AirSpace Podcast Season 4, Episode 9: Chicago Flyer Theme music up and under 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. Theme music up and out 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 United States, 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 John Robinson 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.