back." I said, "Well, we don't want our money back, what we want to do, is to get into school and we realize that unless we go through an approved school, we'll never get a mechanic certificate." So they say, "Well, we just can't do nothing for you."

Ted Robinson: And why was that.

Cornelius Coffey: Well, they never had colored students before. And they had students from Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, and he said, "It just won't work out."

Emily: Experiences like these were really common for Black aspiring aviators. It's why Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman, and woman with native American ancestry to get a pilot's license in 1921 had to go all the way to France to get her training.

Nick: So Bessie Coleman had to go all the way to France to get her certification, and her license, and her training. And the reason that that had occurred to her, was the publisher of the Chicago Defender, which is a newspaper that will come up later in our story as well, told her, "Save up your money, learn French, go to Europe, get your certification there, and then come back." And when she did come back, the Black owned media across the , like the Chicago Defender, heralded her as a hero. She made headlines, articles were written, profiles were posted. She was a early Black aviatrix celebrity based on having gone to Europe and come back with her pilot's license. This was all in the early 1920s. She had early plans and intentions to open a school for Black aviators. Unfortunately she died in a accident, she was thrown from a plane that she herself was not flying in 1926 ahead of an air show. And she was buried in Chicago before our story really begins, but because she had accomplished so much before she died and because she had gotten such excellent exposure, she was a real hero and a real inspiration and a real rallying point for a lot of the pilots in our story. Everyone in this story knew who Bessie Coleman was, and it was really important that she had done what she did so that we can get on to the things that the Challenger Club was able to achieve.

Matt: Right, and not everyone could afford to go to France to learn to fly. And and Cornelius Coffey were two such people. But their employer, Emil Mack heard about the debacle with the Curtiss Wright school not letting them in, and he encouraged them to sue Curtiss Wright for the right to attend classes there.

Nick: It's important to note, as is often the case in American litigation, they threatened to sue Curtiss Wright. They didn't actually file suit, but they had the idea and the backing from their employer in Emil Mack. And they went to Curtiss Wright and they said, "Look, we've already paid you, like, we're not going to take the money back, like, you got to let us in." And what we want to emphasize here is that, this isn't a case of a white employer sticking up for two of his staff members and then all of the barriers coming down, this has to do with Robinson and Coffey being extraordinarily qualified, and if you hear Coffey say it, he said, "The thing that Mr. Mack's suggestion and support bought us was a little bit of extra time for the Curtiss Wright school to see how good we really were." I think to me that demonstrates not extraordinary lengths on behalf of Emil Mack, but it demonstrates how flimsy the policy of discrimination really was in the case of this school since it could be so easily sidestepped in this case, but that is not to say that this was not a deeply racist policy, and that this was not racism represented in this institution, and that widespread institutional racism and discrimination was still very active and would be for decades to come. And true to Coffey's word, not only did Curtiss Wright, the school see how qualified they were as prospective students, but once they went through the program, the school saw the potential that they represented, but also the potential in perhaps admitting other Black students. And Coffey and Robinson were told, if they could recruit a sizable class of Black students, then Curtiss Wright would hire them to be instructors for that class. And even though that class would be taught separately, that represented for them, a very exciting opportunity to just become instructors, but to open up a pipeline for at least people in that area. So Coffey and Robinson talked to everyone they could, they spoke to their friends at the Chicago Defender and together they put out the word and were able to assemble a class of 35 students to begin teaching.

Emily: I think this story is really interesting, especially because you have the Curtiss Wright school really falling in line with the systemic racism that's going on in the United States at the time, keeping Black students out. And when they admit Robinson and Coffey, and they recognize the talent, they open up the doors to allowing their two Black alumni to teach courses and recruit other Black students. So while access is being granted to the field of aviation to other Black people in the United States, it's really important to be very clear that this doesn't actually mean that there is equality in aviation and aviation schools, because of course these are two entirely segregated spaces. But what's really powerful is that access is being granted, and so in 1931, the recruiting efforts of Robinson and Coffey catch the eye of Janet Bragg, who saw an ad in the Chicago Defender and Janet Bragg spoke to Ted Robinson for an oral history in 1989.

Oral history audio Janet Bragg: And after reading in the Chicago Defender paper about, they were looking for young men to come into the field of aviation. And I saw a picture Bessie Coleman, and I had been reading about Bessie Coleman, and so I decided, well, "Why can't I get into this and learn to fly also?"

Nick: My favorite part about Janet Bragg is her pivotal and want to become a pilot moment, was seeing a billboard with a bird and all of the baby birds in the nest. And it said, "Birds can learn to fly, why not you?"

Emily: Well, I think my favorite part of the Janet Bragg story is listening to Janet's oral history, she saw this advertisement for young Black men to come become aviators and she was like, "Cool, I'll sign up for that in the first inaugural class." And so she was a big part of the group of Black aviators when conversations about creating the Challenger Air Pilot’s Association started.

Nick: Right. The first few classes of Black students Coffey and Robinson taught at Curtiss Wright, didn't stop flying once they got their training, and many pilots from those classes, along with Coffey and Robinson started a club, the Challenger Air Pilot’s Association, so they could support one another and to be part of a community.

Matt: Bragg, who was actually working as a nurse for an insurance company at the time that she became an aviator, was the first member of the Pilot’s Association to actually be able to afford to buy her own reliable airplane, which she did because she wanted to fly it, and it also became one of the first aircraft of the Pilot’s Association.

Nick: Let's take a second and check in on where we're at. We've got some ambitious, talented individuals who lacked access to training, and they lobbied, they studied, they persevered, they threatened, they cajoled, they networked, and they got the training that they needed. They needed airplanes, so in some cases, they built them, in some cases, they bought them but they overcame that obstacle. But, and I can't emphasize this enough, aviation is not a desegregated altruistic community at this moment. And the next racist hurdle that our heroes face is the airport, the airport doesn't want them around. And at this point who among us would maybe start to be a little discouraged or who would say, "Oh, you know what, hey guys, let's build our own airport." Emily: Right. So by 1933, they have access to an airplane through Janet Bragg, but they still don't have this place to put it. And so because, as Nick said, they're not wanted at the airport. They say, "Gosh, maybe we should just build our own." Which I think is an incredibly powerful testament to wanting something so badly that you're willing to build your own airport because I wouldn't even know where to start with that, let alone in the 1930s, when there's not that many airports really sitting around. So this is kind of breaking new ground in so many ways. So they talked to the mayor of Robbins, Illinois, a majority black town Southwest of Chicago.

Tyrone Haymore: He said, "Not only would we permit you to build, we're going to help you build it, you're going to need help."

Matt: We talked to Tyrone Haymore, who's the director of the Robbin's history museum and was also a friend of Cornelius Coffey.

Tyrone Haymore: So they did. Volunteers all from Robbins helped them to clear a field here, not too far from my house by the way. And they cut down trees, moved boulders, and they were able to build a one strip air runway, then they started construction of a hangar. They got the hangar about... I would say it was 95% complete. Complete enough for them to house one airplane, and that airplane belonged to Janet Bragg, she was the only one that had money to buy an airplane.

Emily: This is a story of lots of challenges and hurdles. So this was 1933 when they were thinking about building this airport, a bad storm came through two years later in 1935 and knocked down the whole thing, including ruining two planes that were already parked there.

Matt: By this time though Coffey had made friends with the owners of an airport on Harlem Avenue in Chicago, which is where they would do training flights, between the Robbins and Harlem Avenue airports. And when Robbins got destroyed by the storm, the Harlem airport said, "Don't rebuild, we've got a hangar and runway you can use." So the Challengers moved to Harlem Avenue.

Nick: So let's take a second to check in with John C. Robinson. He is one of the founders of the club, he has been one of our protagonists so far through this story. Towards the middle and late part of the thirties, John Robinson became less involved with the club and started spending a lot of his time in , helping the Emperor train pilots to fly it for their military. So Robinson kind of ships out overseas and has all of these extraordinary adventures. So it's important that Robinson had the experiences and the training that we've covered so far, and then he leaves Chicago and has this other very adventurous, very dashing, if you look at the photos of it, life in Ethiopia, becoming a Black aviation pioneer on the other side of the world.

Emily: In addition to all these activities in Ethiopia, John Robinson also started his own flight school at Poro College near Chicago, and Coffey and Robinson taught students there for several years, but this school was never quite as successful as the school that Coffey established later on.

Nick: Several times so far, we've talked about the Chicago Defender, and the Chicago Defender was a Black owned newspaper in Chicago, and there are analogs in a few different places around the United States. But in this case, the Chicago Defender is threaded through almost every instance, and personality, and achievement in this story. It was the publisher of the Defender that first encouraged Bessie Coleman to go to Europe to get her flight training, and then publicizes her achievement, which is really important in clarifying this as a goal in a lot of minds, they were supportive of helping Coffey and Robinson find students when they become instructors themselves. And they give a lot of coverage to all of these aviators, and their achievements, and these institutions and clubs that they're building together. And in this case, the Chicago Defender as an institution is one of the throughlines that is present in almost every area of this part of early Black aviation, particularly in Chicago. There are other analog institutions in other cities, but the Chicago Defender was in the thick of it for almost all of this story. Historian, Jill Snider says the free publicity the paper gave to the Challenger Air Pilot’s Association was incredibly important. Jill Snider: If you look at the Chicago Defender, any issue between the late 1930s and through the mid 1940s, it's almost inevitable you will see something about the pilots in Chicago, and that kind of publicity is really important to recruiting if you want to bring people into Civilian Pilot Training Program, training or service training, having a national newspaper with the reach of the Chicago Defender, which was nationally distributed, was critical.

Emily: So the relationship between the Chicago Defender and the Challenger Air Pilot’s Association got even closer in 1936 when , one of Coffey and Robinson students' marched into the Defender offices and asked to speak to the editor.

Matt: Brown was able to get the editor to agree to promote, and cover the air show that the Challengers were putting on at the Harlem Airport and Janet Bragg, who was in Coffey and Robinson's original class if you'll remember, and was one of the founding members of the Challenger Air Pilot’s Association, went on to write a regular column on the group and aviation more generally for the paper for several years.

Nick: The club and the paper had a lot in common ideologically, and that had to do with Civil Rights in the United States, and in the case of the Challengers, that had specifically to do with lobbying for inclusion in federally backed pilot training programs.

Jill Snider: The challenger pilots were unique in that... while they focused on economics, and they focused to a degree on Pan-Africanism. The real focus of that group became Civil Rights, and that's partly because they have the support of the Defender and they have the support of many individuals, including Congressman and political figures in the Black community in Chicago who really want to help them get Blacks included in the Civilian Pilot Training Program or training service, and in the US Army Air Corps.

Emily: One such program was the Civilian Pilot Training Program, which was a government funded program that was really meant to increase the number of civilian pilots in the United States and serve as the early training grounds for military pilots who would go on to fight in World War II. Jill Snider: So what you see in Chicago is organizational efforts that really focus on, let's look at government policies, let's find out who's involved and who's got the power to make change, and let's do everything we can to lobby those individuals to help us bring about integrated training.

Matt: So as part of this effort, the editor of the Defender encouraged the Challengers to incorporate and to change their name. So they became the National Airman's Association of America in 1939, and began raising money to send two pilots on a tour of cities, including a stop in Washington, D.C. where they could lobby for inclusion in the Civilian Pilot Training Program, which was at that time just starting to designate and fund training schools.

Jill Snider: It was a tour of cities that was meant to raise interest in aviation in Black communities, across the country and they also went to Washington to lobby, and they serendipitously ran into Harry Truman while they were there. They had not intended to go and see him specifically but he was very interested in their flight and it had a big influence on his thinking.

Cornelius Coffey: The most important thing on that trip was the fact that they met Edgar G. Brown. He introduced them to then Senator Truman, Harry Truman, and he was so about it, he wanted to look at the airplane so they arranged to go out to the airport to see this Lincoln- Page. And he took one look at this airplane and he said, "Hey, if you guys got guts enough to fly this thing to Washington, I got guts enough to see that you at least got some of the thing that you want."

Nick: So it's important, and when Coffey specifies that Harry Truman was not President, they didn't just bump into the President in Washington, D.C., but they did bump into the Senator from Missouri, Harry Truman. And in this case, his support was critical. He supported legislation, he backed this effort in a lot of really meaningful ways, but later when Truman did become President, he made the landmark decision to de-segregate the Army Air Corps in 1948. So it was clearly a really important influence on Harry Truman to have met members of the Challenger Club. And the important thing here is that this is another instance of somebody taking recognition of important achievement and aptitude and opportunity and less about them just being in the right place at the right time.

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Nick: So if you've ever heard the metaphor of trying to build an airplane while you're flying it, this comes to mind several instances during this story. So now Black schools have been accepted due in part to the Challenger members lobbying, to the Civilian Pilot Training Program and that includes the new Coffey School of Aeronautics, that Coffey and his now wife Willa Brown had formed. And this is the part where you build the airplane while you're flying. They had to grade and pave the floor of their hangar, they had to get airplanes with certain horsepower that was very expensive and advanced back then, and Coffey and Brown had to do all of these things at once to prove that the Coffey School of Aeronautics was an accredited school and get approval to stay in the government's CPT program.

Matt: It wasn't just physical changes that they had to make to their facilities. Coffey actually had to go off to the Naval Air Station Glenview for instructor training. And the Civilian Pilot Training Program had classes of around 10 students. And while a lot of the schools in the training program were segregated, Coffey made it a point to include Black and white students in every class that he taught.

Cornelius Coffey: Every 10 students that I took, I had one white student and one girl student in that unit. What I was trying to do is to prove to our government that we not only could teach white students, and they could fly together. See, they always told you that you couldn't integrate them, I said, you could.

Emily: Coffey's aviation school started off really small, but as the school grew, they were able to increase their offerings to students. So students were able start getting cross country ratings and mechanics training. Many instructors that taught for Coffey started out as students in the school before being recruited and trained as instructors. Matt: So between 1940 and 1945, the Coffey School of Aeronautics was a government funded program, and it taught roughly 500 students during that time. But they didn't stop teaching after 1945, in fact they continued to teach students at the school until around the mid 50s and even after that point, Coffey and Brown continued to teach aviation as part of curriculum at Chicago public high schools to aspiring pilots.

Nick: And just to emphasize how important it was that they had gained admittance to the Civilian Pilot Training Program and how widespread and influential that program was, more than 435,000 pilots found their training through this program in schools exactly like Coffey's and many of them would go on to fly for the Army Air Corps, including the , and some of the white women who had attended those schools were trained to become part of the WASP during World War II. It should also be noted that we are still dealing with a heavily segregated racist institution across the board here. Janet Bragg, who featured earlier in our story applied to be a WASP, but was rejected because even though she was a woman, she was Black and they did not admit Black pilots to that program.

Emily: Well, and she couldn't be a Tuskegee Airman because she was a woman.

Nick: Right. You may have noticed a couple of familiar names like the Tuskegee Institute and the WASP program at the end of this story, and that's because we're kind of plugging in these Chicago pioneers to a very ongoing struggle for access and inclusion that continues into World War II for Black aviators, for women, for all kinds of minorities who were excluded from early aviation institutions.

Emily: Right. And this is an ongoing story in that field of aviation; mechanics, engineering, piloting, it's still not a story that is completely equitable, it's still a story where folks lack access, it's not always an inclusive space. And so the folks that we mentioned today, I know there's a lot of names in this story that we've talked about, and I think it's really worth going and looking up each one of these people independently, because we can't dig into each one of their histories, but the legacy each one of these people left behind them, and the organizations that they were involved in, and the training that they were involved in really set the stage for continuing to grant access to these kinds of spaces, especially in the space of aviation so that it can become a more equitable and inclusive space, which we're still working on. I mean, you can go listen to some of our other aviation stories, we still have a long ways to go but the legacy that these folks left behind them is really enduring. I mean, Willa Brown who was working with Coffey, training pilots, served in the Civil Air Patrol during World War II, while continuing her teaching activities at the Coffey school, and she spent the rest of her career organizing aviation programs across the Chicago Public School system. She died in 1992 and was buried in the same Chicago cemetery as Bessie Coleman.

Matt: And John Robinson spent the forties and fifties back and forth between the U.S. And Ethiopia, where he was helping build the country's air force and fight against Italian invasions. He died in a training flight crash in Ethiopia in 1954.

Nick: Janet Bragg continued to fly as a hobby, and she went on to found several successful nursing homes in Chicago and became a mother-like figure to many Ethiopian exchange students. Then she retired to Arizona and wrote an autobiography covering her aviation and nursing careers. She died in 1993.

Matt: Cornelius Coffey continued to teach and run his school until it closed. And he then went on to teach aviation mechanics in the Chicago Public School system and retired in 1969. Then he maintained status as a qualified examiner for airplanes and airplane mechanics. He died in 1994. The aviation career programs he and Willa Brown established in the Chicago Public School system still exist today.

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Emily: AirSpace is from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter @AirSpacePod.

Special thanks to the late Ted Robinson who recorded the oral histories heard in this episode, and to the Smithsonian Institution Archives for sending those to us. Also thanks to the Arizona Historical Society for an oral history used for research. And thanks to the Chicago Public Libraries, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection for help and access to the Betty Gubert Collection of African-Americans in Aviation.

AirSpace is produced by Katie Moyer and Jennifer Weingart, mixed by Tarek Fouda, distributed by PRX.

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