Masaryk University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English
and American Studies
Literatures in English
Mgr. et Mgr. Jan Beneš, M.A.
Black Empire of the Air: Black Aviation
in the Harlem Renaissance and George
S. Schuyler’s Serialized Fiction
Dissertation
Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D.
2018
I declare that I have worked on this dissertation independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
……………………………………………..
Author’s signature
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D. for his kind patience,
support, and invaluable advice. I also want to express my gratitude to Dr. Kateřina
Prajznerová, Dr. Amy Earhart, Dr. Ira Dworkin, Dr. Violet Johnson, the Czech Educational
Foundation of Texas, and my family who have all supported and guided me through the
writing process and my studies at Masaryk University and Texas A&M University.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................1
1. THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THREE BLACK NEWSPAPERS........................................ 25
2. AVIATION’S MESSAGE OF GOODWILL WITH MILITARY THREAT IN THE
BLACK PRESS................................................................................................................................. 32
2.1 Origins of Black Aviation’s Goodwill Message.......................................................36
2.1.1 Aviation as Military Threat: The Tulsa Race Riot, Marcus Garvey, and the Black
Press .........................................................................................................................37
2.2 Bessie Coleman: Black Aviation’s Joan of Arc .......................................................42
2.3 Coleman’s Successors: Joel “Ace” Foreman and Hubert Fauntleroy Julian ........49
2.3.1 Hubert Julian’s Goodwill Message ...................................................................52
2.4 Lindbergh, the Black Press, and Aviation Editorials .............................................58
3. THE AVIATION CAMPAIGN: EDUCATION, ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES,
AND REPRESENTATION ........................................................................................................... 68
3.1 William J. Powell’s Creation of and Contribution to the Aviation Campaign......68
3.2 Educating Harlem: Black Aviation in New York and the South............................96
3.3 Black Aviation Education in Chicago: John C. Robinson, Female Aviators, and
Military Displays...................................................................................................104
3.6 Flying the Distance: Breaking Geographical and Racial Barriers.......................146
3.6.1 The Loudest Voice of Black Aviation: Hubert Julian......................................149
3.6.2. Flying Haiti ...................................................................................................162
3.6.3 Writing the First Transcontinental Flight and Erasing Another Boundary .......173
3.6.4 Forsythe and Anderson’s Goodwill Flights for Interracial Understanding .......180
3.7 The Next War Will Be Fought In the Air: Black Aviation’s Military Dimension
...............................................................................................................................194
3.7.1 Ethiopia’s Significance for Black Aviation.....................................................199
3.7.2 Black America’s Fascination with Ethiopia ....................................................202
3.7.3 From Chicago to Ethiopia...............................................................................210
3.7.4 John C. Robinson’s Ethiopian Endeavors in the Black Press...........................214
3.7.5 Showing Off: John C. Robinson’s Technical Expertise on Display .................218
3.7.6 A Hero’s Welcome.........................................................................................223
3.8 I’m Flying to Memphis: John C. Robinson’s Untold Mission ..............................226
3.9 The Writing in the Sky...........................................................................................230
4. BLACK EMPIRE OF THE AIR: READING AVIATION IN GEORGE S.
SCHUYLER’S SERIAL FICTION .......................................................................................... 233
4.1 Introduction............................................................................................................233
4.2 Educating the Black Internationale’s Army and Putting it to Work...................242
4.3 Revenge and Fury Raining from the Sky..............................................................250
4.4 Control of the Air: Armed Liberation, Decolonization, and Survival .................266
4.5 Black Empire in the Context of Frederick Douglass’ and Booker T. Washington’s
Treatments of Technology ....................................................................................281
4.6 Love is in the Air....................................................................................................300
4.7 The Flying Ethiops in Revolt in Ethiopia..............................................................306
CONCLUSION: THE SKY IS THE LIMIT............................................................................... 324
WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED .......................................................................................... 336
1
INTRODUCTION
In 1926, the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. Knopf released Langston Hughes’s first
collection of poems The Weary Blues and Boni & Liveright published Eric Walrond’s Tropic
Death; Walter White’s Flight also came out that year. Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An
Interpretation, published in 1925, triggered an inspired intellectual debate about the merits of
black literature and art throughout 1926 – George S. Schuyler, for example, penned “The
Negro-Art Hokum” for The Nation, in which he expressed skepticism toward the existence
and the development of “new art forms expressing the ‘peculiar’ psychology of the Negro”
(122). A week later, Langston Hughes challenged Schuyler’s views in “The Negro Artist and
the Racial Mountain,” claiming that “for the American Negro artist [there is] a great field of
unused material ready for his art” (156). W.E.B. DuBois joined in later in the year with
“Criteria of Negro Art,” famously declaring that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be.”
And a group of young artists – Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Aaron Douglas,
Richard Bruce Nugent, and Langston Hughes – published a controversial new magazine
Fire!!, “devoted to younger negro artists,” in the fall of 1926. Essays, poems, novels, and
magazines by black Americans were thriving.
Few more so than Urban League’s academic magazine, the Opportunity, which held
its prestigious annual award dinner on May1, 1926. As Harlem Renaissance’s leading nonGarveyite
newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the New York Amsterdam News, informed,
“some of the most distinguished persons of both races in the field of the arts, letters and
music” witnessed as Arna Bontemps took the Alexander Puskin Poetry Prize and Countee
Cullen received his fourth poetry award (“Win Contest Prizes for Literature,” “Opportunity
Magazine Awards 22 Literature Prizes”). However, this exhilarating announcement of the
progress of the Harlem Renaissance was overshadowed by another piece of news that day: the
tragic death of Bessie Coleman, black America’s heroic aviatrix. Coleman’s face, the
2
photographs of her wrecked plane aflame, and the reports on her demise dominated the cover
pages of black newspapers. Harlem, Chicago, and other black communities around the
country mourned the loss of a creative, ingenious, internationally-recognized and
internationally-minded figure, who embodied the spirit of the New Negro and the Harlem
Renaissance – yet has rarely been discussed in the context of the period’s zeitgeist.
Academic discussions and scholarship of the Harlem Renaissance have mostly
revolved around the New Negro’s artistic expression in the literature, theater, music and
dance, as well as the visual art of the era. Nathan Huggins’ seminal Harlem Renaissance
(1971), for example, delves into the era’s “naïve assumptions about the centrality of culture”
(303), while Genevieve Fabre and Michael Feith’s Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at
the Harlem Renaissance (2001) emphasizes the rehabilitative aspect of New Negro art. The
more recent Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem (2013) and
A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (2015) explore the inter- and trans-national impact
and inspirations of Harlem Renaissance art and its artists. Even paradigmatically
groundbreaking monographs such as The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negro’s
Western Experience (2012) or Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Cholocate Babies: Performance,
Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (2011) acknowledge the primacy of literature
and art in their discussions of the era.
Indeed, the ideologues of what Richard Wright originally referred to as the “Harlem
school of expression” emphasized art as a means of redeeming the stereotypical image of
black America; although, as Josef Jařab points out in Masky a Tváře Černé Ameriky, these
redemptive attempts often resulted in new, but inverse stereotypes (21). James Weldon
Johnson, for example, urged in the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry the
“demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and
art” (vii). Charles S. Johnson, upon founding the Opportunity, proclaimed that “each book,
3
play, poem, or canvas by an Afro-American would become a weapon against the old racial
stereotypes” (quoted in Lewis 48). And Alain Locke, in the seminal “Enter the New Negro,”
announced that “renewed self-respect and self-dependence” have entered “the life-attitudes
and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new
outlook” (631). Since the New Negro was now being “seriously portrayed and painted,” his
cultural production would “enrich American art and letters” and bring about “the revaluation
[…] of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and
prospective,” explained Locke. Most importantly, such newly-found appreciation for black
arts and letters would establish black America as “a collaborator and participant in American
civilization” (632-4, emphasis mine). Much like the authors of slave narratives, New Negro
artists would write and perform African Americans’ humanity for all of America to
acknowledge.
For Locke, New Negro’s artistic contribution was a means of achieving civilizational
parity, as well as of instilling a sense of racial pride. Proving “racial civility” (Huggins 196)
through art would lead to “the rise from social disillusionment to race pride, from the sense of
social debt to the responsibilities of social contribution,” and would ultimately rehabilitate the
“race in world esteem.” It would then position “the American Negro […] as the advanceguard
of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization,” prophesied
Locke (632-3). He envisioned an international platform for New Negro artists through which
art was to be not only restorative, but also dynamic and forward-thinking; inter- and transnational
with emphasis on Pan-Africanism. In fact, Locke saw the international leadership
role of black America as its claim to modernity in announcing that the “[American Negroes’]
new internationalism is primarily an effort to recapture contact with the scattered peoples of
African derivation.” The potential role of “the American Negro in the future development of
4
Africa is one of the most constructive and universally helpful missions that any modern
people can lay claim to,” explained the Harlem Renaissance’s patron of the arts (634).
Overall then, Locke envisioned that creative contributions, ingenuity, and artistry
would prove black humanity, and establish black Americans as civilized and modern; ready to
assume leadership among the dark peoples globally. His vision, however, underscores the
heavy burden put by Harlem Renaissance ideologues on the black artists’ shoulders. In his
“Criteria of Negro Art,” DuBois echoes Locke in stating that “the growing recognition of
Negro artists [represents] the real solution of the color problem. The recognition accorded
Cullen, Hughes, Fauset, White and others shows there is no real color line.” In other words,
Locke, DuBois, and others were fixed, as Huggins puts it, “on a vision of high culture”
produced by the most talented New Negro artists believing in racial uplift through art (10); to
the point that they hardly mentioned jazz music in their texts, deeming it too low-brow (Fabre
and Feith 19, Williams 1), and mostly ignored other cultural production of the era as well.
Such obsession with (high) art in the writings of both the Harlem Renaissance
intellectuals and, later, academic scholars obfuscates the fact that the burden of representation
– struggles against stereotypical depictions – and new displays of humanity and ingenuity,
along with the desire to connect Africa-descended peoples around the world did not fall solely
on black artists’ shoulders. The movement was, according to David Levering Lewis, its
historian, a “somewhat forced phenomenon, a cultural nationalism of the parlor” (xv) and, as
Langston Hughes famously claims in The Big Sea (1940), “the ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard
of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any” (178). Rather, as
Davarian L. Baldwin explains in Escape from New York, “more than Harlem’s arts and letters,
the very notion of a New Negro consciousness was produced and consumed through the
various race protests, race papers, race records, race films, race sporting leagues, and race
enterprises that circulated across the country and around the world” (16). Sterling Brown, one
5
of Harlem’s most famous poets, even argued for the inclusion of athletics among the arts,”
because of its value for and popularity among all Americans (Anderson 180). Indeed, as
recent scholarship and the historical record indicate, the Harlem Renaissance was not a New
York-based movement predicated on art, but, instead, a multifaceted and “truly a national
phenomenon” (Wintz and Glasrud 1), filled with “a range of New Negroes who were more
than just the objects of black modernist art and writings waiting for aesthetic construction”
(Baldwin 4). Bessie Coleman represented one such model New Negro race leader and role
model.
Coleman’s story of artistry, however, barely appeared in The Crisis or the
Opportunity, Harlem Renaissance’s prestigious literary magazines. Rather, it filled the pages
of race newspapers read and consumed by millions of people of color nation- and worldwide.
Coleman left Chicago to study aviation in France and arrived in Harlem with an international
pilot license in October 1921. A close friend of Josephine Baker’s, Harlem’s legendary
performer, the aviatrix was celebrated upon her return by the cast of Broadway hit with an allblack
cast, Shuffle Along, including Baker, Florence Mills, and Paul Robeson. The Chicago
Defender even celebrated Coleman with a cartoon (“Shuffle Along Company Gives Fair Flyer
Cup,” “They Can’t Keep Us Down”). In her first interview, Coleman explained to a reporter
for the Defender that “because I knew we had no aviators, neither men nor women, and I
knew the Race needed to be represented along this most important line, I thought it my duty
to risk my life to learn aviation and to encourage flying among men and women of the Race
who are so behind the white men in this special line” (“Aviatrix Must Sign Away Life to
Learn Trade”). As early as 1921, well before Alain Locke, Coleman thus formulated her
civilizing mission to represent the race in the revolutionary and utterly modern art of aviation.
With lack of representation in the highly-skilled field in mind, Coleman planned to
open a school in Chicago and had even been asked to teach flying in Moscow, the New York
6
Times reported (“Negress an Air Pilot”). Furthermore, when Marcus Garvey’s Harlem-based
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a powerful back-to-Africa organization,
held its Third International Convention in August 1922, Coleman appeared at the event to
inspire the members to formally establish a bureau of aeronautics, tasked with opening a
flying school (Snider 93-4). The aviatrix also performed at parades celebrating the Harlem
Hellfighters and the 8th
Illinois Infantry, legendary WWI units. Coleman was an
internationally-minded black aviation crusader, too, as she expressed desire to spread the
gospel of aviation in pan-American countries (“Bessie to Fly Over Gotham,” “Bessie Gets
Away; Does Her Stuff”). In the first half of the 1920s, Coleman – who once explained to a
French reporter that she wanted to “cause the Negro to change Uncle Tom’s cabin into a
hangar” (“Bessie Coleman Famous Aviatrix”) – became a New Negro role model. As the
Pittsburgh Courier’s George S. Schuyler eulogized upon Coleman’s funeral in his “Views
and Reviews” column in May 1926, Coleman “wanted to be an aviatrix and would not be
frustrated by racial barriers. […] More and more Negroes are following her example. Many
more ought to.”
Like Harlem Renaissance ideologues, intellectuals, and artists, Coleman was during
her short-lived career preoccupied with subversion of old stereotypes and representation.
African Americans had long been viewed as technically incompetent, explains Bruce Sinclair
in Technology and the African-American Experience: “denying them access to education,
control over complex machinery, or the power of patent rights lay at the heart of the
distinctions drawn between black and white people” in the United States (2). Coleman,
however, “believed in the regenerative powers of technology” and sought “for blacks to
represent themselves as technically competent” (10); or, to use Locke’s terms, as members of
the American civilization. Coleman presented black aviation as a proof of civility and
humanity. Like other Harlem Renaissance artists and figures, the flyer went to France to
7
develop her art under the tutelage of experts and, upon her return, performed in front of large
crowds to foster race pride and promote positive image of African Americans as technically
capable and ingenious. Before her death, Coleman was even booked to star in a race film by
Richard E. Norman about flying, which materialized in the 1926 hit silent movie about a
heroic WWI-veteran-turn-railroad-detective, The Flying Ace (Lupack 162-5).
Coleman’s vision also included inter- and trans-national aspects. The aviatrix
cooperated with Garvey’s UNIA and hoped to engage other nations and peoples of color in
aviation. Like Hughes, McKay or DuBois, Coleman had contacts with the Soviet Union. And,
like Schuyler and Charles S. Johnson, she had a strong connection with the Harlem
Hellfighters and other black military units and veterans.1
Finally, her art of flying and her
stunning performances for communities of color across the nation and in Europe fostered the
development of the general Harlem Renaissance’s print culture, particularly the black press.
Regular celebratory articles about Coleman drove the circulation of the Defender and
Garvey’s Negro World to figures over 200,000. In these numerous interviews and reports,
Coleman also established black aviation’s objectives and its role as a means of representing
the race. In short, Coleman was a Harlem Renaissance and New Negro artist in her own right.
After Coleman’s death in 1926 and Charles Lindbergh’s successes from 1927
onwards, black America – especially on the pages of the black press – feared that there would
be no one to replace “Brave Bessie” in developing black aviation. Indeed, Coleman’s fellow
aviators took up her cause and activities, but initially without much success. However,
between 1929 and 1939 – the year when the United States Congress established the Civilian
Pilot Training Program (CPTP) for black pilots, a precursor to the Tuskegee Airmen program
– black pilots organized popular air shows, carried out long-distance flights, organized
1
Charles Johnson was a volunteer with the 103rd Pioneer Infantry Regiment in France during WW1.
He later rose to the rank of sergeant-major. Schuyler, who at the age of 17 enlisted in the army and
was stationed in Hawaii and Seattle, was sent in 1917 to Camp Des Moines to train the cadet
officers in the units which would later be known as the Harlem Hellfighters (Lewis 13-45).
8
segregated schools and clubs, and, importantly, took initiative to promote black aviation to the
public via the black press. They began to directly form black aviation’s image in symbiosis
with black papers and journalists, continuing and advancing Coleman’s pioneering work as a
New Negro role model. Including Bessie Coleman’s years of fame and omnipresence in black
newspapers, black aviators thus led almost a two-decade-long campaign – from 1921 to 1939
– for aviation in the black press during a period better known as the Harlem Renaissance.2
Black Aviation in the Black Press: Crusading Advocacy, Protest, and Community
Building
Black newspapers represented an ideal channel for the promotion of and advocacy for black
aviation during the interwar period since, at that time, the black press emerged as “one of the
most important institutions […] through which racial protest was expressed [and represented]
the most militant agitator that [African Americans] possessed” (Bullock 208). The institution
also functioned as the mechanism which fostered the abstract, “imagined community” of
black America. As Benedict Anderson explains, “the members of even the smallest nation
will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the
minds of each lives the image of their communion.” The black press played a central
facilitating and institutional role in bringing about such communion, because “communities
are to be distinguished,” according to Arnold, “by the style in which they are imagined” (6).
Unlike the general press in the United States, the black press imagined and presented the
black national community as well as the local ones “through its coverage of black
organizations, social functions, personalities, issues, events, and achievements,” explains
Hayward Farrar. In doing so, it “offered its readers a definition of black community” (xi).
2
The dissertation here follows the periodization – approximately 1919 to 1940 – utilized by, among
others, Henry Louis Gates and Nellie McKay in The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature, Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey in Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem
Renaissance Anthology.
9
In its emphasis on all things African American, and increasingly Pan-African, the
interwar black press, according to Gunnar Myrdal’s seminal An American Dilemma,
“define[d] the Negro group to the Negroes themselves.” It was through black newspapers that
the “individual Negro [was] invited to share in the sufferings, grievances and pretensions of
the millions of Negroes far outside the narrow local community. This create[d] a feeling of
strength and solidarity,” the building blocks of a community. In this way, asserts the Swedish
sociologist, “the press, more than any other institution […] created the Negro group as a
social and psychological reality to the individual Negro” (911). The black press thus “helped
create, maintain, and mold the black communities it […] served” (Farrar xi).
At the same time, the black press played the role of an advocate for its communities
and the national community in general. It “served as the black community’s voice and, by its
expression, as a preservative of that community’s identity,” explains Brian Carroll. Black
newspapers advocated and crusaded for their community’s causes and needs, they protested
Jim Crow policies. Thus, the newspapers “imbued African Americans with a sense of purpose
and destiny, functioning as an instrument of social change, enterprise, artistic self-esteem, and
racial solidarity. […] In fulfilling these roles these newspapers contributed to the development
of a national black consciousness” (3). Overall then, African Americans “used the press as a
communication device to foster their identities” as they “could read about themselves and
their own accomplishments and applaud the verbal body blows that colored journalists
slammed at American racial prejudice” (Baldasty and Lapointe 15).
As the black American community’s builder, connector, and voice, the black press
exerted immense influence and control over that very community’s progress, development,
and demeanor. As Myrdal argues, the black press operated “as the chief agency of group
control. It [told] the individual how he should think and feel as an American Negro and
create[d] a tremendous power of suggestion by implying that all other Negroes think and feel
10
in this manner” (911). One of the techniques employed by the black press in developing a
community-wide consciousness was the racial uplift ideology. Although uplift was originally
articulated as a program of the black elites in which “by adhering to a code of temperance,
thrift, polite manners, sexual purity, cleanliness and rectitude, blacks contradicted racist
stereotypes about their alleged inferiority” (quoted in Field 3), the black press in the interwar
period – especially with the onset of the Great Depression – began to transform the basic
tenets of uplift as it increasingly addressed and spoke for the interests of working- and lowerincome
African Americans. Black papers accentuated protest, crusading tones, and advocacy
campaigns which emphasized black America’s needs. They eschewed assimilationist uplift
policies which would endear African Americans, through emulation of white middle- and
upper-class values, to the majority population. Indeed, the black press still encouraged
“individual initiative, mutual assistance, social responsibility, interracial cooperation, and
economic independence as components of a general [uplift] strategy for promoting the
advancement of African Americans (Field 3), but it also attacked more vigorously America’s
racially segregated economic, political, and social structures. In black papers, racial uplift was
not entrenched in class distinctions as before WWI, but in building a common New Negro
consciousness of progress and advancement around which the entire black American
community could coalesce and move forward.
The black aviation campaign in the black press stands as an example of one such
massive national advocacy movement rooted in highlighting certain common racial uplift
values to combat racist stereotypes and demeaning depictions of African Americans as
inferior. Aviation education and complex, skilled work available to anyone, individual
pioneering aviators’ initiative with the objective to attract and benefit the local and, in turn,
the national black American community, and the black aviation leaders’ international outlook
are the values which define and characterize the crusade for black aviators in the interwar,
11
Harlem Renaissance black press. The campaign produced race role models and leaders whose
success in the highly-skilled and utterly modern field of aviation despite segregation was
highlighted and celebrated as behavior and path to a bright future which the readers should
support and emulate. The aviators’ achievements and increasing success, argued black
newspapers, would benefit the entire national community as they would signal to white
America that African Americans can fly, can operate sophisticated machinery, and can
participate in and contribute to the technological progress that the United States were
undergoing in the interwar period. African Americans would thus rightfully earn their place in
the U.S. Army, particularly the new Air Corps.
The campaign for black aviation also served its part in the production of
emancipatory, non-Eurocentric knowledge, and in the “resistance to the white race dogma
[…] popularized among the Negro people through the Negro press” (Myrdal 96), which
stereotyped African Americans “as different and inferior in the biological, medical, and
anthropological sciences” (Stepan and Gilman 170). In the context of aviation, the dogma
materialized in the form of barring black applicants from flying and navigation schools and
the Army flying units on account of their intellectual, technical, technological, and scientific
inferiority (Broadnax 18-25). The black press, however, functioned as a channel in which one
can find and trace a “‘critical tradition’ in relation to scientific racism [produced by] those
stereotyped by the sciences of the day” (Stepan and Gilman171). This tradition involved
“recurring tropes, recurring techniques of reenvisioning identity, [and] certain patterns in the
tactics of re-representation” (179). Aviation as a scientific and technological field, as well as
the campaign in the black press, played an important role in developing and enhancing the
existing critical tradition which ultimately sought to counter the notion of African Americans
as inferior.
12
As this dissertation project argues and shows, the Harlem Renaissance-era black press
engaged on behalf of black aviation in the tactics of transvaluation and recontextualization of
the discourse on aviation. As black aviation students as well as seasoned black aviators were
repeatedly excluded, barred, and segregated from aviation education institutions, flying clubs,
and other organizations because of their skin color and the alleged physical and mental
deficiencies associated with it, the black press challenged, subverted, and reversed these very
same values attached to people of color in aviation. The press thus began to advocate for
black aviation.
The rhetorical strategy of transvaluation used by the black press, explain Nancy Leys
Stepan and Sander L. Gilman in “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of
Scientific Racism,” involved accepting “the terms set by the dominant discourse, but [also]
chang[ing] the valuations attached to them.” Race differences were sometimes acknowledged,
but “the ‘inferior’ element in the hierarchy was revalued and renamed. This strategy entailed a
transvaluation of the terms of the dominant discourse.” Indeed, “this simple process of
transvaluation of the terms from negative to positive was not always convincing, observe
Stepan and Gilman, “since the resisting minority was always in a position of lesser legitimacy
than that of the dominating voice.” However, for the aviators, the journalists, the black press
as a whole, and the audience, “such transvaluations often had considerable weight. Reactive
and defensive though transvaluations may have been, the result was often empowerment [as]
upon the basis of such reversals political solidarities were created” (181) and the black
American community was strengthened as it rallied around a common cause.
As this dissertation shows, once black aviators and the black press realized that
segregation would not allow the development of black aviation within and through the system
of white educational and professional institutions and organizations, the flyers and the
newspapers worked in symbiosis to highlight as a positive development the fact that black
13
aviators were still able to succeed in the field despite the era’s segregation and racism.
Particularly in the period between Bessie Coleman’s passing and the first historic
achievements by black aviators in 1932, individual amateur black aviation pioneers as well as
group efforts in the form of segregated schools, clubs, and air events such as circuses and
exhibitions were embraced and promoted in the black press. As “a dialectical politics of selfsegregation,
solidarity and reversals was set in motion” (Stepan and Gilman 182), black
newspapers employed emotional, crusading language and images – a set of tropes, phrases,
and themes here designated as black aviation’s message of goodwill – to rally African
Americans to the cause of pioneer black aviators as representatives of the assertive and
increasingly militant New Negro era.
The fact that white America insisted on segregating those African Americans who
wanted to learn to fly and subsequently fight for their country because they were not deemed
worthy of the highly-technical field was reversed rhetorically in black newspapers as a
positive turn of events. This allowed, as black journalists argued, black aviators to develop
their skills independently and make their communities even more proud when they achieved
white aviators’ level without having all the institutional support. Nevertheless, while
segregation in aviation was thus embraced out of necessity as a rhetorical strategy to counter
existing misconceptions and stereotypes of African Americans’ technical and technological
abilities and to highlight the development of black aviation independent of white structures,
the reversal of values attached to segregation was not completely convincing. Indeed, the
black press still advocated, protested, lamented, and crusaded for black aviators to be
accepted to study at white aviation schools and to fly alongside white flyers at exhibition
events, circuses, and, ultimately, in the U.S. Air Corps.
Along with the straightforward strategy of transvaluation or reversal of values of the
dominant discourse on aviation, the black press also gradually sought to recontextualize the
14
existing debates surrounding aviation and the exclusion of black flyers from the United
States’ rapid advancements and ascendance in the field. Recontextualization, claim Stepan
and Gilman, was “associated with a growing empowerment of minorities in science, an
increased familiarity with its idioms and technologies, and, therefore, a new authority in
challenging the claims of science on its own terms.” In essence then, “the tools of science
were used either to prove that the supposed factual data upon which the stereotypes of racial
inferiority were based were wrong, or to generate new ‘facts’ on which different claims could
be made” (183).
In the black press, recontextualization emerged especially in the period from 1932
onwards as black aviators, their segregated schools, clubs, and organizations notched one
achievement after another despite segregation, racism, and Jim Crow combined with the Great
Depression. Increasingly, black newspapers employed the persuasion technique of
indisputable “data” of successful cross-country and international flights, the rising number of
licensed pilots, student aviators, and African American-run aviation schools, as well as the
overall black American community’s air-mindedness, to argue that black aviators deserved a
place in the nation’s army’s flying units. As familiarity – on the part of the black journalists
and the reading public – with the parlance, science, and technology of aviation grew
throughout the campaign, the black press utilized the scientific idiom of aviation as the logos
in its support of black aviators. Ultimately, black aviation’s progress – often discussed as
scientific and technological progress of black America as a whole – was highlighted in the
black press as a development which would benefit the African American community as it
represented a form of racial uplift, a civil rights struggle, and proof of black Americans’
humanity as well as technical and technological ability.
15
Black Aviation and the Harlem Renaissance
Still, the black aviation campaign in the black press was an even more complex cultural,
social, and political phenomenon than it may seem. Throughout the almost two-decade-long
campaign, black aviators and aviatrices also directly participated in the overall cultural
production of the Harlem Renaissance with their performances as well as in the era’s print
culture. Black journalists structured and lead the campaign with reports, columns, editorials,
and photographs. But black aviators complemented the movement as they wrote letters to the
editor and newspaper articles on their flying experiences, the physical reality of flying, and
the history of black aviation. One of the pioneer New Negro aviators, William J. Powell, even
published a racially-uplifting popular and widely reviewed book, authored and performed a
successful aviation-themed and uplifting play, and directed a documentary propagating
aviation among black Americans.
Thus, as the black press archive and historical records of the larger Harlem
Renaissance era reveal, while intellectual figures and artists published essays, short stories,
novels, poems, and led vigorous discussions about black art, politics, and civil rights in The
Crisis and the Opportunity and other art-focused magazines, New Negro aviators and
journalists led a nation-wide campaign for black aviation in the black press. The campaign
countered existing stereotypes of African Americans’ innate lack of technical and
technological abilities by emphasizing black Americans’ rising representation in the highlyskilled
and modern field. It highlighted the economic opportunities available in the field of
aviation, as well as the civil rights issue of including black pilots in the United States Air
Service and later Air Corps. Keeping in spirit with the Harlem Renaissance’s international
aspect, black pilots – some of them Afro-Caribbean immigrants – proposed and carried out
international flights to other nations of color, sometimes with the financial backing of black
papers, to promote black technical ingenuity, interracial goodwill, and flying artistry.
16
The significant presence and role of black aviation in the multifaceted world of the
Harlem Renaissance and its ideologues’ objectives have, however, been left out of the era’s
history and scholarship, no matter how geographically or temporally defined. Even the most
recent look at Harlem’s sport scene, The Culture of Sports in the Harlem Renaissance (2017),
ignores black aviation completely. Scholars of what has been termed the Black Chicago
Renaissance and the New Negro Renaissance in Los Angeles have also largely omitted
aviation in its early history. This dissertation project, however, recovers and explores the
history, cultural significance, and artistic representation of black aviation during the Harlem
Renaissance and the early years of the Black Chicago and Los Angeles Renaissance, here
subsumed under the umbrella term of the Harlem Renaissance. The project argues for the
inclusion of black aviation during the 1920s and the 1930s into the expanding definition of
the Harlem Renaissance alongside other creative arts and politics as it represents a prime
example of black creativity and ingenuity, a racial-uplift project, as well as a struggle for civil
rights.
Specifically, in its first part, the project focuses on and analyzes the depiction and
propagation of black aviation – through the rhetorical strategies of transvaluation and
recontextualization – in and by the interwar black press, thereby drawing attention to the
crucial role of the press in providing a counternarrative to existing stereotypical depictions of
African Americans regarding science and technology. Black newspapers championed aviation
as much as or more than the all-black basketball team called The Harlem Renaissance3
or the
integration of baseball, the automotive industry and its opportunities for African Americans,
or other social and civil rights causes such as housing conditions and criminal justice reform.
The dissertation project thus argues that black aviation represented an omnipresent aspect of
the popular and print culture during the Harlem Renaissance.
3
For more on the basketball team, see On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey through the Harlem
Renaissance (2007) by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
17
The progress of black aviation – just like the Harlem Renaissance itself – was partially
a result of the influx of black migrants into the industrial cities in the North and West as
skilled mechanics educated in Southern black vocational schools sought employment. Black
aviation was portrayed as a means of uplift and, although it was mostly represented by the
African American middle class, the black press sought to engage lower-income classes in the
field as well. Black papers employed sensationalism, emotional language, pride, and an eye
for attractive stories and characters in their aviation campaign – the way black aviation was
discussed reflects the black press’s practices as much as the successes of black aviators.
Initially, the campaign was one-dimensional, engaged in transvaluation, as it celebrated the
individual achievements of Coleman and her New Negro successors, while decrying lack of
financial support. However, from 1929 onwards, and particularly between 1932 and 1939 – as
the analysis of major black newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, and
the New York Amsterdam News demonstrates here – the black press gradually filled with texts
by black aviators along with reports on and support of educational and organizing efforts,
long-distance and international flights, inter- and trans-national cooperation, and eventual
campaigning for black aviators’ inclusion in the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP).
Black aviation gradually rose in popularity among the general black American public
as well as the popular culture stars of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Josephine Baker, Duke
Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, William Pickens, and Claude McKay. Several
famous New Negro journalists also repeatedly reported on black aviation: Floyd J. Calvin,
J.A. Rogers, Percival L. Prattis, William Pickens, and George S. Schuyler interviewed black
pilots and sometimes even ventured flights with them. Schuyler’s column “Views and
Reviews” in the Courier, however, stands out among these texts. According to Melvin
Tolson, Schuyler’s column was “the most discussed column in Negro America. I have heard
his opinions attacked and defended in barbershops, Jim Crow cars, pool rooms, class rooms,
18
churches and drawing rooms” (quoted in Wilson 168). Between 1924 and 1943, Schuyler, one
of Harlem Renaissance’s foremost journalists, public intellectuals, and authors, commented
on and celebrated achievements by black aviator in his columns. His aforementioned eulogy
for Bessie Coleman represents a mere tip of the iceberg as Schuyler’s journalism continually
displays his erudition in the field of aviation all the way up to the 1943 review of Giulio
Douhet’s seminal text on modern air warfare, The Command of the Air.
More importantly, as this dissertation project argues, Schuyler also integrated black
aviation into his immensely popular serialized novellas – Black Internationale (November
1936-July 1937), Black Empire (October 1937-April 1938), and Revolt in Ethiopia (July
1938-January 1939), the plots of which are driven and framed by aviation and technological
innovation. Schuyler’s full oeuvre thus indicates, as Ivy G. Wilson points out, that “one way
to accentuate Schuyler’s presence as a writer of the Harlem Renaissance is to underscore his
nonfiction prose as the backbeat to his creative writing” (163). This dissertation explores and
highlights the connections between Schuyler’s journalistic work and fiction, both published in
the Courier, and points out and analyzes the author’s engagement in promoting aviation as a
New Negro phenomenon, as well as his awareness of black aviation’s popularity among the
readership of the black press.
The second part of the project therefore analyzes George S. Schuyler’s journalistic and
literary contribution to advocacy for black aviation, thereby expanding and deepening existing
scholarship of his often controversial and eclectic work. It argues that not only was Schuyler
among black aviation’s most vocal supporters in the black press, but also that his three
novellas should be analyzed in the context of the author’s journalistic work on aviation to
expand our understanding of the texts’ popularity and complexity. Schuyler the journalist and
public intellectual criticized Harlem Renaissance leaders for selling out to white audiences
with primitivism, while, as the author of three novellas of black pilots’ endeavors in Africa,
19
he depicted African Americans, Ethiopians, and other peoples of color as New Negroes: as
modern and masters of a technology associated with only the most civilized of nations. In this
way, his hardboiled texts integrate black journalists’ rhetorical strategies of transvaluation and
recontextualization and deliberately serve as racial propaganda, taking DuBois’s call to its
extreme. Schuyler consciously exploits Harlem and black America’s fascination with New
Negro aviators’ successes from the late 1920s and the 1930s, especially with John Charles
Robinson’s heroic mission in Ethiopia in 1935/36 covered in depth and celebrated on the
pages of the Courier.
The novellas also draw inspiration from black aviators’ efforts between 1937 and 1939
to form an organization to lobby the Congress and campaign, with help from the black press,
for the inclusion of black pilots in the United States Air Force. Schuyler’s black pilots display
military skills, organization, and technical ingenuity as they overpower colonial armies in
Africa to finish Robinson’s mission and avenge Italy’s colonial war in Ethiopia.
Consequently, the novellas therefore imagine and explore black aviation’s potential for armed
decolonization and violent liberation as they envision black pilots as modern fighters against
white supremacy. Finally, the texts also approach black internationalism through an
innovative prism of aviation – connecting Africa-descended people in a violent anti-colonial
war lead primarily in the air – and subvert the long-standing stereotype of African Americans
and Ethiopians as technologically and technically incompetent. Instead, Schuyler envisions
black pilots as rulers of a Black Empire of the air.
Overall, in its two-part exploration and analysis of black aviation within the context of
the Harlem Renaissance, this dissertation project follows the call of a distinguished scholar of
the era, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, that “extending the established boundaries of the Harlem
Renaissance also means engaging in innovative recovery work” (4). The dissertation
considers and engages with three Harlem Renaissance novellas and the journalistic work of
20
one the era’s most-recognized public intellectuals and authors in a broader context of early
black aviation history. At the same time, it recovers and situates the symbiotic efforts of black
aviators and the black press within one of the most culturally productive eras of black
America’s history, thus highlighting the parallels between the objectives of the Harlem
Renaissance and its pioneer aviators, New Negro models and race leaders. In general, the text
also continues archival recovery and exploration of black newspapers and provides innovative
contextualization and interpretation of literary texts from the Harlem Renaissance era.
Finally, the project provides a comprehensive, albeit not exhaustive bibliography of
newspaper articles dealing with black aviation, continuing the pioneering work begun by
Betty Kaplan Gubert in Invisible Wings: An Annotated Bibliography on Blacks in Aviation,
1916-1993. In doing so, the project maps, in-depth, early black aviation history as well as its
contribution to Harlem Renaissance’s print culture and cultural production. Existing
monographs on black aviation such as Double V: The Civil Rights Struggle of the Tuskegee
Airmen (1994), The Divided Skies: Establishing Segregated Flight Training at Tuskegee,
Alabama, 1934-42 (1992), Blue Skies, Black Wings: African American Pioneers of Aviation
(2007), and Storming the Heavens: African Americans and the Early Fight for the Right to
Fly (2018) have mostly focused on the Tuskegee Airmen and the early 1940s. The 1920s and
the 1930s have been treated merely as pioneering years – a lead-up to the Tuskegee Airmen –
during which a handful of successful individuals paved the way for the CPTP. Rarely have
these two decades been considered in their own right. This dissertation, however, traces the
aviation campaign in the black press throughout the Harlem Renaissance era and pinpoints the
most significant aspects of this culturally significant and widely consumed phenomenon. It
uncovers, for example, numerous pioneer female aviators, segregated clubs, airports, and
schools, as well as plans by black pilots to establish segregated airlines.
21
The most recent scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance has tried to dispel the
prevalent notion that, geographically speaking, Harlem was the cradle of black arts and letters
during the 1920s and the 30s. Rather, as Wintz and Glasrud argue, “New York was more of a
destination than an incubator” (2). Similarly, in tracing how widespread of a phenomenon
early black aviation was – Chicago, Los Angeles, Harlem, Boston, Pennsylvania, Haiti, and
Addis Ababa are shown to be influential black aviation hubs or centers during this time – the
dissertation decenters Tuskegee as the focal point of black aviation history. In doing so, the
text further highlights the nationwide as well as the inter- and trans-national aspects of early
black aviation history. Some of the most important flyers were West Indian immigrants who,
after learning to fly in the United States, took up Bessie Coleman’s call and spread the gospel
of aviation in pan-American countries in direct anti-colonial reaction to the spread of the
United States’ empire of the air, embodied by Charles Lindbergh and Pan-Am, in the
Caribbean. Other black pilots taught foreign students of color or engaged in fights in the
Spanish Civil War and Ethiopia’s war against Italian colonial forces. Education, military
engagement, and public performances of black aviators along with their presentation in the
black press thus resulted in the creation of an entire range of New Negro role models and race
leaders, who inspired others inter- and trans-nationally to take up aviation as a means of
demonstrating black humanity and civilization.
In his 1939 essay for the Reader’s Digest, Charles Lindbergh famously called aviation
“a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era.” He
declared it “a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy
in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian
inheritance of Europe -- one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to
live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown.” Throughout the Harlem
Renaissance era, black journalists and aviators sought and fought to dispel Lindbergh’s
22
interpretation of aviation as proof of white supremacy. The coverage of black aviation in the
black press challenged segregation in aviation, but also celebrated and advertised New Negro
aviators’ successes within the constrictions and despite segregation. In the 1930s, as black
aviation developed, black newspapers provided mounting evidence that African Americans,
too, mastered this allegedly Western tool. In this way, as this dissertation hopes to show,
black aviators not only challenged long-held stereotypes, but also assumed their role as
Locke’s advance-guard of Africa-descended peoples who have caught up with modern
civilization. Seizing the moment in which the black press, through the rhetoric strategies of
transvaluation and recontextualization, presented and popularized black aviation as a
nationwide uplift and civil rights phenomenon, George S. Schuyler integrated and serialized
assertive, militant, anti-colonial, Pan-Africanist, and highly skilled New Negro aviators into
his extremely popular and shocking novellas of black aviation’s potential.
Structure of the Dissertation and Acknowledgement
The dissertation is divided into four section. The first one deals briefly with the history of the
three black newspapers analyzed in this project: the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh
Courier, and the New York Amsterdam. The subsequent section discusses the origins of the
black aviation campaign – and its materialization in the form of a goodwill message of
aviation – in the three newspapers. It traces the emergence of aviation as a hotly-debated topic
after the Tulsa race riot in 1921 and Bessie Coleman’s arrival in that same year. Coleman’s
strategies of promoting black aviation, her successes, as well her successors’ failures are also
addressed here. The third and longest section maps the development of black aviation and its
campaign in the black press across the period between 1928 and 1939. It highlights the major
figures – both aviators and journalists – of the movement, including George S. Schuyler, and
identifies and analyzes the major themes and tropes utilized and debated in the campaign. The
final section deals with Schuyler’s serialized novellas and his depiction of black aviation in
23
the texts, underscoring the author’s complex and hitherto ignored portrayal of New Negro
aviators and aviation as a means of liberation and decolonization as well as a framework for
romance in the novellas.
The dissertation project presented here is the result of a long research process into
black aviation and the black press. It was facilitated by having access to the invaluable
database of Proquest Historical Newspapers, which allowed key-word search through a vast
collection of black newspapers. By searching for keywords associated with aviation – flying,
flyer(s), pilot(s), aviator(s), aviatrix, and aviation – the database revealed almost one thousand
newspaper texts dealing with the phenomenon of black aviation. Initially, this search took the
shape of a seminar paper, then an annotated bibliography, and finally a Master’s Thesis titled
Writing in the Sky: Black Aviation in the Interwar Black Press and defended at Texas A&M
University in College Station, TX in the spring of 2017.
The current dissertation project is, in a large part, rooted in the previous thesis – some of
its sections, particularly throughout chapters 1, 2, and 3 are almost identical. However, the
introduction, the focus and methodology, as well as the scope of the dissertation is vastly
different. While the thesis analyzed mostly only two newspapers – the Defender and the
Courier – the current text includes and adds also the New York Amsterdam News. The
structure of the thesis was almost painstakingly chronological, but the dissertation follows a
thematical and a broadly rhetorical focus in its analysis so as to allow black aviation’s
incorporation into the Harlem Renaissance. The introduction, the final chapter or the literary
analysis of Schuyler’s serialized novellas, and parts of the conclusion are all brand new texts
which build on the findings of both the thesis and the subsequent dissertation research.
Overall, the dissertation presents a more thorough, detailed, and expanded exploration of the
black aviation phenomenon in the black press during and in the context of the Harlem
Renaissance.
24
Throughout the text, the designation ‘African American’ and ‘black American’ is used
interchangeably to refer to descendants of enslaved black people who hail from the United
States. The terms ‘black’ and ‘Africa-descended people’ denote Africans, African Americans,
and West Indians – hence the term black aviation – to convey the fact that not only African
American pilots were part of the massive aviation campaign in the black press and of the
Tuskegee Airmen. Finally, the term ‘people of color’ includes Africa-descended people as
well as other ethnicities since Japan and Central as well as Latin American countries were
directly or directly involved in the campaign discussed here.
25
1. THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THREE BLACK NEWSPAPERS
The history of the black press dates to the early 1800s. The first black newspaper, Freedom’s
Journal, a weekly, was established in 1827 by John B. Russwurm and Samuel Cornish
(Washburn 17). Other short-lived publications, around forty of them, followed until the Civil
War with all of them focusing on protesting injustices to the race. After 1865, the black press
divided between crusaders for civil rights and those which saw potential for profit rather than
social change (Wolseley 24-6). One of the major figures in the development of crusading
black newspapers was Frederick Douglass, who, during his career as a journalist, established
several different papers. In 1847, he started the North Star, which later merged with the
Liberty Party Paper into Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Aiding Douglass in these pioneering
efforts was Martin R. Delany, a journalist often considered the original black nationalist.
Douglass later continued with Douglass’ Monthly and the New National Era in the
Reconstruction period (30-37).
As the black population in the postbellum period was becoming more educated and
communities along with churches were able to provide financial support to various papers and
serve as its audience, the number of black newspaper publications soared. State-based and
local newspapers flourished, with numbers rising from 31 publications in 1880 to 154 by
1890 (Wolseley 39). At the turn of the century, many of the local papers ceased to exist, while
the black press became more established in large black communities. Newspapers were now
founded as commercial ventures, where social causes may have still dominated, but other
news claimed significant space as well. By 1910, there were an estimated 288 black
newspapers with a combined circulation of about 500,000 primary readers, yet the
newspapers typically passed from the purchaser to other people in the community as well,
multiplying its impact (Washburn 83). As Frederick Detweiler noted in 1922 in his seminal
The Negro Press in the United States, “the entire literate portion of the race reads
26
newspapers” with “each paper sold ha[ving] an average of five readers” (11). The
Philadelphia Tribune and The Baltimore Afro-American dominated the national market along
with Thomas Fortune’s the New York Age, closely associated with Booker T. Washington,
and Boston’s Guardian (Washburn 43-50). However, the 1920s saw the rise of Robert S.
Abbott’s The Chicago Defender and Robert L. Vann’s The Pittsburgh Courier. The New York
Amsterdam News (NYAN) joined influential black papers in the 1920s, too, as the voice of
Harlem.
In An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal famously notes that “the importance of the
Negro press for the formation of Negro opinion, for the functioning of all other Negro
institutions, for Negro leadership and concerted action generally, is enormous. The Negro
press is an educational agency and a power agency” (179). The Courier, the Defender, and the
NYAN fit this description perfectly. The three newspapers became a dominant force in the
black press by the 1930s. Abbott launched the Defender in 1905, envisioning the paper as a
fighter for the race; hence its title. It was barely surviving at first as its militant tone of
muckracking, campaigning against prostitution, and for black causes did not seem to attract
enough readers (Wolseley 52-3). It was not until Abbott decided to employ yellow journalism
that the sales of the Defender soared, and by 1915, the paper had reached a circulation of
230,000 (Washburn 83, Wolseley 54). By 1925, the paper was circulated among 247,867
readers (Yeuell 93), with approximately two thirds of the issues sold outside of Chicago.
According to Charles A. Simmons, the change in journalistic style brought about a larger
number of subscribers to the Defender, and also stability and longevity as it “gave notice and
recognition that the Negro press no longer could be brushed aside by authorities as merely an
incidental medium” (27).
The Defender became a crusading newspaper. This was especially true once Abbott
decided to sensationalize and highlight in red-color headlines the living conditions of African
27
Americans still residing in the South and launched a campaign in 1917 for “the Great
Northern Drive.” The paper provided information on how to best leave the South for Chicago
and other large cities in the North and helped migrants with train fare. The campaign became
so successful that not only did some Southern states outlaw the distribution of the Defender,
but the paper’s circulation had reached 283,571 by 1920 (Simmons 30-5). In this way, the
Defender followed the black press’s tradition of advocating for a social cause. According to
Wolseley, the paper later modified its militancy and became more moderate. Its circulation
plummeted during the Great Depression to 73,000 by 1935 (52), when it was surpassed by the
Courier as the major national black newspaper, which covered the Ethiopian crisis and the
rise of Joe Louis. Nevertheless, during the 1930s and the 40s, the Defender “became the
primary publishing vehicle for the cultivation and promotion of the Black Chicago
Renaissance,” explains Darlene Clark Hine, “as well as a source for international news and
perspective.” Even during the Great Depression, “when most black Americans were
struggling to survive, [it] provided coverage of national and international events” (xxii). This
included the detailed coverage of black aviators’ endeavors and lobbying for the CPTP.
The beginnings of the Pittsburgh Courier were not easy, either. Robert L. Vann took
over the struggling Pittsburgh newspaper in 1910. Despite the early struggles in circulation,
Vann did not consider adopting yellow journalism as a way of promoting the paper – though
by the early 1920s, sensationalism began to appear in the paper, too (Washburn 129-32). It
was during the Great Migration, fueled by the Defender, that Vann realized where the
Courier’s potential lay: the newspaper became “an organ of social force by calling attention
to various neighborhood problems,” often caused by the newcomers from the South
(Simmons 45). Vann also stressed the importance of education for the black community and
advertised employment opportunities. These feature heavily in the Courier’s coverage of
28
aviation throughout the interwar period, for education was perceived as a means of racial
uplift, “as the gateway to advancement and upward mobility” (Field 5).
Vann had a clear plan of how to transform the Courier into a respectable newspaper.
Throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, he worked on solidifying the newspaper’s reputation
and financial situation as he hired George S. Schuyler, whose “Aframerica Today” series
increased the paper’s circulation from 40,000 to 50,000. Other hires included Ira F. Lewis,
Floyd J. Calvin, Percival L. Prattis, and J.A. Rogers, who gave credibility and a strong,
distinctive voice to the conservative paper and brought advertisers (Wolesley 68, Buni 42,
Washburn 133). As a result, the Courier was declared “the best colored newspaper published”
by H.L. Mencken in 1930 (quoted in Washburn 133). Due to the Courier’s coverage of the
rise of the legendary boxer Joe Louis as well as of the Italo-Ethiopian crisis in the mid-1930s,
Courier’s national circulation reached 250,000 by 1937-8 – at a time when George S.
Schuyler serialized his aviation novellas in the paper – with less than 10% of its readers in
Pittsburgh. And, although the circulation dropped to 180,000 for the rest of the decade
(Washburn133, Whitaker 202), the paper’s campaign for civilian pilot training managed to
keep readers interested and propelled it into the 1940s, when the Courier became the most
prominent black newspaper with circulation peaking at 357,212 in May 1947 (Buni 325).
Another reason for the Courier’s popularity may have been the repeated occurrence of
texts by Harlem Renaissance authors. Zora Neale Hurston, for example, published a number
of short stories in the paper (Carpio, Sollors 557). Walter White’s Fire in the Flint as well as
George S. Schuyler’s Black No More and as many as thirty other novellas by Schuyler were
serialized on the pages of the Pittsburgh weekly. The paper thus served as one of the major
voices of the Harlem Renaissance nation- and worldwide.
29
Little has been written about the history of the New York Amsterdam News (NYAN). It
was established in 1909 and James H. Anderson originally managed the paper from the San
Juan Hill district of New York; but as Harlem swelled with the influx of immigrants, he
moved the offices to uptown Harlem. Even though it is said that the paper struggled for
survival between 1926 and 1935, it still managed, as will be discussed later, to invest heavily
in various black aviation endeavors during the Harlem Renaissance era. At its height, the
paper had a circulation of over 100,000. Similarly to the Defender and the Courier, the NYAN
advocated numerous civil rights causes and participated in the Double V campaign during
World War II. Due to its role as the major black-owned and black-focused newspaper in the
New York City area, NYAN is now remembered especially for its reporting on the Civil
Rights Movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the Freedom Riders. In the 1960s, the
paper ran a column written by Malcolm X (“About Us”).
As is the case of the Defender and the Courier, the Harlem newspaper also ran
numerous short stories, articles, and columns by and about various Harlem Renaissance
authors and figures, including essays by DuBois, Roi Ottley, or Adam Clayton Powell
(“About Us,” “Newspapers: The Amsterdam News,” Morial 13). While the Courier made its
name, for example, by advocating for the integration of baseball, the NYAN promoted the allblack
Harlem Renaissance basketball team, the first world pro-basketball champion, and other
Harlem-based ventures and events which contributed to Harlem’s overall popular culture.
Like the Courier, the paper thus functioned as one of the voices of the Harlem Renaissance
The post-WW1 period was one of growth for the black press. In 1933, there were
approximately 150 black papers with a circulation of 600,000, and by 1940, the numbers
increased to 210 papers and 1,276,000 subscribers, respectively, with the Courier, the
Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the NYAN being the most prominent black
papers. However, as Washburn points out, “before the war, more than a third of the country’s
30
black families subscribed to a black paper, and during the war, between 3-5 million and 6
million of the nation’s 13 million blacks read the papers every week,” with the Courier
expanding to 14 national editions (140). Why did the black press become so popular?
Because, as Simmons puts it, the leading papers of their era “eventually established
[themselves] as a vital force willing to fight for the causes of the Negro community” (49).
Vann himself proclaimed that “racial achievements shall be heralded far and wide, [so] that
others, perhaps too easily despaired, may take heart for renewed effort” (Buni 78). The black
press fostered racial pride, highlighted any and every achievement by the community, and,
“virtually everything […] was propaganda for a cause, a practice inherent in protest”
(Wolesley 202) against the white press, which virtually ignored black achievements.
In short, the black press has always played a crusading role. The Courier, for example,
made its name by campaigning against a racist radio program called Amos ’n’ Andy, fighting
for ending the color line in baseball, and recognition of African Americans in the armed
forces. The Defender facilitated the Great Migration and campaigned against prostitution, as
well as for the inclusion of black Americans in the armed forces.4
The NYAN functioned as a
communication channel for the Harlem community and reported in detail on the community’s
pro-Ethiopian sentiments and organizing efforts in the mid-1930s. As will be discussed
further in this text, these papers also popularized, advertised, and made public pioneering
achievements in black aviation – there are hundreds of photographs, short reports, celebratory
articles, promotional editorials, and letters documenting the race’s progress in aviation, from
receiving solo licenses and carrying out successful flights to graduations from aeronautics
schools and participation in or attendance at an air circus. All three papers financially
sponsored black aviators or goodwill flights at some point during the Harlem Renaissance era.
4
Despite an unprecedented amount of research, Ethan Michaeli’s The Defender: How the Legendary
Black Newspaper Changed America only records articles about Bessie Coleman in the early 1920s
and largely ignores the presence of black aviation in the paper during the 1930s.
31
While mainstream national newspapers followed the successes of numerous white aviators
and aviatrices, the black press reported on New Negro, pioneer aviators, thereby satisfying the
African American community’s demand for racial role models during the “Golden Age of
Flight.” Black aviation became one of the newspapers’ crusades as African Americans
developed the field despite and, simultaneously, because of segregation and Jim Crow. The
following sections address the ways in which the papers promoted black aviation: by
formulating what is here referred to as the “goodwill message of aviation” – a racial uplift
message of education, economic opportunities, leadership, and black transnationalism, which
included also a gradually increasing military dimension.
32
2. AVIATION’S MESSAGE OF GOODWILL WITH MILITARY THREAT IN THE
BLACK PRESS
Two goodwill flights, which perfectly capture the aspirations as well as difficulties that
symbolize the history of pre-Tuskegee black aviation, were carried out by New Negro pilots
in mid-1939. Alfred Anderson, the first black commercial pilot’s license holder and future
flight instructor for the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP) at Howard University and the
Tuskegee Institute (Gubert, Sawyer, Fannin 9), flew in his plane “The Goodwill Spirit of the
American Negro” from Philadelphia to Cuba and Haiti to promote aviation and cordial
relationships between African Americans and the two Caribbean nations (“Philadelphian Pilot
on Goodwill Flight to Haiti,” “Goodwill Flyers in Tuskegee”). The National Airmen’s
Association’s (N.A.A.) Dr. Earl W. Renfroe, a commercial pilot and a pioneering dentist5
,
Dale L. White, a private pilot, and Chauncey Spencer, a parachute jumper, navigator, and the
son of Anne Spencer, one of Harlem Renaissance’s foremost poets (“Prepare for Flight”),
planned a tour of about a dozen cities around the country in order to draw attention to and
advocate for African American inclusion in a Congress bill proposing the establishment of the
CPTP; virtually a program to train reserve pilots in case of a war.
Both flights served primarily as messengers of goodwill and demonstration of black
America’s technical ingenuity; they sought to recontextualize the existing belief that African
Americans cannot fly and therefore do not deserve to join the U.S. military’s flying units. The
former flight signaled that the best of black pilots could safely navigate the airways over the
United States and the Gulf of Mexico as well as spread the aviation gospel to Africadescended
people outside of the US. Anderson flew with Richard Robert Wright, Jr., the
president of Wilberforce University and bishop in the A.M.E. church. In early 1939, Wright’s
father had organized the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce with the objective of, among
5
Renfroe’s complex career is best depicted in Essays on Earl Renfroe: A Man of Firsts (2001).
33
others, promoting black aviation in the context of the US government’s plan to finally train
African Americans as civilian, and potentially military pilots (Haynes 208).
The latter flight exposed repeated problems with African Americans’ concerted efforts
to blaze a trail in aviation. Dr. Renfroe withdrew from the flight along with his plane, leaving
White and Spencer scrambling for funds – which they obtained from a family of successful
black entrepreneurs – only to subsequently stop thirty minutes into the flight due to technical
difficulties on their rented plane (“Flyers Are Grounded by Motor Fault,” Scott, Womack 91).
While Anderson and Wright’s flight was a testament to the abilities and achievements of
black pilots and entrepreneurs, the N.A.A. flight threatened to become a major setback in the
efforts of the organization and the Defender in campaigning for the CPTP. Despite initial
obstacles, however, both flights succeeded, providing an even stronger recontextualizing
evidence of the skills and resources that black pilots and mechanics had learned to wield after
almost two decades of pioneering work.
Most goodwill flights in the Harlem Renaissance period were conceived to promote
interest in aviation among African Americans and draw their attention to economic
opportunities in the field. Education and increasing demand for skilled factory, garage, and
airport jobs, as well as aviation’s overall future potential, were the staples of the goodwill
message in the newspaper coverage of the flights. This message also reflected and
incorporated the inter- and trans-national ethos of the Harlem Renaissance: pilots sought to
foster inter- and intra-racial relationships both in the US and among other Africa-descended
populations. The two flights above fit the mold perfectly. The objective of Anderson’s flight
was to bring “a message of goodwill from members of the Race in America to Haitians”
(“Goodwill Flyers Safe in Haiti”) and demonstrate the abilities of race flyers in long flights. It
also promoted several business ventures between black Americans and Haiti, the first black
republic (“Haiti Invites Black Americans,” “Haitian Trade Project Gets Native’s Okeh,”
34
“Philadelphian Pilot on Goodwill Flight to Haiti,”). The Defender and N.A.A.’s flight from
Chicago to nine other cities was, on the other hand, envisioned to “arouse interest of aviators
in other cities in a nationwide meeting to be held [in Chicago] in August and to thank
congressmen and federal officials for helping include Negroes in the government air training
program” (“Chicago Pilots Plan a 3,000 Mile Flight”).
Moreover, the flight was to promote Cornelius Coffey, Willa Beatrice Brown, and
their aviation school. Coffey, who had by 1938 become black aviation’s leading figure, had
founded the N.A.A., owned a flying school in Chicago, and was hoping for his institution to
become part of the federally-funded CPTP, which would provide funding for both historically
black colleges and universities as well as non-college aviation schools such as Coffey’s.
White and Spencer’s flight was thus also designed to promote aviation education, predicated
on meticulous ground coursework as well as actual flying experience at a governmentlicensed
all-black airport in Chicago. The Defender played an essential role in promoting the
flight as it devoted almost an entire page on May 20, 1939 to reports and photographs
documenting the success of the newspaper-sponsored goodwill flight.6
Finally, the two goodwill flights carried with them an implicit understanding that
piloting skills and mechanical abilities had a military dimension. While Anderson’s hop was
designed to bring a peaceful message to Haitians, both flights were tied to the military
potential of aviation due to their connection to the National Defense Appropriation Bill that
had just passed through the Congress, and to the subsequent CPTP Bill. Although civilian in
name, the proposed pilot training program was military in spirit, and both flights
demonstrated not only the willingness, but also the desire of New Negro pilots to take a
worthy part in the upcoming war.
6
Later in 1939, the Defender reminded its readers of the flight when it claimed that White and
Spencer had inspired the West Virginia State College Institute to apply for inclusion in the CPTP
(“Defender’s Goodwill Flyers Inspired”).
35
As the dissertation reveals, the specter of aviation’s military potential is visible in
many journalistic texts about black aviation from the Harlem Renaissance period. Black
aviation and its coverage in the black press had included a military aspect from its very
inception. After white American pilots destroyed the black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma
in 1921, aviation became a matter of survival for African Americans and thus garnered much
attention by black journalists. The black press also took notice when the U.S. occupation of
Haiti and its other colonial ventures in the Caribbean region heavily featured aviation and lead
to the establishment of “the empire of the air” (Vleck 1) in the pan-American region.
Furthermore, black newspapers reported on colonial armies’ utilization of aerial bombing
throughout Africa. Consequently, aviation quickly emerged in the early 1920s as not only a
new measure of civilization in the colonizer-colonized dichotomy, but also as a new means of
control of and violence against populations of color. This explains why support for the
development of black aviation in the black press went hand in hand with urgent calls for the
inclusion of black pilots in the United States Air Service and later the Air Force.
The two 1939 flights were harbingers of the ways in which the black press would
campaign for the inclusion of African American aviators in the CPTP and later for the double
victory abroad and at home – the legendary Double V campaign. The two flights were also a
reification of the vision that pioneering aviators, newspapers, and political leaders began to
formulate as early as 1921. The fact that the two flights succeeded and, especially in the case
of White and Spencer’s flight, were also heavily covered by black newspapers was the result
of a two-decade-long campaign in which the black press in cooperation with black aviators
had constantly sought to convey the importance of aviation for the black community and
formulate a message – of job opportunities, education, and the military importance that had
become increasingly visible. The first contours of a vision of black aviation began in 1921
36
with the so-called Tulsa Race Riot and the emergence of Bessie Coleman, which are
discussed in the following sections.
2.1 Origins of Black Aviation’s Goodwill Message
The 1920s, when Bessie Coleman and her initial successors promoted and attempted their
flights, were a period during which the black press began to shape and articulate black
aviation’s goodwill message. Journalists and some political leaders expressed their fear about
the military potential of aviation and urged the race, even more so than the goodwill
messengers, to take up aviation, thereby imbuing the goodwill message with the ever-present
dimension of an upcoming race war conducted in the air. This section explains and analyzes
the origins of aviation’s goodwill message with strong military dimension on the cases of the
black press coverage of and reactions to the Tulsa Race Riot and the emergence of Bessie
Coleman as a nationwide black aviation crusader.
It also discusses the attempts of Coleman’s colleagues and successors – Ace Foreman
and Hubert Julian – to replicate her. Julian, for example, helped formulate black aviation’s
goodwill message, but also exploited the black community’s anxiety over aviation’s military
threat for his personal enrichment and fame. The section ends with an analysis of newspaper
editorials’ commentary on developments in black aviation, and their contribution to
formulating the essential tenets of aviation’s message of goodwill and military threat:
education and economic opportunities, racial representation in aviation as proof of humanity
and civilization, the increasingly military dimension of aviation, and the wish to spread the
field internationally to other Africa-descended people.
37
2.1.1 Aviation as Military Threat: The Tulsa Race Riot, Marcus Garvey, and the Black
Press
The growing field of aviation was associated in the black press with warfare from
early on. In 1913, for example, the Defender reported on the use of airplanes in battle in the
Balkan wars (“Airships Used in Balkans”). During WW1, as Jessi M. Snider observes in the
seminal study Flying to Freedom: African-American Visions of Aviation, 1910-1927, black
journalists began to pay more attention to aviation as reports on the use of airplanes over
European battlefields began to make the pages of white newspapers and magazines (41). After
the race riot in Tulsa in 1921, however, the reality of modern warfare was brought closer to
home. In the ground and aerial attack on the predominantly black Greenwood community,
300 people were killed, 35 blocks of the “Black Wall Street” district were destroyed by
incendiary bombs, over 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and 6,000 were detained by
the police (Hirsch 28). While the riot was brutal and bloody, the black press focused
specifically on the fact that airplanes and air bombs were used during the assault. James
Weldon Johnson, for instance, stated that “there was no more hellish passion loosed against
the Germans in the late war than was loosed by these white citizens of Tulsa against their
colored fellow citizens” (quoted in Snider 65). Johnson must have seen air warfare’s potential
in 1920 in Haiti, where “the [the U.S.’s] prospects of dominating improved further with the
advent of aircraft” (Roorda 270). In 1919, for example, the Marines, on their “civilizing”
mission as Johnson sarcastically called it, dispatched airplanes to fight the insurgent cacos,
who were caught defenseless against aerial reconnaissance and dive bombing (“SelfDetermining
Haiti”).
In descriptions of the scenes in Tulsa, black papers thus adopted “martial language”
and began writing of a race war (65). The war, it seemed, would be fought in the air. Despite
the coverage of WW1 in the black press, it was not until Tulsa, argues Snider, that “the
38
presence of these latest machines of war [airplanes] in Greenwood brought this aspect of war
alive for black Tulsans” and, conversely, for the African American community at large (67).
Battlefields were no longer clearly defined and even civilians could now be attacked, while
having no way to defend themselves. Importantly, the race riot also seemed to have been
symptomatic of the white American population’s apprehensive reaction to the phenomenon of
the Great Migration and the emergence of a more assertive, confident, and militant black
population, the emblematic New Negroes. The population of the prosperous and booming
Greenwood had risen to 11,000 by 1921. By the time of the riot, explains W. Sherman
Rogers, “the community included two schools, a hospital, two newspapers, two theaters, a
public library, 23 churches, and three fraternal lodges.” In short, “the Greenwood district was
the hub of the social and business life of the community” (87-8).
The community’s confidence, gained by its prosperity, however, sparked outrage
among white Tulsans; especially when the community’s leaders sent armed men to the
courthouse on May 31, 1921, to prevent a lynching. The white citizens thought they were
witnessing an uprising and viciously attacked Greenwood with, among other weapons,
airplanes with incendiary bombs (Rogers 89). Not only was thus aviation weaponized to
prevent an uprising, but also to punish the African American community’s insolence
materialized in its prosperity and belief that its could prevent, with arms, a lynching. In this
way, aviation became feared in the black press as a potential punishment against any aspiring
and wealthy New Negro community. It spelled doom for communities of color in a potential
race war. The presence of airplanes over Tulsa thus highlighted the technological
advancements of the white population – and the “racial technology gap” (Snider 70-71).
When the Defender and other papers published a short report in June 1921 on the
establishment of The Knights of the Air, which included around 700 members of the United
States Air Service and were organized by William J. Simmons, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku
39
Klux Klan (“Current Events”), the exposed technological and skill gap between the black and
white population became a dominant issue in the coverage of aviation for the next two
decades, permeating the otherwise positive, goodwill message of aviation as progress.
Some race leaders’ reactions to Tulsa focused on aviation as well. Marcus Garvey, for
example, had predicted the race war, invoked in the coverage on Tulsa, as early as 1919.
Garvey’s ultimate objective was, according to David Levering Lewis, “the establishment of a
Liberian Zion and the eventual liberation of the ancestral continent [of Africa]” (37).
Garvey’s UNIA preached the uplift of the black race and “encouraged self-reliance and
nationhood,” with these goals embodied by the organization’s motto of “Up You Mighty
Race” (38). As Snider demonstrates, Garvey “stressed the need [for African countries] to
achieve economic and military power” to be able to fight “on the African battlefield, where
the great war of races would be played out” (79); a development that eventually took place in
the Italo-Ethiopian war, when Italian mastery of the air prevailed over Ethiopian mettle.
Indeed, as Takaki observes, “technology was perceived as the means by which people of color
[…] were to be subordinated” (quoted in Sinclair 5). Garvey thus saw modern military
technology as crucial for the development of people of color’s power and, even though he
mainly espoused naval technologies as they held a symbolic significance for the descendants
of slaves,7
airplanes, too, gradually became part of UNIA’s plans (Snider 82-83). The Tulsa
riot, writes Snider, “engendered a new appreciation of the airplane’s role in racial relations”
and speakers at various UNIA branches began to elaborate on the importance of airplanes for
the organization’s plans (85-86). Garvey himself inserted a message of aviation’s military
potential into his speeches, observing, for example, that white colonists in South Africa had
used planes against the local Bondelzwarts people (88).
7
See Snider 80-86 for a more detailed discussion of Garvey’s views on the supremacy of ships over
airplanes.
40
Developing a stable of airplanes and training of skilled aviators became an integral
part of UNIA’s race war message and overall mission. Speeches and articles quickly turned to
plans of action after Tulsa as the Brooklyn branch of UNIA proposed to purchase an airplane
for the organization’s African Legion – the plane was to be piloted by Capt. Edison McVey,
“an attaché in the Universal African Royal Guards, a Legion division” (Snider 89). McVey,
who would write an aviation column for Garvey’s Negro World until 1933 (Horne 54) later
stunt-flew with Hubert Julian, one of black aviation pioneer figures, who became member of
the UNIA in January 1922 (Snider 91). When the UNIA held its Third International
Convention in August 1922, Julian parachuted over Harlem and thrilled thousands of
spectators, reminding them of the exciting, albeit horrifying, spectacle of aviation. Garvey
then introduced Julian as a hero to the convention’s crowd of 10,000. A few days later, Bessie
Coleman, home from her second trip to France, appeared at the convention as well (Snider
92-4). With black aviators taking part in the convention, fundraising for the proposed airplane
immediately began and the Brooklyn branch announced its purchase in July, 1923 (Horne 41).
As a result, the UNIA even established the Black Eagle Flying Corps, headed by Julian,
which joined the already existing Black Starship Line, the Universal African Motor Corps,
and the Universal African Legion, a makeshift army (Womack 29, Jakeman 59).
Consequently, between 1922 and 1925, Garvey and his Negro World – one of early
Harlem Renaissance’s most widely read newspapers – continued to develop and shape its
message on the military use of aviation. Even though Garvey was inspired by the martial
language employed in the black press coverage of the Tulsa riot, it was his paper that began
concerted efforts in creating an aviation message that served UNIA’s purpose of presenting
itself as the leading organization preparing the Africa-descended people for the upcoming
race war. The racial technological gap was constantly reiterated as the Negro World – with an
estimated circulation of 200,000 – published numerous articles on the ways colonial powers
41
were employing airplanes in their efforts to subdue local populations. The paper condemned,
for example, Italy’s use of air attacks in Southwest Africa in 1924, the British for bombing
civilians in the Middle East, and the French for dropping bombs in Morocco and Syria
between 1922 and 1926 (Snider 96-97). The newspaper, however, also rejoiced in the fact that
Daniel Cole of Detroit, an African American, fought for the Foreign Legion in Morocco. The
UNIA’s mouthpiece also posited that “when you see a Zulu chief flying through the African
sunlight on a motorcycle and realize that any average human being can be taught to run a
flying machine in eight hours, you wonder how long ‘white supremacy’ will last” (cited in
Horne 38-9). Overall, Garvey saw aviation and the colonial powers’ ability to master the air
as already threatening to African populations – despite the titillating prospects of the locals
taking up aviation in retaliation – and was quick to warn of similar developments in the
United States, particularly after Tulsa.
Nevertheless, as will be shown next, the non-Garveyite black press gradually began to
emphasize aviation’s civilian dimension – a goodwill message of aviation which stressed
employment, participation in as well as contribution to America’s economic and technological
developments, and internationalism. As Garvey’s Pan-African message of race war and
African exceptionalism gradually lost traction as well as its main voice when Garvey was
banished from the United States in November 1927, aviation’s goodwill message filled the
vacated space in the black press. However, despite becoming the dominant philosophy in the
discourse on black aviation, goodwill would sometimes still be accompanied with
reminiscences of the military potential of airplanes, and, more increasingly, with calls for
inclusion of African Americans in the US armed forces, including the Aviation Service and
the Air Corps. An illuminating example of such a mixed goodwill message is a Defender
editorial from September 1925, which claimed that “we are inching along [in aviation]” yet
warned readers that “the next war will be fought in the air” and urged them to become pilots
42
(“The Week” About Aviation”). The notion that black aviators should, too, be trained in air
warfare never truly disappeared from the newspaper coverage of black aviation and would
become a cause of its own once John C. Robinson became the head of Ethiopia’s Air Force in
1935; a cause which is reflected in George S. Schuyler’s Black Internationale and Black
Empire. The combination of goodwill and military message of aviation would then drive the
campaign for inclusion of black students in the CPTP from 1936 on.
2.2 Bessie Coleman: Black Aviation’s Joan of Arc
Although the events in Tulsa and the black press’s reaction defined the beginning of
aviation coverage in black newspapers, it was Bessie Coleman who became the face of black
aviation and would symbolize it until the emergence of the Tuskegee Airmen. As Snider
points out, “Coleman recognized the importance of newspapers in reaching and maintaining a
relationship with the public, and upon her arrival she made them a vehicle for publicizing her
aims” (152). In taking up aviation as a racial cause with international and military dimensions,
Bessie Coleman personified the early aviation goodwill message and her name would later be
used as a reminder whenever black newspapers sought to emphasize the importance of
studying and advancing aviation in the African American community.
Coleman, born in Texas in 1892, was the first major African American pilot known to
the black public. Although Eugene Bullard had flown for the Lafayette Flying Corps during
WW1, little information about the recipient of the French Croix de Guerre made it to the
black American public until later in the 1920s, when the Defender mentioned the military
hero in several of its articles about expats living in Paris.8
Coleman studied at the Colored
Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma, and in 1915 moved to Chicago,
where she worked as a manicurist at the White Sox Barber Shop and owned a chili parlor.
8
There are two reputable monographs on Bullard: The Black Swallow of Death (1972) and Eugene
Bullard, Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris (2006). Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of
Diaspora also mentions Bullard (pgs. 4, 63, and 66).
43
Coleman’s brothers, John and Walter, would tell stories about French women flying airplanes
and the war planes they had seen during their service overseas (Rich 26), presenting their
sister with the image of aviation as a hobby as well as a military proposition. One day,
Coleman made up her mind to learn to fly a plane herself.
Since she had been rejected at white aviation schools in Chicago, Coleman decided in
November 1920 to take Robert Abbott’s advice and try her luck in France (Gubert, Sawyer,
Fannin 78). Abbott’s Defender reported on Coleman’s return from France with an
international pilot license in October 1921, announcing that the aviatrix would give
exhibitions “in the hope of inspiring others with the desire to fly” (“Chicago Girl Is a FullFledged
Aviatrix Now”). One week later, the newspaper carried a short article about
Coleman’s warm reception by the cast of Shuffle Along (“Shuffle Along Company Gives Fair
Flyer Cup,” Freydberg 76) and a cartoon, titled “They Can’t Keep Us Down.” It depicted a
plane with a flag announcing “Miss Bessie Coleman – Blacks’ First Aviatrix.”
Coleman quickly became the face of black aviation. Although it is unclear if and how
much she was informed about Tulsa, the celebratory cartoon and the overall raving coverage
that Coleman was receiving would indicate that the African American community had found
the person who would lead its progress in aviation now that the field had become essential to
survival. Coleman was aware of the overall importance of aviation for her race’s future and
did not hesitate to express it to journalists: In France, she had walked nine miles to school
every day for ten months, and in interviews she did not forget to mention that her flying
school stood near Rouen, the city where the English had imprisoned Joan of Arc (“Aviatrix
Must Sign Away Life to Learn Trade”). Coleman, with enthusiastic help from the black press,
presented herself as a crusader for the race and its future in aviation. In underscoring in black
newspapers her dedication to advancing her race in the field, her anxiety over the racial
technological gap, and the fact that she had studied under the tutelage of a WW1 ace who had
44
shot down thirty-one airplanes during the war, Coleman came to form the basis of aviation’s
goodwill message with a palpable military undertone.
The essential aspect of Coleman’s goodwill message, as evidenced in her dedication to
schooling in France, was an appeal to the black community to pursue technical and
mechanical education. In February 1922, Coleman left for France and Germany to gain
further advanced flying instruction. She explained to the readers of the Defender that she
wanted to purchase a plane in Paris for her aviation school which she planned to open upon
her return in New York City to “all who want to fly” (“Bessie Coleman Leaves New York for
France”). During her stay in Europe, Coleman received another license, becoming “the first of
her race to [be] a full licensed flyer,” according to a short report in the July 1922 issue of The
Washington Post. The paper noted that the aviatrix had to refuse an offer “from Moscow to
teach flying by women” because of “Soviet disturbances,” but now intended to open a flying
school in Chicago (“Negress an Air Pilot,” “Bessie to Fly Over Gotham”). Upon her second
return from Europe, the aviatrix consequently sought funds to open the announced school –
hence her aforementioned visit to the UNIA convention.
Coleman’s emergence also spurred the black press to initiate its own crusade for the
inclusion of African Americans in the US armed forces. In an article informing white readers
about the aviatrix’s successes in Europe, the New York Times mentioned that Coleman had
piloted a 220-horsepower Benz-motored L.F.G. plane in Germany, “the largest plane ever
flown by a woman” (“Negro Aviatrix Arrives”). A May 1924 article in the Defender then also
noted that the aviatrix had piloted a Fokker bomber plane during her visit to Germany in 1922
(“Dutch Aviator Will Teach Race to Fly”). This would explain why the UNIA members,
preparing for a race war to break out soon, had been so ecstatic when Coleman paid them a
visit upon her return. Along with reminiscences about Tulsa, the news about Coleman’s skills
may have been why the Defender asserted in an editorial from May 1922 that “we should
45
have representation in the aerial service and proper steps should be taken to secure it” (“Let
Us Fly”). Now that the race had a skilled pilot in its ranks, it was time for more African
Americans, especially the WW1 veterans, to join the nation’s air forces.
Once Coleman was back stateside, she fully focused on spreading her message of
goodwill, seeking to draw attention to aviation, its military dimension, and to recruit sponsors
and students for her future school. Dubbed “Queen of the Air” by the Defender, Coleman
explained in interviews that while in Germany, she had flown for Pathé films over prominent
sites in Berlin – the film would later be used in the aviatrix’s promotional tour. She was also
planning to bring in European experts to help her teach the race to fly and, in the meantime,
she hoped to travel around the United States and “the pan-American countries” (“Bessie to
Fly Over Gotham”). In wanting to take her exhibition flights and promoting black aviation
internationally, urging people of color to take it up as a cause, Coleman enriched her goodwill
message. The shift from teaching in Chicago – or in Moscow – to flying around the Americas
added a new geographical and ideological dimension to the overall goodwill message. Even
though Coleman’s own plans for spreading the gospel of aviation abroad never materialized –
which is how the story of international flights by black pilots would go until 1932 –
international and transnational outlook as well as the recognition of erasure of borders
through aviation became an indispensable component in the coverage of black aviation.
Coleman also highlighted and exploited the notion of aviation’s military potential after
WW1 and Tulsa; the aviatrix “often symbolically portrayed herself in martial terms,” explains
Snider (229). In New York in 1922, shortly after her visit with the UNIA, Coleman performed
her first US exhibition flight under the auspices of the Defender – this constituted the first
time a black newspaper financed a black pilot’s flight. She flew in honor of the 15th
New
York National Guard Regiment, also known as the Harlem Hellfighters, which had made a
name for itself not only for bravery displayed in combat, but also for spreading jazz around
46
Europe through James Reese’s marching band (Lewis 1-6). The band performed while
Coleman was in the air (“Bessie Gets Away; Does Her Stuff”). In Chicago, one month later,
Coleman put on an even more spectacular and militaristic show, when, in honor of the 8th
Illinois Infantry, the aviatrix showed stunts named after various European war aces and drove
the crowd into frenzy during her second flight as she made the figure eight in the air (“Bessie
Coleman Makes Initial Aerial Flight”). While Coleman’s flying thus became firmly connected
with the military, it was also distinctly African American military achievements that Coleman
was celebrating. In return, she was recognized as a crusader with the skills of the most famous
of war aces – and could thus lead the race in case of a race war fought in the air.
Unfortunately, in 1923, Coleman suffered serious injuries while flying in California,
but vowed to return. Even from the hospital bed, she continued to propagate aviation,
explaining that her injuries proved that “flying in the air is no more dangerous than riding an
automobile on the surface” (“Bessie Coleman Says Good Will Come from Hurt”). A tone of
criticism, however, also appeared in her message for the first time as she decried lack of
funding and cooperation on the part of her race in establishing her aviation school. These
problems would prevent Coleman from ever giving up barnstorming for a teaching career
until her premature death in 1926, during yet another exhibition flight to raise funds.
Lamenting the lack of funding and interest in aviation on black America’s part in general
would become another ever-present feature of aviation’s goodwill message until 1938,
especially in editorials.9
Recuperating from serious injuries, however, did not stop Coleman from further
presenting herself in martial and also Pan-African context. Before a planned exhibition in
Chicago in September 1923, Coleman’s plane was exhibited at the Eight regiment armory
9
Snider provides an in-depth discussion of this type of tone in aviation coverage in Chapter 5 of her
study.
47
(“No Flight by Bessie Coleman; Rain Interferes”). Furthermore, although the aviatrix had
never joined the UNIA, she had cooperated with Garveyites in preparation for her exhibition
in honor of the 15th
infantry regiment (Snider 230). While in Paris, Coleman had attended the
Pan-African Congress where she had met Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou, a major figure in
the Paris African community, who, according to Brent Hayes Edwards, fostered relationships
between African American, Caribbean, and African intellectuals during the Harlem
Renaissance (85). When Prince Kojo visited Chicago in 1924, as the aviatrix was taking a
respite from her crusade, Coleman spoke at his reception and was rumored to have been his
lover (“Prince Kojo of Dahomey Pays Tribute to Lincoln,” Freydberg 92). Although her
connections with the Pan-African community loosened over time, Coleman had created an
image of herself as a crusader with military-flying skills and transnational connections,
willing to lead and educate her race.
In the end, it was Coleman’s funeral in 1926 that solidified her image for the
following years as a Joan-of-Arc-like martyr, who died for her race’s aviation progress, and
that established her goodwill message as the staple of black aviation discourse in the black
press. The May 8 issue of the Defender carried a photograph of Coleman’s burning plane and
a lengthy description of the accident in which the aviatrix fell out of the plane (“Bessie
Coleman, Aviatrix, Killed”). A short obituary likened her to Crispus Attucks, the first
American killed in the American Revolution, and Frederick Douglass, and eulogized her as a
“pioneer, first in the air (“The Week: Pioneer”). Unlike the NYAN, both the Courier and the
Defender devoted significant space to Coleman’s Chicago funeral, with the Defender carrying
an editorial “As Americans Should Die” and Courier’s George S. Schuyler eulogizing
Coleman. In stating that aviation offers “wonderful possibilities today for Negroes as well as
whites” (“Views and Reviews”), Schuyler spread Coleman’s goodwill message on with his
influential column.
48
More importantly, the newspapers showed to the public that Coleman was being
awarded a funeral with military honors – becoming associated with other influential figures in
black history – with the casket covered in the American flag, and six soldiers of the Eighth
Regiment carrying the dead body. Ida Wells Barnett,10
Coleman’s mentor and one of the
founders of the NAACP, delivered the eulogy, while Reverend J.C. Austin, an influential
Chicago Garveyite and Pan-Africanist, officiated the ceremonies (“Brilliant Military Honors
Accorded Fallen Aviatrix,” “Chicago Pays Parting Tribute to Brave Bessie Coleman”). In
short, Coleman received a national-hero funeral and extensive emotionally-charged press
coverage, which emphasized the military aspects of her goodwill message as well as her PanAfrican
connections.
However, Coleman left a void in the race’s aviation efforts. The Defender realized that
Coleman’s passing signaled a new era in black aviation with no other role models at hand.
Moreover, the void exacerbated the notion of the racial technological gap discussed by
Garvey, Coleman, and the black press throughout the early 1920s. To stimulate active
participation in aviation after Coleman’s death, the Defender disseminated Coleman’s
goodwill message to educate the race in flying and prepare it for the future. In an August 1926
article on the new Ford company airplanes, for example, the paper noted that Ford had the
country’s defense in mind when it had designed the new machines, and bemoaned the fact
that, even though Bessie Coleman “worked tirelessly to quicken the interest of our people in
aviation, […] they seem to ignore [it] in spite of its increasing importance” (“Ford Tells
President Plans for Air Force”). The proximity of the next war was again highlighted when
the newspaper noted in 1927 that “aviation authorities, in discussing the rapid advancement of
the airplane as an instrument of war, are wondering what would be the result if the Chinese
army adopted the airplane on a large scale” (“Chinese in Aviation”). The article echoed
10
Barnett’s autobiography, Crusade for Justice (1970), unfortunately does not mention Coleman in
any way.
49
another editorial from 1925, in which the next war, fought in the air, was described as pitting
against each other the U.S., Europe, and “the aroused hatred of Asia” (“The Week: About
Aviation”). With Coleman gone, it seemed that African Americans were lagging in aviation
behind all races.
2.3 Coleman’s Successors: Joel “Ace” Foreman and Hubert Fauntleroy
Julian
Temporarily, the void that Bessie Coleman had left seemed filled when Joel “Ace” Foreman,
Coleman’s contemporary from California, announced a transcontinental flight in 1927.
Foreman’s was, as Robert A. Jakeman explains, the “first bona fide attempt at a long-distance
flight by a black” (61). Foreman had made a name for himself, according to Snider, as a race
car driver and a pilot in California and enjoyed the admiration of local journalists (249). For
example, in September 1925, the 24-year-old “piloted his plane to 2,000 feet, nose dived,
looped the loop, and stood on the wings of his plane in the first of a series of stunts, which
were part of his exhibition” in front of a crowd of 350 spectators (“Race Aviator Flies for
Hospital Fund”). In late February 1927, the Courier announced Foreman’s goodwill
transcontinental hop, declaring emotionally that the proposed feat would launch “a new epoch
[…] in the history of the Negro’s achievements.” The paper provided a short biography of
Foreman, saying that “the local dailies have been running stories of his life and great interest
is being attached to his flight.” Foreman was depicted as a showman of considerable piloting
skills, poised to take Coleman’s place as the face of black aviation (“Los Angeles Mayor
Sends New York Mayor Letter by Negro Cross Continental Flyer”).11
Unfortunately, the epoch never materialized. Even though Foreman declared in the
Courier that “he will make the trip easily, barring mishap,” the next article in the newspaper
11
As a goodwill flight seeking to arouse the interest of the race in aviation, Foreman’s hop had
another symbolic dimension, too, as the plane would carry a letter from the mayor of Los Angeles to
the mayor of New York.
50
noted that upon take-off, the aviator had been flying in a plane that he had secured only a few
hours before, and had been sent off by mere 500 spectators (“Los Angeles Mayor Sends New
York Mayor Letter by Negro Cross Continental Flyer,” “Transcontinental Flyer Hops Off On
First Leg of California-New York Journey”). In a strikingly dissimilar tone to the Courier’s,
the Defender, perhaps owing to its employment of yellow, sensationalist style of journalism,
depicted the scene of Foreman’s take-off as “a gala affair [where] everything was ideal for the
attempt,” including ten thousand spectators. At the same time, the paper lamented that
Foreman and his mechanic, Ace Ward, had met with “little encouragement from the white
race and a little more from their own” (“10,000 Cheer Aviators as They Start Their Flight
From Coast to Coast”). In an effort to promote the race aviator yet excoriate the lack of
funding on the part of the black community, the Defender was spreading a mixed message of
shaming its readers into supporting black aviators, while hailing the Los Angeles branch of
the NAACP and the Negro Business League for funding the historic feat.
Foreman and Ward barely managed to reach Chicago. It took them four days to arrive
in Salt Lake City, where they were stranded for days due to lack of funds needed to purchase
a new motor for their inadequate old plane (“Cross-Country Aviators Down,” “Flyers Forced
Down in Salt Lake”). The Defender carried a series of photographs from the scene of
Foreman’s take-off, informed of the aviator’s technical misfortune, and explained in detail
how Foreman navigated the stalled plane mid-air (“Snowstorm Forces Flyer to Come
Down”). The paper showed that, despite mishaps, the two aviators were experts in their field.
It sought to present Foreman as an expert technic and skillful aviator worth the readership’s
time and money. As the Courier noted, too, the aviators had to walk four miles from their
now motor-less plane to Salt Lake City in snow, and yet wished to continue in their flight
anyway (“Cross-Country Flyer to Continue Flight”).
51
The editor of the California Eagle, Joseph Bass, following the emotionally-charged,
crusading imagery of Coleman’s goodwill message, depicted Foreman as a hero on an
aviation mission for the race. Foreman, according to Bass, was “striving to make his
contribution to progress depicting the prowess and genius of a race risking his very life to
accomplish the end wholly unmindful of vain glory or any of the colorful things which men
sometimes strive for” (quoted in Snider 256-7). Bass’s goodwill message, like texts on
Coleman during her career and after her passing, included personal sacrifice, lamentation, and
call for the race to take up aviation education by following Foreman’s example.
The message was heard, it seemed, in Chicago. When the two aviators arrived, they
were welcomed, invited to give talks at churches and social gatherings and to ask for funds.
Despite the flight’s eventual failure, the Defender sensed a good story and published an
interview with Foreman, in which the flyer implored the black youth that “they, too, with
courage and training, can launch into the field of aviation.” “The youth of our group,”
Foreman explained, “have too long been led to believe that […] we have no place in the
growing field of commercial aviation” (“Flyers Score Men Who Mock Their Efforts”). But
his flight sought to awaken in the race the ambition to fly and to reverse the stereotype of
African Americans’ technical and technological inability.
Foreman’s eloquence was strongly reminiscent of Coleman’s. The Defender portrayed
the young pilot as an unassuming, yet passionate crusader for the race’s success in the field of
aviation, and, even though Foreman’s flight ended in Chicago when his plane was deemed
“not airworthy” by aeronautical authorities (Snider 260), the black newspapers seemed to
have found a new aviation hero. More importantly, even Foreman expressed his vision of
aviation as essential if the race were to survive the upcoming race war: “[B]eing barred in the
last war from the aviation service seriously affected [the race’s] ambition to learn to fly. This
ambition must be awakened,” explained Foreman, “if we ever expect to leave the ground and
52
master the air as the other races of the earth have done” (“Flyers Score Men Who Mock Their
Efforts”). Having been associated with the Californian Eagle’s Garveyite editors (Snider
265), Foreman was probably versed in the race-war rhetoric of the UNIA. Although he had
not delivered on his promise to make it easily to New York and had to travel back to Los
Angeles, where he finally arrived after almost four months, by train, the young pilot did state
upon his arrival that “he may take a trip to South America” (“Ace Foreman, Los Angeles
Aviator, Back Home Again”). In this way, Foreman echoed Coleman’s internationallyminded
goodwill message of aviation.
Indeed, Foreman followed in Coleman’s footsteps both rhetorically and in terms of
ideas after his return to California. In December 1927, he announced the opening of his own
flying school, expecting “a considerable number of Negro boys and girls […] to enroll in the
school […] owing to the world-wide interest in aviation” (“Negro Aviator Starts School”).
The school opened in April 1928 (“Race Aviator May Take Part in Air Derby In Fall”).
Although Foreman managed to realize his dream of opening a black aviation school, his
career was cut short: in early August 1929, he drowned. The Courier carried a detailed
biographical article on Foreman (“Ace Foreman Lived Eventful Life”), but there was no
military funeral held for the young flyer. In a span of three years, the African American
community thus prematurely lost two passionate pilots, upon whose deaths the black press
was left with a creative, deeply personal and emotion-stirring narrative of martyrs who
implored their fellow men and women with arguments about an upcoming war as well as of
economic opportunities in commercial aviation to take up aviation as a worthwhile cause for
the future of the race.
2.3.1 Hubert Julian’s Goodwill Message
Unfortunately, the discussion on aviation and its message to the readers – fostered and
molded by Coleman, Foreman, and various texts in the black press – was picked up,
53
transformed, and discredited by Hubert Fauntleroy Julian.12
The Trinidad-born parachutist
claimed to be a doctor with a degree from McGill University in Montreal and to have had
fictitious ties to the Canadian Air Force during WW1;13
hence his frequent designation in the
black press as “Colonel Julian.” His escapades filled the pages of the black press until the
1950s and hampered back aviation’s progress and image for years. In 1922, Julian became
popular for his parachute stunts in honor of the UNIA and for the Harlem Hellfighters. In
May 1923, he dazzled Harlem with a parachute jump – while playing the saxophone – from a
plane piloted by Edison McVey, sergeant first class “with the 95th
Air Squadron of the United
States Army” (“Julian Jumps from Plane 3000 Feet Up,” Horne 41). The NYAN planned to
christen the pair’s newly-purchased plane in late May 1923 (“Julian to Again Jump from
Plane”), but McVey, “one of the two daredevil aviators of the race,” according to the Courier,
was severely injured in a plane accident (“Lieutenant Edison Badly Hurt in Fall”).14
In the
following months, Julian became a headline joke in the black press as his wife, whom he had
left in Montreal, called him a “love thief [who] left a trail of broken hearts in his wake” and
sued for divorce (“Sued by Wife”).
Julian knew how to attract publicity for himself through aviation. In April 1924, the
desperate parachutist travelled to Boston to seek funding for a plane to fly to Africa (“Aviator
Seeks $8,000”). In claiming to want to fly to Africa, he exploited the international dimension
of Coleman’s and Foreman’s dreams of flying to Pan-American countries to spread aviation’s
goodwill message. Also, having been a Garveyite, Julian was well aware of the ways Garvey
was publicizing aviation’s military potential in articles about colonial powers’ bombing of
various African countries, and he took part in the military displays of aviation organized by
12
Although Gerald Horne claims that Julian “was no buffoon” (41), the numerous newspaper articles
on Julian’s antics provide another image, as does the dislike towards Julian on his fellow black
aviators’ part.
13
According to Snider (107), there were no records showing a black flyer in the Canadian army, nor
were there any records of Julian having ever attended the university.
14
McVey had served, according to Gerald Horne, “with the 95th
Air Squadron of the United States
Army,” earning the rank of sergeant first class (41).
54
the UNIA. Unlike the heralded flyers that Coleman and Foreman had been, however, Julian
could not fly a plane himself and seemed to have only tried to whet the black public’s appetite
for black flyers, while discrediting any funding campaigns on his behalf in the process. One
month after Julian’s trip to Boston, the Boulin Detective Agency, one of the first black
detective organizations operated by a fellow West Indian (Brundage 306), announced that
Julian “is not an aviator or pilot, but only a parachute jumper.” The investigation by Boulin
concluded that Julian sought to enrich himself by asking for funds, because, since he was not
a licensed pilot, he could not legally take an airplane to Africa or anywhere else (“Herbert
Julian Not an Aviator Detectives Say”). Despite his publicized shortcomings and legal
troubles, however, Julian began in 1924 his career as black aviation’s con artist, spreading a
message of goodwill on which he did not intend to deliver.
A mere month after the Boulin exposé in the Courier, Julian continued to develop his
own exaggerated goodwill message, with special emphasis on the international, bordercrossing
dimension of aviation. In June 1924, he brought a $8,000 plane to Harlem, where it
was supposed to be assembled for a test round-trip to Boston. On July 4, he was planning to
hop off on a trip spanning four continents within thirty days – a feat nearly successfully
carried out by the Italian, Mussolini-backed pilots Francesco de Pinedo, Carlo Del Prete, and
Vitale Zacchetti in 1927 (“Francesco de Pinedo: A Flight Across the Atlantic and the Two
Americas”) – as he planned to visit South America, Haiti, Liberia, West Africa, France,
England, Scotland, Iceland, and Canada. Julian’s grey plane was dubbed “Ethiopia I.”
although the country was not on the destination list. Its tail was painted in red, black, and
green, due to Julian’s association with Garvey’s UNIA. The organization, however, distanced
itself from Julian’s proposed trip (“Julian Brings $8,000 Airplane to Harlem”) as it was
already losing credibility due to its own scandals.
55
Julian was a master of form over matter, rhetoric over action. He skillfully exploited
Pan-African symbols in naming his plane Ethiopia I., thereby alluding to the biblical quote
“Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God,” which represented the black biblical
tradition and was reflected in Garveyism and the Rastafari movement (Moses 51). He
combined the militant Pan-Africanism of the UNIA with Coleman’s vision of international
promotional flights into a convoluted message of goodwill, which he could only promote, yet
never actually deliver on. Indeed, his 1924 flight ended in disaster when Julian was pressured
into taking off after a Department of Justice official had asked him to prove that he was not
embezzling money from his aviation fund. In front of a crowd of 10,000, who were asked to
donate even more money so that Julian could repay what he still owed to the plane owners,
the parachutist ended in Flushing Bay after a three-minute flight, suffered internal injuries,
and became the laughing stock of both the black and white press (Snider 116, “Aviator Hurt
When Plane Falls”).
Even though Julian would never fly more than several hundred miles during his
career, he presented his unrealizable goodwill plans in the black press for another decade and
became one of Harlem’s most notorious figures. In 1926, Julian sought funds for another
plane to fly to Liberia and, desperately searching for a successor to Coleman, the NYAN even
published Julian’s own pleading text asking for funds. In it, the parachutist urged his fellow
Harlemites – as “the only licensed black aviator,” according to the Courier (“Julian Pays
$9,000 on New $15,000 Plane”) – that the opportunity to fly will not be given to black
Americans until “we have proven that the same spirit of intrepidity that actuates the members
of the nautic [sic] race to risk their lives furthering the science of aviation, dwells in the breast
of this oppressed race.” Julian reveled in employing emotional, crusading appeals and rhetoric
in pleading for funds for his flights. He also exploited the fact that the black press could speak
directly to African American communities across the country when he announced that the
56
object of his flight to Liberia was to commemorate the 150th
anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence by flying a plane “owned by Negroes, manned by Negroes […] from the
centennial across the Atlantic to Africa” (“Julian Makes Ringing Race Appeal”). In the end,
Julian’s plane was never paid for and the flight never materialized (“Julian Pays $9,000 on
New $15,000 Plane,” “Julian Planning Liberian Flight,” “Julian Will Really Fly?”).
In 1928, the parachutist proposed to emulate Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 non-stop flight
from NYC to Paris and, this time, managed to acquire sponsorship from Senator A. Spencer
Field. In a series of promotional articles, the Courier and the NYAN recycled Julian’s old
message with a new twist: taking a page from Coleman and Foreman’s book, Julian presented
himself as an aviation crusader for the race, stating that “if anything happens, I shall be the
only sufferer. […] While I am sure the outcome will be satisfactory, I have no desire to place
the life of another human being in jeopardy” (“To Go Lindy’s Way – Alone!,” “Julian Plans
Paris-Return Flight,” “Julian Still Plans Atlantic Flight”). Julian’s message was similar to
Coleman’s first statements upon her first return from France – as well as Bass’s defense of
Foreman in the California Eagle – as was the exalting and flowery language in the Courier
and NYAN articles describing Julian’s plans. Furthermore, Julian was satisfying the black
press readership’s lust for yellow journalism as he toyed with the ever-present imagery of
death, associated with early aviation attempts and Coleman and Foreman’s fate. He was also
exploiting Lindbergh’s popularity among black Americans.
More importantly, however, Julian began playing the race-war card, too. In an
interview before his proposed flight to Paris, the parachutist explained that if his flight proved
to be a success, “the colored man will be recognized in a new light from the standpoint of
value to his country. No longer will he be of service only to the Army and Navy. Once he has
been granted a license to pilot a machine, he can go into the aviation corps.” Driving his
message of military potential of his crusading flight home, Julian echoed Garvey and the
57
black press editorials in stating that “it is certain that if another war comes, it must be fought
in the air”. The Courier adopted the language of Julian’s bold claims and shifted the tone of
its aviation message toward sensationalism, despite its reputation as a conservative paper
devoid of yellow journalism. The paper called Julian the “only blackbird ever to cleave the
azure on man-made wings,” working for his race “eager for a Negro to attain a greatness in
flying commensurate with that of his brethren in other branches of the arts and sciences.”
Again, Coleman and Foreman’s message resurfaced here, but in a more exalted tone, typical
of Julian’s self-promoting style aimed at stirring national and racial pride in the readership.
The Courier even went as far as to hail Julian the “Bronze Lindy” and claimed that he had
sought to make a transatlantic flight long before Charles Lindbergh and others even
considered such a trip (“To Go Lindy’s Way – Alone!). Importantly, it must be also noted
here that the Courier, in its celebratory coverage equated aviation with the arts and sciences,
two areas in which African Americans had long been proving their humanity and worth to
white America. For the black newspaper, then, the development of aviation among African
Americans was parallel to the advancements made by the Harlem Renaissance’s artists.
The Courier even provided an extensive biography of the Julian, including an
assertion that parachutist was “the only Negro pilot ever licensed by the National Aeronautic
Association of the U.S.A.”15
Ever the crusader, “soft-spoken but with eyes sparkling
determination,” Julian explained to the paper’s reporter that he had “no desire for personal
aggrandizement [for] the sole purpose of my proposed flight is to stimulate a greater interest
in aviation among my own people,” echoing Foreman’s confession to the Defender upon the
failure of his cross-country trip. His success, Julian added, would lead to the founding of
aviation schools where “Negroes may be taught the science of flying – free” (“Julian Names
Plane Black Eagle”). From personal sacrifice and international aspirations for his flight to
15
Future reports in the two newspapers would reveal that Julian received his license as late as 1931.
One report from the late 1930s even indicated that he was a student’s license holder only.
58
calls for establishing aviation schools for the race, Julian thus recreated a complete goodwill
message, with implicit criticism of inadequate funding for pioneer aviators. Only one key
component was missing – Julian ever successfully taking off.
Of course, during the years when Foreman and Julian shone in the spotlight, the black
press reported on other pioneering aviators as well, usually providing a photograph and a
short biographic profile along with it. In 1927, for example, the Defender published a
photograph of Jesse S. Samuels, who was hoping to join the United States air mail service
(“Future Flyer”), which, however, remained closed to race aviators until 1938, when another
Illinois-based pilot, Grover C. Nash, delivered mail during the National Air Mail Week
(“Race Aviator Flies U.S. Air Mail Route”). The Courier also reported on Clarence E. Martin
and Walter E. Swagerty,16
who attempted to sign up for a non-stop-flight race to Hawaii in
1927 (“Black American Aviators to Enter $35,000 Non-Stop Hawaiian Flight”).17
Jesse
Boland made headlines in October 1927, when he flew a plane be had built himself over the
city of Roanoke, Va. for several hours (“Roanoke Youth”). Technically-skilled youngsters
around the country were trying to pave the way for African Americans in aviation, but
Coleman also remained on people’s mind: newly-built apartments in Harlem were named
after the deceased aviatrix in 1927 (“Harlemites Honor Memory of Aviatrix”).
2.4 Lindbergh, the Black Press, and Aviation Editorials
However, by the time Foreman returned to Los Angeles in June 1927 and one year had
eclipsed since Bessie Coleman’s death, Charles Lindbergh had become an international
superstar – the embodiment of America’s fascination with aviation and the measure of
Western technical civilization which black Americans were trying to catch up with. Given
16
According to Jakeman, Swagerty claimed to have invented a “heavier than air machine” back in
1911 (54).
17
Swagerty appeared on the pages of the Courier again in September 1929 in an article on four air
races in Los Angeles, where he demonstrated a “monocoupe, a pilot and passenger plane of small
proportions” for the Velle Motor company. The article explained that Swagerty did not possess an
aviator’s license (“Aviator Takes Part in Four California Races”).
59
Julian’s antics and unfulfilled promises, Foreman’s failure to land in New York, and
Lindbergh’s stunning non-stop flight from New York to Paris, editorials in the black press
began to express skepticism towards the future of aviation among African Americans.
Indeed, the black press had reasons for doubt. As Jenifer Van Vleck points out in
Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy, the National Advisory Committee
on Aeronautics reported in 1927 that “aviation is being accepted by the people as a means of
transportation and as a business in which industrial capital is being invested.” According to
Van Vleck, the “production of civilian aircraft quadrupled between 1927 and 1929;
production of military aircraft increased from 1,995 to 6,193” (50). In 1928, twenty three new
airlines would be established and by mid-1929, the U.S. had sixty- one passenger airlines,
forty- seven airmail lines, and thirty- two cargo lines. The number of passengers was rising,
too: from 5,782 in 1926 to 173,405 in 1929. Aviation patrons were boosting aviation
progress: in 1926, the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics was established. It
provided “much- needed financial support for aviation education and research. By 1930, the
fund had granted nearly $2.7 million for the establishment of aeronautical engineering
programs at eight leading universities, an aviation law institute, and educational initiatives for
elementary and secondary schools” (40-51). While aviation in the African American
community was barely was inching along, white America was flying forward.
The Defender and the NYAN celebrated Lindbergh’s feat for weeks, while the Courier
largely ignored it. All three papers, however, published sobering editorials on the present and
future state of aviation among African Americans. The Defender also ran a syndicated comic
strip “The Conquest of the Air” by Nicholas Afonsky from June 2, 1928 to May 4, 1929 – 45
installments altogether. Along with Lindbergh trivia and later reports on the goodwill flight to
pan-American countries, the paper used Lindbergh to inspire and urge its audience to take up
or at least support aviation, while it decried black Americans’ lack of opportunities in the
60
field. An editorial commemorating Bessie Coleman from May 1927, for example, observed
that “disaster seems to attend all our efforts in [aviation], partly because of a lack of interest
on our part, and partly because of insufficient preparation on the part of those who are trying.”
Education opportunities were scant, too, noted the editorial, as “we are barred from schools of
aviation […] and lack of funds makes it impossible for us to procure first class equipment for
our efforts in aviation” (“Bessie Coleman”).
Despite these unfavorable conditions, however, another editorial from May 1927
exhorted that “men of your color who pioneer in aviation come the hardest way. […] For
them to be aviators requires more than ordinary heroism, for they fly with the poorest of
equipment, the cheapest of planes, and the scantiest encouragement.” Comparing Ace
Foreman with Lindbergh, the editorial observed that “no cheering thousands gather when
[Foreman and Ward] take off, no checks flow in to reward their work.” And yet “their fight is
the hardest kind […] and their reward is pitiful. It took nerve and courage for Lindbergh to fly
from New York to Paris. But it takes nerve and courage for the aviators of your color to fly at
all” (“The Week: Nerve and Courage”). Despite Foreman’s and also Julian’s failures, the
black press thus sought to transvalue or reverse the image of aviation among African
Americans as an exercise in futility, particularly in the face of Lindbergh’s achievement.
Despite eventual defeat, black aviators were attempting to blaze a trail in aviation and the
black American public should reward them with attention, support, and funds, argued the
Defender. In response to the editorials, letters from the readers poured in for months. An
aviator, for example, promised to “keep striving on to the top of the ladder of success” (“From
an Aviator”), while others debated why black Americans could not succeed in aviation and
other endeavors, venturing reasons from poor diet to lack of financial backing (“The Stuff of
Which Lindberghs Are Made,” “The Lindbergh Question,” “More About Aviation”).
61
The NYAN also employed the discussion of Lindbergh’s courage and overall character
to inspire and engage its readership. In “Lindbergh and the Negro Problem,” a former member
of the UNIA, Sybil Bryant Poston, urged black Americans to “go it alone [and] to become
pioneers, trail blazers with confidence in ourselves and a belief in the ultimate triumph of our
race.” Along with the Courier, the Harlem-based paper also ran an editorial titled “What Will
the Negro Contribute to Aviation,” in which it reminded the readers that race pilots often face
ridicule and lack of interest in their efforts, but it also struck a hopeful tone in arguing that
Lindbergh’s achievements should inspire the race’s youth to “begin a serious apprenticeship
in aeronautics [although] the time is not yet favorable for a big adventure in aviation by a race
man.” Since people of color had contributed to navigation and participated in voyages and
explorations, the time would come, argued the text, for “those of dusky skin” to do their part
in aviation as well. While hopeful in vision, the editorial read as a sobering reminder of the
state of aviation among African Americans. As in the Defender’s case, responses to the
sobering message came in the form of letters.
Along with tidbits on Lindbergh’s non-stop flight, however, the NYAN devoted most
attention to its exclusive coverage – as the only black newspaper – of Lindbergh’s historic
goodwill flight across Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean between 1927
and 1928. Upon the aviator’s visit to the Virgin Islands, for example, the newspaper took
pride in enumerating the various black dignitaries present at the welcome ceremony
(“Negroes to Welcome Lindbergh,” “Correspondent Tells of Lindbergh’s Arrival”) and
celebrated Toussaint L’Ouverture in reports on Haiti (“Lindbergh and Haiti, the Country of a
Great Liberator”).
It must be noted, however, that while the paper celebrated and raved about
Lindbergh’s visit to the Caribbean, it was also countering the mainstream press’s coverage of
the goodwill flight. Lindbergh was repeatedly hailed by white reporters as a conqueror of both
62
the air and the countries visited; the “Columbus of the Air [who] has sailed the uncharted
spaces to the new world in the imagination, admiration and affection of his fellow-men”
(“Lindbergh Arrives at Santo Domingo”). To solidify his image as the “aerial successor” to
Columbus, Lindbergh was even gifted in Haiti “a mahogany paper weight loaded with metal
from the anchor ring of […] Santa Maria” and had a street leading to the statue of Toussaint
L’Ouverture named after him, the New York Times informed (“Haiti to Give Flier Relic of
Columbus”).
Reports repeatedly depicted Lindbergh as a benevolent apostle of the gospel of
aviation and civilization to the backward populations of the region. In “Lindbergh Lands at
Port-au-Prince as New Discoverer,” the NYT explained that Haiti’s “illiterate negro peasants
[…] discovered colonel Lindbergh much as the Indians did Columbus, for they had never
heard of him before.” Indeed, the uncivilized population of color in Haiti and other islands
could not fathom who Lindbergh was, the NYT were saying, for even though “the inarticulate
negro peasants […] have become accustomed to seeing the Marines flying planes, [they] have
little means of understanding Colonel Lindbergh’s achievements” (“Haitian Opposition Wars
on Lindbergh”). As the newspaper would have it, Lindbergh resembled a god-like creature,
descended from the skies – in Cuba, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was allegedly received as
a “supernatural machine,” with thousands of people observing and touching it “reverently”
(“Lindbergh Reaches Goal at Havana”). Overall, the NYT recycled the existing imagery of
Lindbergh as a discoverer and pioneer, as well as “the embodiment of transnational
whiteness” (Van Vleck 46), and transposed it onto the exotic Caribbean, which Lindbergh
graced with his civilizing mission.
The NYAN ran articles and editorials critical precisely of such exoticization and U.S.
colonialism embodied by Lindbergh. An editorial from February 1928, for example, pointed
out the “plight” of the Virgin Islands under U.S. rule (“Lindbergh at St. Thomas”). Another
63
text noted that Mexico “was not fooled by the goodwill idea” behind Lindbergh’s flight and
that “American capitalists were obnoxious to Mexicans” (“Citizens Entertain Senorita
Fuentes”). In another editorial, “America’s Orgy in Haiti,” the newspaper predicted that “the
brutalizing policy of the United States will recoil upon itself, especially in its attempts to win
the friendship of Latin America. “Personal favor, handshaking and flying machines,” asked
the text, “what are they worth in the face of such political, social, and economic debauchery
as prevails in Haiti?” Thus, whereas the NYT saw Lindbergh’s flight as an opportunity to
promote US dominance over the Caribbean and the region’s skies as a conquering, yet
civilizing mission, the voice of Harlem – keeping in spirit with its Renaissance – would have
none of it. Instead, it repeatedly highlighted and criticized the Marines’ racism in Haiti, US
imperialism, and eventually exposed Lindbergh’s goodwill as ultimate show of power.
The Courier – and even George S. Schuyler, it seems – largely ignored Lindbergh’s
successes; excepting the aforementioned sobering editorial. In a column, “The Camera,”
Robert L. Vann himself did briefly observe that “all the glory is [Lindbergh’s]. His example is
ours.” But Geraldyn Dismond, the Courier and Harlem Renaissance’s gossip columnist,
publicist, and radio announcer nicknamed “Harlem’s Hostess” (Kellner 101), used
Lindbergh’s reception in New York in 1927 mostly to commemorate Bessie Coleman,
“whose courage overcame the obstacles of sex, color, and limited means and education.”
Lamenting and emotionally appealing to her readers – as was expected of aviation’s goodwill
message in the black press – Dismond noted that Coleman “was a credit to the people who did
little enough to honor her” (“Through the Lorgnette of Geraldyn Dismond”). A June 1927
editorial, aptly titled “Lindbergh and Lynching,” then quipped that “so long as the fiendish
custom of mob murder continues in this country such dramatic exploits as the flight of
Lindbergh are incapable of removing the stain from our national escutcheon.” Per the
Courier, Lindbergh’s success meant few positive consequences for black America. Finally, a
64
score of advertisements for events where a new dance – the Lindy Hop – would be performed
and danced in Harlem filled the pages of the Pittsburgh weekly as well.
Martyrdom – as the reactions to Lindbergh indicate – remained one of the main
elements of the goodwill message that the black press was conveying, but distrust in aviation
and the realization that making headway in the field would be a longer journey than expected
because of segregation and lack of flyers, resonated in editorial texts as well. Eventually,
skepticism of individual, Sisyphean efforts led the authors of editorials to focus on more
organized, group- and systemic-level efforts. For example, in “The Week” from May 1927 –
an editorial column on the Defender’s front page – the paper shifted its message towards the
consequences that the undesirable state of affairs in black aviation had on the race’s civil
rights in general. Titled “Heroes of the Air,” the column first discussed the unsuccessful nonstop
transatlantic flight of two French flyers, Nungesser and Coli, explaining the interest of
the race in the flight by noting that France provides “men of your color […] equal
opportunities to achieve honors in all fields.” While the United States attempted its own
flight, pilots of color were not wanted, the text pointed out, even though the race had already
furnished its own pioneers, namely Bessie Coleman, a “martyr to the progress of aviation.”
The column reminded its readership that African Americans had been represented in aviation,
but were now invisible; whereas in France, where Coleman had studied and was hailed as a
wonder by numerous flying aces, men of color flourish. Progress in aviation and civil rights
were thus connected, as subsequent coverage in the black press would demonstrate.
If advancements in black aviation were vitally connected to the community’s civil
rights, so were they to the hopes of black soldiers’ inclusion in the US military aviation units.
The Defender, perhaps due to Abbott’s connection to Coleman, was in the forefront of early
campaigns for the inclusion of African Americans in all branches of the armed forces. It
focused mainly on inclusion in the aviation service. In one September 1927 editorial, the
65
Defender called “the few attempts made at flying by our people […] feeble and disorganized,”
but proclaimed Bessie Coleman “valorous” and of “indomitable courage and will,” reminding
its readers of the aviatrix’s intentions to start an aviation school. The Chicago paper also
connected aviation with the race’s lack of representation in the military when it declared that
black soldiers have been “a part of every modern achievement. We have taken part in every
conflict in which America has been engaged since its inception,” and asked, “Shall the mighty
spirit of Bessie Coleman die?” (“Bessie Coleman’s Spirit Must Live”). Another September
editorial, “No Chance to Fly,” asked “for a chance to prove ourselves in the air” since “the
next war will be fought in the air,” and demanded that racial “barriers [be] removed in
aviation circles.” The specter of a war fought in the air without black Americans’ participation
haunted these editorials.
Invoking Coleman’s legacy worked, however, as the answer that the Defender
received one week later was encouraging. Frederick W. Smith of the 8th
Illinois Infantry – the
regiment Coleman flew in celebration of in 1922 – related that there were 25 high school
graduates in the regiment “who are at the present time clamoring ineffectively for training in
aviation […] but our struggle for recognition is a feeble one because no man of power in our
Race supports the youth in such endeavors.” Smith proposed that politicians be lobbied to
establish a black air squadron in the Illinois National Guard (ING), as it had been done for the
white soldiers (“Letter to the Editor: National Guard Aviation”). However, the idea would not
come to pass until the early 1930s, when John C. Robinson and Cornelius Coffey established
the first black squadron in the ING. Another military officer responded to the Defender’s
challenge when Lieut. H.D. Meadows, a WW1 veteran, proposed a school named after
Coleman, which would teach the race’s youth in aviation, as the field offered unlimited job
opportunities (“Youths Must Prepare for Aviation Age”). In this way, Coleman’s message,
with its military aspects, was being vigorously debated. Finally, the Defender argued in a
66
February 1928 editorial, “Give Us a Chance,” that “the government owes it to us to give us
this chance [and] let down the bars in our […] aviation service, and we will prove what real
service and real loyalty mean.”
The exciting narratives as well as the tragic fates of Bessie Coleman and Joel
Foreman, along with Hubert Julian’s escapades, reported in the black press gave contours and
helped define the central tenets of the aviation campaign and its goodwill message. Technical
and mechanical education combined with existent and potential future economic opportunities
would lead to black representation in aviation and would help bridge the racial technological
gap, black newspapers and aviators argued and exhorted their audience. Crusading aviators
and aviatrices would lead the race in this civil right struggle and, if only the U.S. government
decided to bring down barriers in aviation schools, airports, aviation clubs, and the military,
black America would develop an entire generation of aviators capable of protecting both its
nation and its communities in case of an attack. Crossing boundaries, even before Lindbergh’s
historic feat, remained an objective among black aviators, too, as they wanted to spread the
goodwill message of aviation across the nation as well as to other nations of color. However,
lack of funding, of skilled and successful aviators, as well as mainstream developments in
civilian and military aviation, and the bypassing or avoiding of black Americans in the U.S.
military brought out another element of the aviation campaign – lamentation and skepticism,
especially in newspaper editorials.
All of this clearly shows that the Courier, the Defender, and the NYAN were making a
concerted effort to promote black aviation. As the goodwill message of aviation slowly
developed throughout the 1920s, black newspapers adopted aviation as a cause and deployed
a distinctive force and voice in their coverage of the race’s advancements in the field. The
following pages map the aviation campaign’s progress throughout the rest of the Harlem
Renaissance era, focusing on the aforementioned tenets of black aviation’s goodwill message.
67
The mapping reveals a geographical variability in black aviation efforts as well as the field’s
popularity across genders, the era’s cultural icons, and black immigrant communities.
68
3. THE AVIATION CAMPAIGN: EDUCATION, ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES,
AND REPRESENTATION
3.1 William J. Powell’s Creation of and Contribution to the Aviation
Campaign
While Hubert Julian’s escapades – a proposed non-stop flight to India, allegedly heading the
Ethiopian Imperial Air Force, and changing his citizenship from British to Italian in order to
try and assassinate Mussolini – remained on the pages of the black press until 1937, actual
pilots and their bona fide endeavors gradually took over newspaper reports. In 1928, black
newspapers introduced their readers to aviators and aviation enthusiasts who would later
become instrumental in the full-on campaign that the black press launched a year later. For
example, they reported on Dr. A. Porter Davis, a Kansas City-based pioneer aviator, who,
following the example of Coleman and Foreman, announced that he was planning to found a
local aviation school (“Kansas City Physician Purchases Airplane,” “Kansas Physician Buys
Plane”).18
Or they introduced William J. Powell: on October 27, 1928, the Courier published
an inauspicious photograph with the headline “Form Flying Club,” showing the charter
members of the Los Angeles branch of the Bessie Coleman Aero Club, organized by William
J. Powell, the club’s national president.
From 1929 onwards, black pilots, inspired by Powell’s leadership, would take initiative in
directly forming the movement of black aviation and its image in the black press. Although
their timing could not have been more unfortunate with the onset of the Great Depression,
black aviators and aviatrices began to write letters to the editor, articles on their flying
18
Per the Defender, Davis, a well-off physician, had also been discriminated against when he had
wanted to store his plane at a local airport on the Kansas side of the city, but was rejected by white
pilots who objected to him being allowed on the field, asserting that “his presence greatly harmed
the property’s development.” Davis had previously been rejected by white-owned airports on the
Missouri side as well (“Kansas Aviation Field Bars Physician’s Plane”).
69
experiences, the physical reality of flying, and the history of black aviation. In publishing a
book, writing and performing a play on aviation, and directing a documentary, Powell cocreated
and lead a nation-wide campaign for black aviation in the black press. Powell’s close
relationship with the Courier, developed in early 1929, altered the existing goodwill message
formed by Coleman, Foreman, Julian and the black press prior to 1929, as it was now the
pilots – William J. Powells, Herman Banning, James Holt Peck, and, with the onset of the
Italo-Ethiopian crisis, also Janet Waterford, John C. Robinson, and Willa Brown cooperating
with the Defender – who directly influenced and shaped the message sent out to the
readership. In Powell’s era, even more emphasis was put in black newspapers’ editorials and
articles on promoting aviation and mechanical education, as well as active participation in
aviation events. Black aviators-authors also began to build and call for institutional structures
to be built to secure black aviation’s continuous development. Overall then, black aviators
and the black press transvalued – or accepted – the reality of segregation and Jim Crow in
aviation and, while still lamenting white Americans’ racism, began to celebrate and promote
all-black efforts to advance aviation among African Americans.
This section discusses aviation education efforts in the newspaper coverage of aviation
between 1929 and 1939 as well as the constant advertisement on the part of aviators and
journalists of economic opportunities for aviation mechanics and pilots. In particular, this
section traces the educational and promotional activities of William J. Powell in California,
Charles E. James in Harlem and Atlanta, and John C. Robinson and his colleagues and
successors, Cornelius Coffey and Willa Brown, in Chicago. Their objective was, as it had
been before, to secure representation in the field of aviation and to prove black Americans’
technical competency; to reverse the existing stereotypes of African Americans’ technical and
technological ineptitude. While the campaign was becoming increasingly concerted, it still
consisted mostly of reports on and photographs of individual achievements. What
70
distinguishes this period from the early 1920s, however, is the gradual emergence of group
efforts and the establishment of segregated schools and clubs. It is also at this time that
George S. Schuyler, Courier’s preeminent columnist, became an important aviation advocate,
in particular, for his criticism of Hubert Julian and attempts at presenting aviation as a
worthwhile and serious technical, technological, and scientific undertaking.
The Courier started the year 1929 off with an editorial “Opportunities in Aviation,”
providing statistical evidence of rapid progress in aviation and encouraging its readers to take
it up. The text argued that “tuition fees are not prohibitive, and those who are not physically
fit to become pilots can make themselves eligible for well-paying jobs on the ground.” It also
opined that “there ought to be more Negroes in this field,” because schools outside of the
South were admitting race applicants. Finally, it challenged the black community to take up
the cause: “a good way to get a number of our folks in this new and prosperous industry is for
various local organizations to establish scholarships for that purpose. What Negro community
will be the first to do this?,” asked the paper.19
Several organizations and pioneers answered the call. The Defender, for example,
published a photograph of black students at the All American Aviation Association, which
had allegedly established branches in Chicago, Kansas City, and Los Angeles (“Future
Flyers”). Indeed, attempts at opening aviation schools for students of color began as early as
1927, with Joel Foreman opening his school in California and Walter C. Moreno establishing
an aviation club in Chicago to “promote the development of commercial aviation, to bring
together all air-minded youths, and to help them gain experience and knowledge in regard to
aeronautics” (“Youth Forms Club to Teach Aeronautics”). In 1928, Harlem almost got its
own aviation school. Edgar T. Rouzeau, “one of the first Negro war correspondents in World
19
As a follow-up, the Courier published an interview with Amelia Earhart, where the aviatrix
declared her faith in the African Americans’ “ability to do the worthwhile things” (“Amelia Earhart
Discusses the Negro”), which provided further encouragement for would-be pilots.
71
War II” (“Yesterday in Negro History”), reported that a Philadelphia-based aviator was
hoping to establish “a flying school for Harlem youth” and coax “Harlem to take to the air”
(“Plan Flying School for Harlem Youth”). Records indicate that Harlem did not get such a
school until 1929/1930, but Hubert Julian’s incessant activities and efforts to make Harlem
air-minded kept black aviation alive in New York City.
The loudest answer to the Courier’s call, however, came from California in February
1929, where “the first Good-will tour by Negro flyers in the history of aviation” was planned
to take place in June. The flyers would start from Los Angeles and stop at “200 of the most
important cities” with the object of interesting the race “in aviation in general and its
possibilities” (“Girl Flyer to Head Flight”). Although the article did not specify the tour’s
organizers’ names, the endeavor gained clearer contours in an early March letter in response
to the Courier’s aforementioned editorial. William J. Powell wrote to the paper about his
excitement to see “our greatest weekly paper starting a campaign to interest the Negro in this
new field [of aviation] (emphasis mine).” He announced that it was his organization which
was planning to tour the country in July, visiting 100 cities “In the Interest for Negroes in
Aviation,” and hoping to open branches in each of the cities. His five planes would be piloted
by students who were to be “licensed by the Department of Commerce very shortly.” Powell
also explained that he was starting an advertising campaign and hoped that the Courier would
publish an article on aviation by him every week in both local and national editions of the
weekly (“Letter to the Editor”).
Powell’s letter is remarkable for several reasons. The director of the Bessie Coleman
Aero Club took it upon himself to promote aviation among African Americans and was
willing to invest his own money, hoping to gradually find other financial support. In this way,
Powell established himself and his organization as the leader in the segregated field and gave
a voice and credentials to the cause of black aviation. Furthermore, Powell, like Coleman and
72
Julian, understood that the black press was the most efficient way of entering black
households and propagating aviation. Having noticed that the Courier had engaged in
encouraging its readership to seize the opportunities that the field offered, Powell sought to
associate himself with the medium that would give him reach into African American
communities across the nation and that would connect the “imagined community” of black
aviators and students wanting to take up the activity. His plan to have a weekly article appear
in the black press also materialized as the Courier carried almost twenty articles and editorials
dealing with aviation in the rest of 1929. In other words, there was to be no escape for the
black readership from Powell and the Courier’s aviation campaign, if the new aviation
crusader were to have it his way.
The Courier followed its challenge to black America with an editorial in March,
“Wanted: Aviators and Mechanics,” which asserted that the time was ripe for the race to take
up aviation like it did the auto industry. In fact, as Kathleen Franz points out, black
newspapers had in the 1920s also “mounted a campaign for auto citizenship: they produced
counter images of black drivers as inventive and respectable [and] as technologically skilled
and socially responsible” (139). The Courier’s piece serves as a perfect example of the way
the aviation campaign was advertising job opportunities in skilled positions as one of
aviation’s main attractions. The paper pointed out that “there is unlimited opportunity for
capable pilots and mechanics regardless of race, color or creed. Young Negroes should awake
to this opportunity. There are plenty of schools scattered around the country where they can
obtain the necessary knowledge to qualify for such positions.” Vocational education was also
emphasized in the process. Echoing the early 1920s call for African Americans to take up
aviation by studying at aviation schools, the text explained that now, more than ever, “the
machine dominates the world today and will continue to do so.” Finally, reacting to a longperceived
technological lag on the part of the black community, the text presented the logical
73
argument that “the man who is skilled in handling, repairing and overhauling the machine will
be an important personage so long as the machine age lasts.” If black drivers and mechanics
had succeeded with cars, they should be able to learn to operate and repair planes, too, argued
the text. Mastery of technology and mechanics was here highlighted as not merely a form of
emulating white America’s technological prowess, but was considered a life-long benefit for
the entire black community.
In the following months, the Courier filled its pages with reports on Powell and his
aero club. It commended Powell on using a “group method” of learning aviation by
establishing local branches of his organization and providing each of them with a plane,
which would “open a way for the Negroes to get in on the ground floor of this promising
industry” (“Opportunity to Learn Aviation”). As Coleman, Foreman, and other pilots on the
pages of black newspapers had evidenced, individual effort was to be appreciated, but would
often fail in bringing about advances in the field – Powell’s group method held a promise of
change as it aimed to be more efficient and less costly. The paper also ran a photograph of
Miss Beatrice Reeves, “the only Negro girl in America today completing her course in
aeronautics” under Powell. Address and further details were provided for the readers to
support Powell’s efforts (“Pilot”). In early May, Powell’s first biographic profile appeared in
the black press, informing readers that the aero club director had spent a year learning to fly at
the Warren School of Aeronautics, was a University of Illinois graduate, lieutenant with the
317th
Engineers during WW1, and the first black man to have completed a course in aerial
navigation. The text then devoted two paragraphs to spreading Powell’s goodwill message of
educating pilots and mechanics (“Aero Club to Buy 100 Planes”).20
20
Powell’s complete profile can be found in Distinguished African Americans in Aviation and Space
Science (2002) as well as Phil Scott’s “The Blackbirds Take Wing.”
74
Even though coverage of Powell’s endeavors now dominated the black press aviation
campaign, the Pittsburgh weekly did still report on other individual educational efforts in
aviation. It informed about a Jacksonville, Florida girl, who, having been inspired by Bessie
Coleman, wished to pursue aviation and had recently won a city-wide competition to join the
local Girls’ Flying Club, but was being denied entry on account of her race (“Girl Wins Place
in White Flying Club”). Another sign of nation-wide interest in aviation was an article about
the National Association for Advancement of Aviation Among the Colored Race, whose
purpose was “creating a better understanding between races, through a mutuality of interest in
the newest science, aeronautics.” The organization planned to provide scholarships for
students to be sent to existing aviation schools and then take place in the budding field of
aviation. It also eventually sought to establish its own school and hold exhibition flights and
air-shows (“Organize Aviation Association in N.Y.”). It seemed that Powell was not the only
one crusading for his race in aviation and that the campaign’s goodwill message with
emphasis on education and subsequent entrance into the industry was reaching its objectives.
More importantly, the article marked another instance of an aviation organization being
established. The field and interest in it seemed to be growing.
It may thus come as no surprise that the year 1929 also brought the first attempt at
establishing a black aviation school with an overtly military purpose. In June, the Defender
published a photograph with the title “Chicago Goes Air-Minded,” depicting “Major
Simmons,” the head of the American Aviation School on Indiana Ave, with his students. In a
somewhat derisive tone, the paper added that “if learning to fly depends upon the ground
work, this group ought to be expert aviators in a short while,” as the group of students “is
shown working on a model plane.” The paper was missing an important point here, however.
As Powell, Simmons, and John C. Robinson’s subsequent educational activities would show,
ground work – in other words, technical and mechanical skills – were a prerequisite to
75
becoming a successful aviator during the Jim Crow era. Black pilots could only rely on their
own skills to repair and make their planes functional. It was ground work first, flying practice
second what Powell had preached all along.
Despite the mocking tone, however, Simmons turned out to be a true pioneer of
aviation in Chicago after Coleman’s death and a follower of Coleman’s deployment of overt
military symbols to highlight the vital importance of aviation. According to Distinguished
African Americans in Aviation and Space Science, Major Rupert A. Simmons sponsored the
first “colored” air show in August 1929 (180), because he wanted to showcase Dr. Davis from
Kansas City – discussed above – and to promote his own Chicago school. The Defender later
changed its tone when Simmons announced the proposed August air meet. The paper ran a
celebratory article, likening Simmons and the black instructors at the other two aviation
schools in Chicago to the crusading Bessie Coleman and declared that “never has the public
shown such a keen interest in the progress of aviation as it is doing today” (“Big Aerial Meet
to Draw Cream of Aces to Chicago”). The paper also carried a large photograph of
Simmons’s students in front of a plane, lined up as soldiers, clad in uniforms (“Plan Big
Aerial Exhibit”).
Simmons’s American Aviation School was military in style, as the photograph in the
Chicago weekly indicates. According to Enoch P. Waters, one of the Defender’s eminent
journalists, the school was part of the Illinois Air Commerce Reserves and “employed an exarmy
pilot as an instructor in aviator mechanics and flying.” At one point, claims Waters,
“membership in the organization reached 60, and out of the group came three licensed flyers”
(“Black Wings Over America”). Simmons later became an aviation promoter and helped
establish Willie “Suicide” Jones as one of the best parachutists in the world. On the occasion
of Jones’ world-record leap in September 1939, the Defender ran a brief profile on Simmons
with two photographs from 1929, where the Major is depicted with his students in military
76
uniforms of the Illinois Air Commerce Reserves, which he had founded independently of any
military organization (“Pioneers Who Made Chicagoans Air-Minded”). Simmons added a
strong martial aspect to his endeavors in aviation education. Given the atmosphere and events
concerning aviation in 1939, the reminder that there had been a military-style aviation school
in Chicago in 1929 only served to strengthen African Americans’ resolve to lobby further for
inclusion in the CPTP.
In the late 1920s, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Diego were the hubs of black
aviation group activities; although Hubert Julian kept Harlem interested in aviation as well.
While Chicago was going air-minded – military-style – Powell was pushing forward with his
proposed tour. His home branch in Los Angeles bought a new Swallow training plane in May
1929 (“Bessie Coleman Clubs Get New Training Plane”).21
In July, even though the proposed
tour had not started, it was reported that one of the aero club’s planes would be christened
“Oscar DePriest” to honor the African American congressman from Illinois. DePriest was the
first African American to be elected to Congress from outside the southern states, the first in
the 20th century, and the first since the Reconstruction Era (“To Christen Plane Oscar
DePriest”). The Defender, too, picked up Powell’s proposed tour: In “Bessie Coleman Aero
Club Planes to Tour,” it summarized Powell’s goodwill message, provided a profile, and
listed the participating pilots. In its section “California News” from June 29, the Chicago
weekly added that on July 1, Powell’s group would hold exhibition flights around San Diego
and then set off on a trans-continental flight.
Powell’s endeavors, however, were not always received with and discussed in positive
terms – which only added to his aura of an aviation crusader. The Defender published a letter
by Powell in mid-September, in which the aviation campaign leader had to defend himself
21
In local news, the Courier announced that the local Bluebird Aero Club of Pittsburgh had applied
to join Powell’s organization (“Bluebird Aero Club”).
77
against accusations that he had hoodwinked the gullible black public with his campaign when
his Blackbirds did not perform at the Universal Association air meet – organized by Major
Simmons – at Checkerboard Field, Chicago. Powell’s flyers, however, had never been
scheduled to participate in the event, the director insisted. Similarly to Coleman, Foreman,
and the black press editorials, Powell accused those who had spread false news about his aero
club of “shatter[ing] the confidence of our people in the thing that is foremost before the
world today, aviation.” Albeit disappointed, Powell projected confidence in his endeavors
when he announced that there were only eight black aviators in the country at that moment,
seven of whom belonged to his organization. Their objective was to perfect themselves in
flying and quietly prepare “to carry aviation to the Negro by the Negro.” Powell was
implicitly informing the readership that he did not intend to profit from the goodwill tour, but,
at the same time, did not want to present an unfinished product to the public. He implored
“the Negro of America not to lose confidence in the Negro’s ability to fly before they really
enter the field, for aviation industry opens unlimited possibilities and jobs to the Negro”
(“Eight Licensed Pilots”). He stayed on his goodwill message and presented himself and his
group as toiling crusaders, who would deliver aviation to the race despite segregation, Jim
Crow, and lack of support. Martyrdom, as a form of reversal of the notion that African
Americans could not fly and contribute to American aviation was thus, as in Coleman’s case,
part of Powell’s modus operandi.
The Checkerboard Field, Chicago event on August 17-18 was not without its own
controversy. In an editorial, “Progress in Aviation,” the Defender raved about the air meet:
the event proved that “the possibilities of the world’s youngest industry are unlimited with
anyone with grit, wit, and determination” and that “anything can be done” in the field of
aviation. However, the text never mentioned the event’s organizer, Major Rupert A.
Simmons. In a letter published the following week, Lucile Childress, a reader, related her
78
experience at the air meet, arguing that it was not until a group of black spectators voiced
their protest against the organizers for not allowing two black pilots to perform, that existing
racial barriers at the event had been lifted. Dr. Davis – who had had an accident en route to
the event (“Skillful Piloting Prevents Death”) – had named his plane “Inspiration,” and later
performed alongside a Mr. Miller.22
Throughout her letter, Childress excoriated the black
spectators who would pay money to see white pilots perform and not support their licensed
compatriots (“At Checkerboard Field”).
In California, Powell’s goodwill tour still had not started – in fact, it would never
materialize in the way it was advertised, nor would it be very successful – although it did help
raise awareness about aviation. Powell’s group managed to christen their plane as planned and
then took DePriest in the namesake plane for an air tour over Los Angeles (“DePriest Takes
Ride in Airplane”). The plane was piloted by Herman Banning, one of the first licensed black
aviators.23
Optimism still prevailed in newspaper coverage of aviation, as the Defender
reported on a licensed aviatrix in Washington, D.C. (“Girl, A Year Out of School, Is Plane
Pilot”), and some on the Courier’s staff ventured to take their first plane rides, thereby again
promoting aviation and pronouncing it safe for the readers, too (“Calvin Makes First Flight in
Airplane”).
Powell’s final endeavor in 1929 came in the form of an unsuccessful and accidentally
international flight. According to reports in the black press, Powell and Banning had been on
a cross-country flight when they lost track of where they were flying and ended up crashing
south of the Mexican border. Having spent four days without food, the two aviators wandered
across the desert and beaches and finally came upon the village of San Felipe, where the
villagers fed them and took them to a hospital in Mexicali. From there Powell and Banning
22
It may be assumed that, since Simmons organized the air meet, it was Robert Miller, one of
Simmons’ students and later the “mayor” of Chicago’s Bronzeville (“Pioneers Who Made
Chicagoans Air-Minded”), who performed alongside the intrepid doctor.
23
The Defender had reported on Banning in 1928, entitling his photograph “Air Conqueror.”
79
made their way back home (“Pilots Wander Four Days without Food,” “Lost in Cross
Country Trip”). The two men thus lost their plane, but managed to survive, registering the
first, albeit unofficial, international flight by a black pilot, and gaining coverage by the black
press; including their biographical information, details about the aero club, and photographs.
In December, Powell added a Phoenix branch of the Bessie Coleman aero club and was to
perform in San Antonio (“Experienced Rare Thrill”). He was still crusading, but his projects
were becoming increasingly harder to carry out with the onset of the Great Depression.
The first year in the symbiotic aviation campaign of black aviators and the black press
closed with an editorial summarizing the black community’s efforts in promoting aviation and
instilling optimism in their readership, despite Powell’s unsuccessful goodwill tour. “Slowly
but surely the Negroes are taking to the air,” the Courier announced, reminding the readers
that “there are news reports of young Negroes here and there graduating from aviation schools
and flying their planes about the country.” Promoting technical and mechanical education, the
text argued that “those who get in the game now will be on top ten years from now, and
probably sooner.” Finally, in exclaiming that “we are finally becoming air-minded” (“We’re
Up in the Air”), the editorial painted a rosy picture of black aviation and its future after a year
of intensive campaigning. The year’s coverage ended with a note in the Courier on the
establishment of the Eagle Aerial Corporation and a ground training school in Baltimore
(“Commercial News”), reminding the paper’s readers that 1929 had indeed been a year during
which new aviation organizations as well as schools – Coleman and Foreman’s dream – had
been established.24
24
Employment in aviation also continued to be one of the points of emphasis in aviation’s goodwill
message in the black press. For example, Edward F. Smith, the parachutist, reappeared in an article about
Smith’s representation of the Irwin Air Chute company at Curtiss Field, N.Y., where he demonstrated his skills
to parachuting experts and a host of white journalists (“Big Air Chute Company Employs Colored Expert”).
Noting that Smith was working as a salesman for an English parachute producer, the Courier was delighted with
Smith’s comportment, and one week later added a photograph of the young parachutist with the title “Daring!”
The newspaper also reported on Smith’s planned leap in October 1931 (“To Make Leap”). It seemed that there,
80
William J. Powell’s crusade ran into trouble in the black press during 1930. In
October, the Defender, seemingly protecting the community of its readers and giving them a
voice, published a report slandering Powell’s enterprise. It asserted that Powell had raised
money from Los Angeles residents, having painted “gaudy pictures of quick wealth to
investors and immediate fame to youngsters who took up aviation.” Having crashed in
Mexico, Powell had never come back to California, and allegedly founded an aviation school
in Arizona, even though “it is said he cannot fly a ship himself.” Now he was “somewhere in
Texas” while investors were waiting and “aviation among our group in the West had suffered
a serious setback” (“Los Angeles Residents Lose Money in Effort to Aid Aviation Among
Our Race”). The article did not include the name of its author or its source. The fact that it
was published in October 1930, almost one year after Powell’s accident in Mexico, seems
curious. In a letter to the editor in the Courier one month later, a stockholder in the Bessie
Coleman organization excoriated the newspaper for publishing false and damaging
information about Powell, who had flown in Los Angeles in September, 1930 in front of a
crowd of “six or seven thousand” (“Letters to the Editor”). According to Powell’s own
account of the events, it was Thomas Allen – one of the “Flying Hobos” who would make the
first transcontinental trip in 1932 – and Oliver Betts who spread a report around Los Angeles
that Powell had run away with people’s money and was not coming back (Black Wings 91).
Powell had been having a busy year in 1930 even before the Defender article, trying to
make headway promoting black aviation nationwide. In January, he and Banning were still in
Phoenix, turning the city’s black school teachers and professional men air-minded
(“Arizona”). In May, the Courier reprinted a section of the Bessie Coleman Aero News, a
indeed, were jobs in the aviation industry and that the hopeful goodwill message communicated in the black
press had merit. Also, Smith’s employment in such a dangerous position must have been a testament to his
technical and mechanical skills – testing a parachute was no longer a hobby, but a serious occupation which
required technical expertise.
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brand new monthly edited by Powell (“Commercial News”),25
titled “Who’s Who in
Aviation.” In it, Powell’s club advertised its flyers as pioneers in almost every category
imaginable. It also listed Bessie Coleman, Joel Foreman, Edward F. Smith, and Dr. A. Porter
Davis, thus contextualizing the aero club’s achievements in black aviation history and
highlighting its leading role. However, criticism of Powell’s promotional activities again
caused controversy. Artis N. Ward, Joel Foreman’s mechanic from 1927, sent a letter to the
Courier in June, in which he corrected Powell’s magazine’s statement that Bessie Coleman
had been the first American woman licensed to fly. Also, it was he, rather than Foreman, who
had been the first “Negro licensed airplane engine and airplane mechanic” (“Letter to the
Editor”). In attacking Powell’s credentials, Ward seems to have misunderstood Powell’s
attempts at promoting black aviation and may have endangered Powell’s mission.
Ignoring their critics, Powell and Banning carried on. In July, the black press informed
on Powell and Banning’s flying exhibition in Abilene, Texas (“Aviators Land in Abilene,
Texas,” “Race Flyers in Texas Give Exhibitions”) and, one month later, the Defender listed
ten North Texas cities where Powell and Banning had already given exhibition flights, along
with eight more where they were scheduled to perform before Labor Day (“Gives Aviation
Show in Texas”). In September, Powell performed in Los Angeles and his aero club was even
trying to establish a coast-to-coast Ladies’ Flying club “with the hope of interesting the fair
sex in aviation,” already attracting “the names of leading society favorites in many of the
large cities” (“Ladies’ Flying Club Drawing National Attention”). Not only were Powell and
his branches busy – they were becoming ever more creative, hoping to seize on the popularity
of aviation nationwide.
25
In 1936, Powell would publish another aviation-focused magazine, the Craftsmen Aero-News, thus
providing outlet for his obvious writing needs and to inform the public about all things aviation.
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The campaign slowed down in 1931. After two years of exhibition flights and
organizing efforts, but hardly any ground- or record-breaking success and with some criticism
emerging, Powell and his organization did not feature in black newspapers very often as there
seemed to be few achievements that the black press could transvalue. The Defender did
announce in June that a Los Angeles branch of the Bessie Coleman Aero Club had just had its
second meeting and “has a big project in view to make aviation history for the race” (“Bessie
Coleman Aero Club”). And, in September, the paper did carry a short article about an air
circus in Los Angeles held by Powell’s organization. It commended Powell’s organization
skills, briefly described the happenings at the event, and announced that “the financial benefit
[from the circus] will be used to defray the expenses of 50 young men and women who desire
to become licensed aviators” (“Give Air Circus as a Tribute to Bessie Coleman”). Despite the
educational objective of the event – and its unprecedented scope – neither the Chicago
weekly, nor the Courier informed about it right before or celebrated its taking place
afterwards. Powell did not celebrate the air circus very much in Black Wings, either. As he
explains in Chapter 9, he had lost most contacts for journalists due to his disagreements with
Thomas Allen and Oliver Betts, the aforementioned former members of his flying group, who
had helped advertise most of Powell’s events and flights.
However, by barely reporting on the air circus, the black press had missed out on the
most successful all-black flying event to that date. In Powell’s words, “on Labor Day 15,000
people turned out to see an exhibition which astonished everyone. […] The show went off
exactly as scheduled. There were no accidents and the people were well satisfied” (Black
Wings 96). The show was a success that Powell had been waiting for. It also inspired him into
organizing yet another large event in December 1931. Although the Courier and the Defender
83
again mostly ignored Powell himself in their reports on the upcoming air meet,26
they did
mention it in passing as they carried a photograph of Irvin E. Wells, a member of Powell’s
group, who was supposed to fly “in a gigantic air circus in the Angel City December 6 for the
benefit of the city’s Unemployment Relief Fund” (“Expected to Feature in Big Air Circus,”
“Going Up For Charity”). In other words, Powell and his student flyers were performing to
help their community during a period of economic hardship and again promoted aviation as a
viable employment option. According to Powell, 40,000 people came to see the show, which
was also the first time “that seven Negro pilots were in the air together” (102). The show also
“featured” Hubert Julian (“Col. Julian in California to Show Them How to Fly”), although
Julian had lost his way during the flight, according to Powell’s account. But a photograph of
Julian in front of a large billboard announcing the show features in many publications on
black aviation history and is part of the Black Wings exhibition at the Smithsonian Air and
Space Museum. Despite the Great Depression, Powell was fulfilling his ambition of making
black Americans air-minded without much advertising.
In 1932, the California-based aviator finally began preparations for his own longdistance
flight. At first, the Courier incorrectly informed that Powell, along with Irvin E.
Wells, was on his way to Pittsburgh in a cross-country flight that would take him from Los
Angeles to New York City. It also stated that Powell was “an associate of Hubert Julian, a
well-known aviator” (“Wells and Powell on Long Flight; to Visit Pittsburgh”). The situation
cleared up a week later when the paper announced that Powell and Wells had, in fact, entered
the prestigious Air Derby along with 56 white flyers.27
The destination was Cleveland, 2,639
miles away from Los Angeles – this meant that Powell and Wells were the first black flyers
ever to compete in a long flight. According to the article – corroborated in Powell’s book –
26
The Courier did publish two brief reports in its “California News” section in December 1931 and
February 1932.
27
The text explained that Powell had had an argument with Julian about a proposed transatlantic
flight and had given the parachutist a “thorough trouncing” (“Race Aviators Flying to Cleveland”).
84
the duo was among the race’s leaders when it arrived in El Paso, Texas. Powell’s flight ended
in Texas, however, after he had crashed the plane due to engine trouble (“Powell Fails to
Land in Cleveland,” “Reporter Tells of Powell Flight,” “Where Trail of Plane Ended”). The
privilege of successfully finishing a long-distance flight was left to Powell’s colleagues James
Herman Banning and Thomas C. Allen, whose achievement is discussed in Chapter 3.6.3.
Back in California after the unsuccessful long-distance flight, Powell intensified his
pioneering education efforts during 1933 and 1934, adding a new dimension – civic
engagement in aviation through drama and fiction. In the summer of 1933, he put on a fouract
play called “Ethiopia Spreads Her Wings,” starring Cleo Desmond, “one of the
outstanding dramatic stars of the early Af. Am. stage, who began her career in vaudeville and
later achieved acclaim with the [Harlem-based] Lafayette Players” and through several Oscar
Micheaux’s films (Peterson 74). Titled by Floyd C. Covington, director of the Los Angeles
branch of the Urban League and an avid aviation supporter, the play had been written by
William J. Powell during a two-day-and-night writing frenzy (Black Wings 122). According
to a review in the Defender, it “deals with the financial reverses of an aristocratic Columbus,
Ohio, family during the depression.” The family’s five children lose their jobs, the father’s
salary is cut, and “the family loses everything.” However, the four sons “decide to hobo to
Los Angeles to enter a Negro aviation school. They do, and their fortunes change” (“Cleo
Desmond Gets Break in Movies and Makes Good”). Per Powell’s own description, one of the
children even becomes “a transcontinental flyer, makes a lot of money and redeems the
home” (122); he thus ultimately personifies Powell’s goodwill message.
The little play was an unexpected success, at least according to Powell’s own account.
Even though “no one in [Powell’s] group really thought the play was anything extraordinary,”
the opening night brought the audience to a frenzy. “Round after round of applause filled the
auditorium as the members of the group unfolded their message,” explains Powell in his
85
autobiography, “and a new inspiration was born in the breast of every Negro present that
night” (122). Powell was then allegedly “besieged for dates at nearly all the large churches” in
Los Angeles; and “the press got busy and heralded the story from coast to coast” (122). It is
unclear how popular the play actually became, as it seems that only the Defender reviewed
the piece. Nevertheless, the paper called it “true to Negro life of the better class, giving an
intimate glimpse of the reaction to the economic dilemma in which the technically trained
Negro finds himself today.” Most importantly, the play sought to draw attention to aviation,
“the only field of industry offering the Race untold commercial opportunities,” explained the
Defender (“Cleo Desmond Gets Break in Movies and Makes Good”). Powell claims that the
play’s success spread nationwide and “gave new impetus [to] Negro aviation” (122).
In the early 1930s, Los Angeles was experiencing its own New Negro Renaissance.
According to Douglas Flamming, “as the Renaissance faltered in Harlem, Los Angeles
became a refuge for black westerners who had ventured to New York; they hoped to keep the
spirit of Harlem alive on the West Coast” (58). Powell’s play and flying performances were
attended by this Renaissance’s figures. Urban League officials promoted and supported
Powell’s group and the play’s staging. In fact, claims the aviator, Urban League’s Floyd
Covington asserted that “the play told the Urban League story better than he could tell it”
(124). Among other “prominent persons” (124), Clarence Muse, one of black America’s
premier Hollywood actors, and formerly a member of the famous Harlem-based Lincoln
Players and the Lafayette Players, appeared at various events held by Powell’s group. As did
Paul Williams, a sought-after architect, who designed major buildings in black Los Angeles
and later built mansions for numerous white elites, such as Frank Sinatra, on L.A.’s West
Side. “It became a status symbol,” explains Flamming, “to have a PRW home, especially in
the rarefied confines of Bel Air and Beverly Hills” (63). Furthermore, Duke Ellington and his
orchestra “lent their names as sponsors to Powell’s endeavors,” claims Von Hardesty, and Joe
86
Louis, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, “toured Powell’s workshop in 1937
and inspected the flying club’s airplane.” Louis’s name was even employed in a promotional
campaign – “Joke’s Good Luck Key Chain.” Finally, Powell mobilized active support on the
part of black clergy as well.
Overall, then, Powell took part in and contributed to the New Negro Renaissance
taking place in California and Los Angeles. Through his letters to the editor, incessant
promotional work, and publishing of his own monthly newsletter, Powell participated in the
era’s print and popular culture. His play featured and his air shows attracted prominent black
actors and figures of the era. Thinking of the general public, too, Powell utilized drama in
order to pinpoint actual, real-life issues plaguing black America, as well as to promote black
aviation and its goodwill message as a means of escaping unemployment. Through art, and
perhaps inspired by the flourishing of black art and music around him, Powell formulated and
expressed on stage aviation’s contribution towards alleviating the dire economic situation of
the African American community and its technically-skilled members.
Having finished work on the play and securing a copyright on it in November 1933,
Powell devoted his time to expanding his educational activities beyond the Bessie Coleman
Aero Club. In February 1934, the Courier announced that under the National Recovery
Administration and the Emergency Education program, a number of African American
teachers “have been employed to teach in district high and junior high schools” in Los
Angeles. Among them, William Powell opened “aviation classes” at the Jefferson High
School (“NRA Gives Teachers Break”). The Defender then informed in April that 86 students
of aviation, “comprising two classes in theory of flight and aerodynamics” were preparing for
their final examinations in evening classes led by Powell. Those who would pass, explained
the paper, would advance to a class on aerial navigation. Also, “another beginners class will
be conducted along with the two advanced classes” and the Defender was urging those who
87
were interested to apply soon (“California News”). In July, Powell was asked to expand his
classes and the Board of Education at Jefferson High was even considering incorporating
aviation classes into its traditional curriculum (“Lieut. Powell to Teach L.A. School Children
to Fly”). Powell was thus allowed to continue teaching aviation classes to both black and
white students.
The highlight of Powell’s exposure of black aviation in the black press came in late
1934, upon the release of his thinly-veiled autobiography, Black Wings. The Courier
reviewed the book in October, calling it “a source of inspiration to every American, young or
old, black or white.” The review underscored Powell’s argument that “there is a better future
for the Negro as a whole in aviation than in any other industry” (“Book Review”). The
Defender highlighted the same theme across three of its November issues when it reprinted a
large section of Chapter 13, the final chapter of Black Wings, subtitling it “Race Neglects Its
Opportunities in Aviation: Engineer Tells Why We Should Become Air-Minded.” In essence,
the chapter was aviation’s goodwill message distilled. Powell listed all the existing and
potential utilizations of airplanes and reminded his readers that aviation was open to all races
and exhorted them to “get into aviation now while we have a chance to have black airplane
designers, black airplane distributors, owners of black air transport lines, and have thousands
of black boys and black girls profitably employed in a great paying industry.” The Defender
devoted three separate issues of its feature page to Black Wings, including an appendix with a
list of licensed black aviators from the United States Department of Commerce. In the NYAN,
H.L. Mencken, under whose editorship the American Mercury published numerous Harlem
Renaissance authors, reviewed Powell’s text positively and summarized its main tenets
(“About Books: Wings of Ethiopia”).
Most importantly, George S. Schuyler, Mencken’s protégé and an influential reviewer
of a number of Harlem Renaissance texts, weighed in with his review of Black Wings and
88
opinions on William J. Powell. In his text, Schuyler stated that the autobiography “kept me
awake long past my time of retiring;” Schuyler felt “actually stirred” by it. He called the book
“the whole story of the Negro (American brand) in aviation from Bessie Coleman to
Anderson and Forsythe.” In praising Powell and other pioneer aviators, Schuyler asserted that
they “deserve to rank alongside Sojourner Truth and Aunt Harriet Tubman.” He also
reiterated the opinion he had voiced in several of his previous columns and which he shared
with Powell: that there were opportunities for the African Americans in aviation and that they
should seize them. Finally, the columnist pointed out that “it is clearly indicated that every
one [black pioneer flyer] from the author down was actuated as much by racial as personal
motives. They wanted to put THE NEGRO in aviation rather than NEGROES in aviation”
(“Views and Reviews”). As before, Schuyler thus depicted Powell and his colleagues as
crusaders and martyrs for the good of the race, who make the best out of – revalue –
segregated aviation. Along with Powell’s text, Schuyler’s review, interspersed with personal
commentary, provides the perfect example of a coherently expressed goodwill message of
aviation. It also indicates Schuyler’s genuine interest in the field and in the race’s role New
Negro models and leaders such as Powell. As the research conducted for this project reveals,
Schuyler may have even received an inscribed copy of the text from Powell himself (see
Figure 1).
Black Wings is a thinly veiled autobiography, a racial uplift text, and a model example
of how black aviators and journalists employed the strategies of transvaluation and
recontextualization in their campaign. The text tells the story of Bill Brown: from his first
glimpse of aviation in Paris at the Bourget Field, which Lindbergh had used for his historic
non-stop flight in 1927, through his rejection at several Illinois aviation schools due to Jim
Crow, to his journey to California where Bill is finally accepted at a school and begins to
learn to fly. The text provides racially uplifting inspiration to young African Americans and a
89
path to emulate as Bill, segregation notwithstanding, becomes a well-trained aviator who
accepts segregation as a fact of life only to prove that African Americans can learn to fly
without much white institutional support.
After he graduates, Bill opens a school for black flyers where he succeeds in raising an
entire generation of black pilots – thus reversing the values attached to segregation as a barrier
to the development of aviation among African Americans. His call, quoted above, for African
Americans to utilize black aviation as business opportunity and a means of segregated yet
independent transportation across the country serves as a recontextualization of the alleged
deficiency of black America to succeed in operating and employing to its benefit the science
and technology of the day and of the future. To further elaborate on his educational and
inspirational efforts, Powell even devotes the longest, 21-page chapter in the middle of the
text to in-depth, manual-like descriptions of how one operates a plane. At the end of the
autobiography, Powell expresses his wish – against segregation, but also to prove his point
that no restrictions may stop the development of black aviation – to “fill the air with ‘Black
Wings’” (147). In this way, Powell provides inspiration for George S. Schuyler’s novellas,
published a few years later, in which African Americans, with the help of other peoples of
color, build an all-black air force and a black empire of the air.
Even though Powell’s leadership in the black press’s aviation campaign gradually
passed to John C. Robinson’s activities and his mission in Ethiopia – discussed in detail in
Chapter 3.7 – the Californian aviator still regularly promoted his goodwill message of
aviation in the black press in the second half of the 1930s. Powell remained closely connected
with the Courier. Having written a play, an autobiography, and numerous letters to the paper,
he did not change his modus operandi in 1936. In January, he commended the Pittsburgh
weekly on its ongoing aviation campaign and the coverage of his classes in Los Angeles
during 1934.
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Figure 1 Special Collections & University Archives, University of California, Riverside
91
He informed that he had 125 students enrolled at that moment, many of whom had applied in
reaction to the articles in the Courier (“Lauds Courier for Part in Boosting Aviation to Race”).
In July, he again thanked the paper on behalf of his organization, the Craftsmen of Black
Wings, “for its wonderful support in publicizing the need of the Negroes’ entry into the
aviation industry [and for] letting Negroes know that thousands of jobs await them if they
only get into the aviation industry now” (“California Aviators Make Rapid Progress”).
Powell was increasingly depicted in black newspapers as the best educator of
prospective aviation students and his long-term position as black aviation education’s leading
figure was acknowledged even among Harlem Renaissance figures. In November 1935, Dr.
Henry Binga Dismond declared in “Negroes, Despite Handicaps, Make Rapid Progress in
Various Fields of Aviation” written for the NYAN that even though Bessie Coleman “first
drew public acclaim […] the real pioneer in Negro aeronautics is Capt. William J. Powell
who gave up his well-established and lucrative business of chain gas stations and garages to
venture into aviation.” His classes are so popular around Los Angeles, noted the author, that
both black and white students are on a “large waiting list.” Binga was a well-known figure
during the Harlem Renaissance: his wife wrote the aforementioned social column for the
NYAN and he “was one of the first African-American physicians to be permitted to join the
outpatient department at Harlem Hospital” where he later “rose to the long-term position of
Chief of Physical Therapy” (Oestreich 498-9).
Like Powell, Binga was a WW1 veteran, having served in France with the former
Eighth Illinois Regiment of the National Guard – a unit which Bessie Coleman repeatedly
celebrated during her Chicago performances. In 1943, Binga even published a collection of
poems titled We Who Die and Other Poems, illustrated by Elmer Simms Campbell, the
illustrator for Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s Popo and Fifina (1932), Sterling
Brown’s Southern Road (1932), and the author of the oft-reprinted “Night-Club Map of
92
Harlem” (1932) (Wintz and Finkelman 210). Given Powell’s popularity in Los Angeles,
Harlem, as well as his reception and influence in the black press, Binga’s praise in his
historical overview of black aviation history indicates that Powell was a well-regarded figure
on both coasts and featured in and contributed to the nationwide phenomenon known as the
Harlem Renaissance.
Indeed, Powell’s reputation in the mid-1930s was impeccable. In May 1936, black
newspapers recontextualized the alleged lack of black flyers in the United States, informed
about a study by the Division of Negro Affairs, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce,
which indicated that there were 55 licensed black pilots in the United States. Only two of
which, however, were exclusively employed in aviation – Powell teaching aeronautics in
California and John C. Robinson fighting in Ethiopia (“55 Hold U.S. Air Licenses,” “Number
55 of Race as Holding Pilot Licenses from U.S.”). Since Robinson’s career was being closely
monitored mainly in the Defender, the Courier devoted much space in 1936 to covering
Powell’s school and aviation group. It provided a detailed biography of Powell and his
school’s graduation statistics in “Aviation Boom Sweeps West,” highlighting the progress that
black aviation was making in California under Powell’s tutelage. The paper later published a
photograph of students at work in one of Powell’s classes and the Defender, too, carried a
photo collage celebrating Powell’s success (“Californians Take Lead in Aviation,”
“Craftsmen of Black Wings at Work”). The photo, inscribed by Powell, served as a
demonstration of the technical and mechanical expertise that successful aviators had to learn
to possess. Overall, then, the black press was recontextualizing, owing to Powell’s successes
and achievements, the widespread notion, advocated, for example, by Kenneth Brown
Collings’s text “America Will Never Fly” for the American Mercury in July 1936, that
African Americans lacked an innate ability to fly airplanes.
93
Most importantly, Powell introduced a new incentive into the aviation campaign; one
that the black press had on several previous occasions called for – an aviation scholarship. In
November 1935, the Courier informed that Powell had taken members of the Alpha Delta
chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity for an air trip over Los Angeles. Upon landing, the
chapter’s leader opined that “the Negro should get into aviation now while there is a chance to
get in on the ground floor,” thus echoing one of the key phrases in Powell’s Black Wings
(“Alphas in Air”). Powell announced in September that his Craftsmen of Black Wings
organization had completed plans to “give 100 free scholarships in aviation to Negro
students,” including “six months of practical experience in building of planes, 50 hours of
flying and ground courses in aerodynamics etc.” Powell hoped to create “One million jobs for
Negroes in aviation” (“100 Scholarships to Be Given Race Aviation Students”). In January
1938, he even secured the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity’s promise to “give him moral and
financial support and offer scholarships in his school for worthy Negro boys” (“Alphas to
Temper Initiations,” “Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Expands Progressive Program”). Powell
thus advanced the aviation campaign and his wish to fill the skies with black pilots another
step further.
Despite his continuous success and diligence, however, frustration was still
perceptible in Powell’s writing. Although a reader sent a letter to the Courier in 1936,
commending Powell and stating that his organization “should receive the serious attention and
earnest support of all black Americans, whether they are now airminded or not [because] the
time and day for Negroes to be skeptical towards scientific progress has gone forever,”
Powell did not feel satisfied. As in the early years of his aviation campaign, he criticized in a
November 1936 letter the lack of support on the part of the African American community.
Borrowing a statement from his autobiography, Powell suggested that black leaders should
inform the community that “NEGROES WILL NEVER RIDE BELOW THE MASON AND
94
DIXON LINE AS FREE MEN AND WOMEN UNTIL THEY RIDE IN AIRPLANES,
OWNED AND OPERATED BY NEGROES.” Specifically, Powell targeted W.E.B. DuBois,
declaring that the famous race leader should impress upon his readers that “today THE
SECURITY OF ANY NATION OR RACE LIES IN ITS AVIATION INDUSTRY”
(“Leaders Should Encourage Field of Aviation, Says”). The all-caps lines do not suggest only
Powell’s frustration with a historical problem in making black aviation relevant, but also
points to the fact that black aviation pioneers such as Powell, Robinson, and Coleman had had
to promote a field essential to the race’s survival without much help from the race’s leaders.
Not only was aviation being ignored financially, but also politically. Despite its clear
connection to the race’s representation and perception vis-à-vis white America – the issue at
the center of the Harlem Renaissance phenomenon – black aviators were ignored by the
movement’s leaders.
In 1937, Powell began publishing a monthly magazine called “Craftsmen Aero-News”
for the purpose of keeping “the public informed of the activities of Negroes in aviation” (“The
Social Institute”). According to Von Hardesty, “no issue [of the magazine] spared black
leaders who […] bore great responsibility for black unemployment during the Great
Depression era. Each issue, in a sort of preamble, printed a brief statement by Powell accusing
black leaders of continually begging the white people for jobs” (xxii). Powell’s criticism was
noticed by Schuyler. At the time of writing his first air-minded novella, The Black
Internationale, Story of Black Genius Against the World, the Courier columnist, who had
gradually become the most vocal advocate for aviation in the black press, devoted an entire
column in January 1937 to Powell, his school, and its new magazine; the column is even
further analyzed alongside Schuyler’s novellas in Chapter 4. Schuyler noted the “immortal
Bessie Coleman” and the scores of licensed aviators, as well as the goodwill flights across the
country and abroad, and remarked that “considering the opposition to Negroes entering
95
aviation or getting any instruction in it at all, this is little short of miraculous.” The columnist
then singled out Powell, whose students had built “the first Department of Commerce licensed
airplane” by African Americans, in saying that this was a new field which African Americans
had created for themselves. The text added details about Powell’s school, its new equipment
as well as the opportunities that awaited African Americans in the field. In an April column,
Schuyler further remarked that young black men, according to a New York engineer, were
reluctant to enter aviation education and urged them to start reading Powell’s magazine and/or
apply for his school so that black America could reach 100 “trained Negro aviators and
mechanics [who] might get a unit in the Army Air Corps or secure work in airplane factories”
(“Views and Reviews,” “Views and Reviews”). As with his novellas – discussed later in this
dissertation – Schuyler was envisioning and supporting activities which could lead to the
inclusion of black aviators as fighters into the United States Air Corps, increasingly one of the
most modern air forces in the world.
Schuyler’s two columns are notable for several reasons. He not only continued
spreading Powell’s goodwill message of aviation, but also increasingly began to tie
demonstration of prowess in the technical and mechanical aspect of aviation to African
Americans’ potential acceptance in the US military. In this way, Schuyler’s texts can be
considered a crucial element in the Courier’s ongoing campaign to secure a place for black
soldiers in the country’s army as well as a stepping stone for the intensified campaign that the
paper launched in 1938. In highlighting Powell’s new equipment, instruction skills, and his
students’ ability to construct a government-approved airplane from ground up, Schuyler
pointed at African Americans’ technical and mechanical skills – lack of which had been used
by the government for decades as an excuse for barring black applicants from the military air
service (Broadnax 23) – that thrived despite segregation and lack of institutional support.
Schuyler again emphasized the racial technological gap, which Powell had sought to bridge.
96
Finally – before the campaign for the inclusion of black pilots in the CPTP consumed
the black press – Powell made headlines in August 1937 with one more technological
advancement. A Cuban official contacted Powell “in regards to the establishment of air lines
between the U.S. and Cuba, and furnishing airplane pilots for these lines, because the Cubans
desire to make all conveniences to entertain and cater to the colored tourists who have never
had the opportunity of visiting” Cuba. Furthermore, the paper noted that there were “two and
a half million Negroes in Cuba and that they are interested in aviation progress among
Negroes.” Powell was interested in Cuba’s offer and remarked for the paper that he hoped to
start an air service in the US solely for black passengers, because “Negroes will never ride as
free men and women below the Mason and Dixon line until they ride in airplanes owned and
operated by Negroes;” echoing his own words from the Black Wings and numerous letters to
the Courier (“Craftsmen of Black Wings Designing New Planes”). In the end, Powell did not
live to see his plans materialize – he died in 1942 at a veteran hospital in Wyoming due to
complications from his WW1 injuries. After more than a decade of vigorously campaigning
for black aviation and teaching an entire generation of black pilots and mechanics, Powell did
manage to see, however, the opening of the Tuskegee Airmen program in 1941.
3.2 Educating Harlem: Black Aviation in New York and the South
Indeed, black aviation was taking off also outside of Powell’s Los Angeles base during the
early 1930s. For example, an aviation school was being opened in San Diego (“San Diego to
Get Aviation School”) and at least four new aviators appeared in the black press: Billy
Donaldson, who claimed Bessie Coleman as her inspiration (“Aviatrix?”), Thomas Perry
Jones from Kansas City with more 120 hours of solo flying to his credit (“Kansas City Boy in
Solo Flight”),28
Thomas R. Ross (“Breaks Record”), and Rollins Ross, a former student at
MIT on a Guggenheim Fellowship, who earned a commercial pilot license in September 1930
28
The aviator, the great grandson of Frederick Douglass, however, died in an airplane accident in
January 1932 (“Aviator Dies in Crash,” “Daring Kansas City Aviator”).
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(“Gets Pilot’s License”). However, it was mainly New York City and Chicago that were
becoming the major black aviation hubs at this time. This section discusses aviation education
efforts in New York City and their spread to the South as part of the New York Amsterdam
News’s aviation education campaign.
Harlem had been air-minded during the 1920s ever since Garvey’s Negro World
discussed aviation as a matter of survival and Hubert Julian’s numerous proposed
transcontinental and pan-African flights filled the pages of various black newspapers. But
other aviation figures appeared in Harlem and the black press as well. In October 1929, for
example, Harlemites were invited to attend a fundraiser at the Rockland Palace – an event hall
which held numerous political rallies, sporting events, and concerts during the Harlem
Renaissance – for Granville Martin, born in Kingston, Jamaica, who was attempting to build a
monoplane. The British Pro-Consul was in attendance, and the attorney overseeing the
fundraiser was Vernon C. Riddick, a well-known Harlem political figure (“Attempt to Raise
Funds for Young Aviator”).
As editorials in the black press urged its readers to take up aviation and make use of
the economic opportunities offered in the field, Marie Daughtry and Charles E. James showed
to Harlem how aviation education could land someone a job. In April 1930, the American
Aviation School opened and began to advertise in the black press its branch in Harlem, where
it was located in the center of Harlem Renaissance happenings, mere blocks from the
Abyssinian Baptist Church, the UNIA headquarters, the Urban League offices, and the
apartments of James Weldon Johnson or Charles S. Johnson. The school promised “no
discrimination in its classes” and affordable rates (“The American Aviation School”) and
stated that its objective was to provide for black Americans an opportunity to “enter aviation
as well as any other race [as] they have had no chance to undertake aviation.” The school also
planned “for the creation of a factory and of airports where graduates of the institution will be
98
employed” (“Aviation School’s Branch Instituted,” “Inaugurate School”). The branch’s
director was Mr. William Daughtry, who reportedly “saw flying service in the Army” and
whose wife was “the only race woman in the world now flying” (“Want Race Students to
Learn Flying,” “The American Aviation School”). Daughtry’s military experience must have
been an alluring piece of information, tying aviation education to potential involvement in the
US aviation service, because, as the Courier covered the gala opening of the Harlem branch
in mid-May, it reported that 40 students had enrolled in classes (“Aviation School Opens”).
The newspaper also ran an advertisement for the school in its sports section (“Negro Aviation
School”), while the NYAN advertised the school in almost every issue during the year 1930.
As in the case of William J. Powell, the Daughtrys organized promotional aviation
events to raise awareness among the Harlem populace. Mrs. Daughtry charmed Harlemites in
May with a parachute jump – having reportedly performed many times around the country –
and announced that the school was planning to buy its own field as white air fields did not let
black students practice at them (“Woman Dives 2,000 Feet From Plane”). In July, she jumped
from 3,000 feet – setting a new record for a delayed drop – at an event sponsored by the West
African Industrial and Commercial Bank, Ltd., headed by Winfred Tete Ansa, a Gold Coast
businessman and a “pivotal figure in establishing pan-African businesses” during the Harlem
Renaissance era (Howison 43, “Makes 3,000-Foot Leap with Chute”).29
Since aviation
education was tied in the aviation campaign with economic opportunities and employment,
Daughtry also attended and spoke at a meeting held by the Harlem Tenants’ League
(“Speakers Offer Solutions for Unemployment and Housing Ills”). In July, however, the
Daughtrys quit the aviation school (“Parachute Jumper Quits Uptown Aviation School”).30
29
In the 1920s, for example, Ansa proposed a “great co-operative company to provide integrated
credit and marketing facilities for West African produce farmers, with America as their market”
(Howison 43).
30
The school’s advertisements no longer appeared in black newspapers after the summer of 1930.
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Still, Mary Daughtry kept promoting aviation and helped introduce new aviators to
Harlem and other black communities. In September 1930, she performed another parachute
jump in Detroit from a plane piloted by Charles E. James. As in Bessie Coleman’s case in the
early 1920s, Daughtry and James’s performances during the summer were caught on film in
1930 by Bilmore Studio, which showed the footage around the country, “providing a program
of educational value and of racial interest” (“History-Making is Seen in Newsreel”). In
October 1931, Daughtry took part in an air circus, “with perhaps the largest number of Negro
aviators assembled at any time in history,” attended by 2,000 Harlemites. Charles E. James
flew a NYAN-owned plane to the event. Leon Paris, a Haitian aviator whose historic flight in
1932 is discussed in Chapter 3.6.2, piloted the plane from which Daughtry and later
Alexander Nelson, James’s future partner, parachuted. John W. Greene, Boston-based black
aviation pioneer, aforementioned Rollins Ross, Edison McVey, Garvey’s first black pilot
from the early 1920s, and Marie Dickerson, one of Powell’s pioneering student pilots, all
participated in the event as well (“2,000 View Circus Staged at Airport”). The legendary
Harlem Hellfighters’ famous band played during and added a military tone to the event.
Despite the Great Depression, black aviation in New York City was alive and well.
Charles E. James would turn out to be a new rising star in the aviation campaign. In
the summer of 1930, he became the official pilot for the New York Amsterdam News
(“Aviatrix Thrills Elks”), which had bought a plane with the objective of opening “the door of
aviation to [black] people” (“Amsterdam News Purchases Plane”). The 24-year old pilot had
made headlines in the black press back in May, when he flew his newly-bought “Miss
Harlem” plane. According to a NYAN article, “a score or more Harlemites made short flights”
during the afternoon (“Plane Given Name of Miss Harlem”), inspired by James’s skills. The
plane was christened by Bessye J. Bearden, mother of Romare Bearden, a cartoonist for
various black newspapers between 1935 and 1937 and later a renowned collagist. Bearden
100
herself was an influential figure during the Harlem Renaissance: a civic activist with the
Urban League and a NYC correspondent for the Defender, whose apartment functioned as a
meeting place for intellectuals and artists (McKenzie). According to Timkins, Bearden was a
“a political force in Harlem […] someone you came to when you wanted to cut through red
tape and get action (227). James presented himself as another crusading aviator at the May
event. When asked by Bearden why he wanted to be a pilot, he answered that he wanted “to
teach my people to fly” (“Aviator James Has Sunday Air Circus”). The NYAN – participating
in the aviation campaign – backed his educational efforts as did other Harlem Renaissance
figures.
James’s goals were aligned with that of the aviation campaign and its leader, William
J. Powell. In September 1931, along with publishing three editorials on segregation in the
military, the Courier and the NYAN reported that “as there are no units in the Air Corps
composed of colored men, no provision has been made for their enlistment or training at the
present time,” directly quoting from a letter from the War Department. Units in the army
composed of soldiers of color were being dismantled, too, and their members were being
“distributed” into other units (“War Department Bars Negroes from Air Corps,”
“Discrimination in Air Corps Bared”). This was a setback to the aviation campaign’s ultimate
objective, but also another reason for black newspapers’ continuous employment of
transvaluation as a strategy to promote black aviation, a segregated endeavor. Next to the
articles and their large headlines, however, the two papers carried a photograph of James,
announcing that he had become “the second Negro to qualify for a pilot’s license.” The
Courier, the NYAN, and the Defender also informed that the aviator was planning an air tour
of “the Negro camps, colleges, and fairs in the South” to “encourage the flying art among
young college students” (“Second to Get Pilot’s License,” “To Make Air Tour,” “Airman
Gets His Wings”).
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Similarly to Powell’s proposed goodwill tour, James’s “educational tour” captured the
black press’ attention. Articles about the aviator’s plans filled the papers. James wanted to
tour the South and give an exhibition in Knoxville, Tn., Atlanta, Ga. Birmingham, Al.,
Jacksonville, Fl., and New Orleans, La. (“Negro Aviator to Fly over Atlanta,” “Florida
Aviator to Tour Southland,” “Harlemites Take Hop on Air Tour of Dixie,” “James Goes to
Atlanta Today to Give Air Show,” “). He fit the profile of an aviation crusader who wanted to
inform, educate, and was not interested in self-promotion and fame. He seemed to be ideal for
what the black press was advertising and promoting in its campaign as his show in Atlanta in
1931 was designed to raise funds for the jobless, much like William J. Powell’s air circus. To
add the advertised educational tone to James’s exhibition, the flight was being sponsored by
Mrs. John Hope, who was also taken for a short plane ride (“James Goes to Atlanta Today to
Give Air Show”). Her husband helped found the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, was active
in the National Urban League, and the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools.
Hope received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1936 and became Atlanta University’s first
African American president (Yenser 218). Once again, influential race leaders of the era were
supporting James’s educational and crusading aviation activities.
Even George S. Schuyler noticed and admired James’s participation in the aviation
campaign. In 1930, the columnist had observed that “this is the age of aeronautics,” arguing
that “there are probably any number of wealthy men now beginning to buy private planes who
would not be averse to employing Negro aviators.” He believed that “any Negro who knows
how to condition and repair an airplane motor will not remain long among the unemployed”
(“Views and Reviews”). In espousing technical and mechanical education, employment in the
growing industry, and honest work, Schuyler could not have missed James’s strong presence
in Harlem during the early 1930s. In a column from October 1931, Schuyler mocked Hubert
Julian’s repeated claims that he would fly to India and compared Julian’s posturing with
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James’s recent achievements. He commended James’s efforts to raise money through
lecturing at schools in the South and giving exhibition flights. He criticized Julian for refusing
to “start at the bottom (like Lindbergh) and work slowly to the top” like James. Targeting the
black press’s penchant for yellow journalism, Schuyler ended his column with asserting that
“Julian will make a better newspaper copy and get more notoriety than James, but I’ll wager
the latter goes farther in aviation” (“Views and Reviews”). The columnist thus denounced
yellow journalism and espoused hard work represented by James. Schuyler was becoming a
voice of reason in the aviation coverage still burdened with Julian’s incessant self-promotion.
In 1932, James held some of the most successful flying events in early black aviation
history. In January, the Courier announced that James was back in Harlem from his tour
around the South and that he was planning an aviation show in Atlanta (“Negro Aviator
Returns to Atlanta,” “Plan Big Aviation Carnival in Atlanta”). The show took place on two
consecutive Sundays in January, drawing a crowd as large as 12,000 spectators. As with
James’s previous exhibition in New York with Mary Daughtry, the event had been captured
on film, which was to be screened in movie theaters around the country (“Mrs. John Hope is
Taken for a Ride”). James was thus using print and visual media to send out the goodwill
message of aviation. The Defender later reported that he had even opened an aviation school
in Atlanta, but no other articles – not even in the Atlanta Daily World which informed its
readers about James regularly – corroborate the claim (“Flyer Burns to Death in Plane
Crash”).
The Daily World reported on another exhibition in Macon, Georgia, where James
performed in front of 18,000 spectators (“18,000 See Two Aces of the Air in Flying Show”).
After performing in Augusta, Georgia, and around South Carolina in April 1932, James and
Nelson told the NYAN that their last ten shows had been attended by as many as 100,000
spectators and had been well-received even by the local white press (“Airmen’s Shows Prove
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Features”). In May, James received a new plane with help from William H. Davis, the owner
of the New York Amsterdam News, to perform at exhibitions in Florida (“Aviator James Gets
New Plane”) and in June took the plane to perform in Brunswick, Georgia in front of 2,000
people (“N.Y. Aviators Give Stunt Exhibition”). He was also reported to be planning a
transcontinental flight from NYC to California (“James and Nelson Purchase Biplane”).
James was touring the country, educating the black community in the South about aviation –
in other words, he was fulfilling Schuyler’s prophecy and vision.
James also attempted an international flight, it seems, which would have made him
the first black aviator to have done so. The Atlanta Daily World reported on James’s flight to
Cuba in July 1932, explaining to its readers that James and Nelson were missing, probably
having lost their way. There do not seem to be any further reports on James’s flight to Cuba in
the Atlanta paper or the major papers analyzed here – but the article in the Daily World was
written in Key West, Florida, from where the two flyers had reportedly taken off towards
Cuba. The trip was supposed to have been a “climax” to James’s Southern tour and Havana
had already been preparing a gala reception for the flyers (“Believe Plane of Negro Flyers was
Fixed before Hop for Cuba”). In the end, James decided to fly in Gary, Indiana in August,
mere weeks after his unsuccessful flight to Cuba, which is where his pioneering career came
to a tragic end. In front of a mixed crowd of 2,000, James died in a burning plane after having
fallen from 800 feet (“Aviator Dies in Crash,” “Aviator James Buried”).
The black press’s reaction to James’s death was comparable to the passing of Bessie
Coleman – it was presented as a national tragedy, impacting the entire black America, which
must have known and followed James’ career from the numerous newspaper texts and film
material distributed across the nation. An editorial in the Daily World proclaimed James a
“self-appointed martyr of a cause,” reminded its readers that the late aviator “dreamed of
aviation as a cure for the Negro economic plight,” and explained the myriad of possibilities
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that aviation was offering (“Charles James: Pioneer). The Courier commended James’s skills
which attracted both black and white spectators to his shows and thus represented black
America’s technical capabilities (“Aviator Dies in Crash”). The Defender devoted much space
on its front page to the report on and photographs of James’s fatal accident, calling him the
“soundest of all Race flyers” (“Flyer Burns to Death in Plane Crash”). Finally, the front page
of the NYAN provided a long eulogy for James, his biographical information, and a detailed
description of the accident. According to the text, James, who had reportedly been planning a
transcontinental and a transatlantic flight, sacrificed “his life for the science of flying [and]
ended in tragedy his quest for more knowledge. His name will be written as a trailblazer on
the pages of history.” The voice of Harlem thus mourned the passing of James as that of not
merely another aviator, but an aviation crusader whose expertise had been gained during his
engineering studies at Columbia University, his work at the Ford plant in Detroit, and the
Curtiss airfield in Long Island where he received his license and flew the Miss Harlem plane
(“James, Harlem Aviator, Killed”). The paper was pointing out that Black America lost one of
its best technically-skilled figures willing to crusade for, promote, and represent black
aviation’s progress nationwide.
3.3 Black Aviation Education in Chicago: John C. Robinson, Female
Aviators, and Military Displays
The tragic passing of Charles E. James incidentally brought to the forefront another crucial
figure in the history of black aviation and its coverage in the black press: John C. Robinson,
the representative of black aviation in Chicago, later dubbed the “Father of the Tuskegee
Airmen.” This section of the dissertation traces Robinson’s educational and promotional
activities, including his intention to open an aviation school at the Tuskegee Institute as early
as 1934. The section also discusses the emergence and the rise of talented and influential
women flyers under Robinson’s tutelage, and highlights hitherto overlooked military aspects
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of Robinson’s crusade in Chicago. Robinson appeared in the black press as early as 1930,31
when the Courier carried a report on a youthful aviator from Chicago named Johnnie
Robinson, who ended up in hospital with his arms and legs frozen after flying over Chicago’s
South Side (“Youthful Aviator Makes Flight”). With support from the Defender and its
owner, Robert S. Abbott – Bessie Coleman’s benefactor and mentor – Robinson had flown,
despite the freezing weather, over the Defender’s offices, dropping down flyers advertising
his organization’s fundraising event (Tucker 31-2). Later, between 1935 and 1938, Robinson
became the most visible and inspiring black aviation figure in the black press due to his role
as the head of the Ethiopian Imperial Air Force and subsequent crusading activities. This
section deals primarily with Robinson’s contribution to the educational feature of the aviation
campaign, while Chapter 3.7 addresses his military mission in Ethiopia and Chapter 3.8
highlights his previously unknown mission in flood-stricken Memphis, both of which may
have served as motivation for George S. Schuyler’s aviation-inspired novellas.
On the occasion of James’s death in 1932, the Atlanta Daily World interviewed
Robinson to discuss black aviation and James’s contribution to it. Robinson explained to the
paper that James had been unique in his plans to spread the goodwill message of aviation:
unlike Hubert Julian, James had toiled and rented a plane for many of his exhibitions, paying
back from the exhibitions’ returns. Robinson showed off his technical expertise in the article,
which introduced him as “the Tuskegee graduate who broke the color line at Curtiss Wright
school” in Chicago (“James, Dead Flyer, Had Nerve”). Robinson was, in fact, the only
instructor of color at the Curtis Wright school and had his own group of students of color,
who would later become some of the leading figures in black aviation in the late 1930s.
31
According to Robinson’s student and colleague, Janet Waterford, Robinson’s flight took place in
late 1929.
106
Robinson’s expertise as a pilot, aviation instructor, and a new inspiring pioneer was on
full display in the Defender throughout 1932. In January, the paper carried a photograph of
Robinson and one of his students in front of a plane (“Just Landed”) and an accompanying
article titled “Seamstress Gives up Her Duties to Become Aviatrix,” thus echoing the first
major article on Bessie Coleman in the same paper in 1922. The school in which Robinson
worked as an instructor, the article explained, was the first “school of its grade to open
complete courses as required by the United States government to all persons, regardless of
color.” According to Janet Waterford, Robinson had “canvassed the neighborhoods of the
South Side to urge blacks to get into aviation, whether as airplane mechanics or pilots” in the
early 1930s, but “the citizens of Bronzeville knew the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical School
was reserved for whites only.” Robinson therefore chose to advertise his classes in the
Defender – and in 1931, he ended up succeeding in opening and teaching as a faculty member
the first all-black aviation class at the Chicago branch of “the most prestigious aeronautical
school in the United States.” The class consisted of 35 students, including 6 women
(“Robinson Organizes Brown Eagle Aero Club,” “Robinson Arouses Race Interest in
Aviation”). Robinson’s success and position, the very existence of his all-black class, and the
Defender’s reports thus suggested – and recontextualized the alleged lack of black aviation
leaders – to Chicago’s South Side and other communities of color throughout the country that
not only was there an experienced African American educator working at a previously
segregated institution, but also that the school was open to students of color. It must be also
pointed out that by having become an instructor at a branch of one of the leading aviation
schools in the country, Robinson was following Coleman, Foreman, and James’s vision,
educating black aviation students and spreading the goodwill message of aviation.
The year 1932 also saw the emergence of black aviatrices. William J. Powell, based
on his book and newspaper articles, instructed several female flyers in his group – including
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Marie Dickerson, who featured at the extremely successful air circus for Harlem in October
1931 alongside Daughtry, James, Paris, McVey, and others. Dickerson’s photo was featured
in the Defender in April 1932 when the paper announced that the aviatrix, having been
inspired by Bessie Coleman, had obtained her full license (“Licensed Air Pilot”). The Courier
published an interview with Dickerson in May, in which the pilot explained how aviation had
become her hobby but complained about the high price of flying, especially during the Great
Depression (“Costs of Flying Has Reached High Altitude, Says California Aviatrix”).
Robinson’s group in Chicago also included female students. In fact, the Challenger
Aero Club, Robinson’s independent aviation club and the precursor to the Cornelius Coffey
School of Aeronautics, the only non-college school providing aviation courses within the
CPTP between 1939 and 1941, was established by Janet Harmon Waterford, one of
Robinson’s students in the historic class of 1931-32 at Curtis Wright. Waterford penned an
autobiography, Soaring above Setbacks (1996), along with Marjorie M. Kriz, which serves as
one of the essential sources of black aviation history. Thanks to Waterford’s ownership of a
plane and leadership, Robinson’s group of students had been able to rent a flying field in an
“all-Negro town” of Robbins, Illinois, and train there. This was the first Department of
Commerce-accredited black airfield in the United States (Tucker xiv).32
Waterford was the face of the Challenger Aero Club in its initial stages. The Courier
carried a photograph of Waterford with the headline “Queen of the Air,” signifying on a title
used by the Defender in 1921 upon the emergence of Bessie Coleman as black America’s first
female aviator; and explaining that the aviatrix had purchased a three-passenger airplane,
which was being used by the Challenger club. In June 1932, Waterford gave a speech at
Bessie Coleman’s grave in Chicago, while Robinson dropped a bouquet of roses from
32
Previously, Robinson had established the Aero Study Club, later called the Brown Eagle Aero
Club in 1927 (Tucker 31).
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Waterford’s plane (“Future Aces at Grave of Bess Coleman”). The group, led by an aviation
educator and a woman pilot, was thus making a name for itself by honoring Coleman’s legacy
of female leadership in black aviation. Later in the summer, the Defender featured a
photograph of Waterford and Dorothy Darby, another one of Robinson’s students, and
announced that the two were preparing to give an exhibition flight in Cleveland (“Air
Exhibition Planned”). Darby later injured herself during a parachute jump in October (“Girl
Flyer is Injured as She Leaps from Plane,” “Aviatrix Hurt”).33
In September, Waterford and
Robinson flew to Cleveland to show off in front of Oscar DePriest, who had already been
initiated into aviation by Powell’s group in California the year prior (“Trio Fly to Cleveland
to Attend Air Races”). In December, the organization held its second annual bridge and dance
party for aviation students of all races, having promoted it heavily among the South Side
inhabitants (“Beautiful Dancing Party of Challenger Aero Club,” Tucker 42). New aviation
leaders were emerging in Chicago, spreading the goodwill of aviation through traditional
newspaper channels, but also through community efforts, emulating Powell’s campaign.
It was not a coincidence that black aviation was flourishing in Chicago in the 1930s.
As Darlene Clark Hine explains, “all who contributed to the literary, cinematic, intellectual,
and dance and music performance arts community in Chicago were at once captive and yet
purveyors of Great Migration fever. The shifting terrain of black bodies fostered new urban
geographies and aspirations” in the form of assertive and confident New Negroes, “while
molding self-affirming agency (or resistance) to white racial and political domination” (xvivii).
Chicago’s pioneering aviators were products of the Great Migration: Robinson had come
from Mississippi, Waterford from Georgia, Willa Brown from Kentucky, and Cornelius
Coffey from Arkansas. Their objective was to represent and make a name for African
Americans in an utterly modern, highly-skilled field and to contribute to the general
33
Darby recovered in 1933, when she planned a series of parachute jumps (“Ready to Fly Again”)
and eventually performed in Hillside, Illinois in September (“Plenty of Thrills Here”).
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advancement of black America. Robinson and company shared this objective with other
Black Chicago Renaissance figures in that they, too, “led the way in forcefully representing
the humanity, work, and political agency of black citizens who moved from farms to factories
and across regions better to seize greater freedom and equality of opportunity” (xvii). Still,
black aviators blazed a trail not only for black migrants from the South, but also for all
African Americans aspiring to the New Negro mentality and demeanor. Their struggle was
political, artistic, representative, and aspirational.
Indeed, black aviation was flourishing outside of Chicago as well. Along with
reports on Robinson and his student aviatrices making headway during 1932, the Courier and
the Defender did not fail to inform their readers about other news in aviation education
outside of Los Angeles and the Windy City. They reported ceremoniously on plans for the
establishment of one of the “best and largest [aviation] schools of its kind in the world” near
Washington, which would be equipped with a large library of aviation texts, dormitories, and
would be able to teach and house up to 500 students. Most importantly, the school would have
its own employment department so that, upon completing their degree, students would “find a
position […] in aviation” (“Work Started on Big Aviation School in East”). The establishment
of such an aviation institute would have been a crucial step in the advancement of black
aviation, but the newspaper never reported on the school again. However, the Courier did
inform on the inconspicuous Alfred Anderson, “the only authorized Negro transport pilot in
the country,” who was teaching aviation to students of color in Atlantic City. Anderson had
passed the transport pilot’s license test in February 1932 (“Philly’s First Transport Pilot,”
“Teaches Air-Minded”). He would later carry out historic transcontinental and international
flights and instruct the Tuskegee Airmen.
Despite a widely reported gruesome airplane accident of a black student pilot and his
wife on their solo flight in Detroit (“Airman and Wife Die in Crash,” “Young Aviator, Pretty
110
Wife Dead in Plane Crash”), black America was clearly becoming increasingly interested in
aviation education. In Washington, D.C., for example, the “first Negro school of aviation”
was established in early January 1933 – the program involved students between 12 and 21 and
was carried out in association with the Dunbar High School, the city’s leading academic
school for students of color. The high school had graduated such figures as Sterling Brown or
Benjamin O. Davis, and its faculty had included the likes of Anna Julia Cooper and Carter G.
Woodson. In 1933, the school also began operating its own airport in Forestville, Maryland –
only the second airport in the nation to be fully operated by African Americans (“Aviators
School Opens,” “To Open Airport Near Washington,” “Dunbar Stars Class in Aviation”).
Jesse McCoy Hanson, the school’s organizer, instructed some of those who would later join
the ranks of the Tuskegee Airmen (“Retired Mortician Buried in District”). In Indianapolis,
the Capitol Airport had announced that “its airlanes of opportunity had been opened to all airminded
persons, regardless of race or color” (“Business Men Inspect Modern Airports”) – a
local group of African American businessmen and professionals inspected the airport soon
after the announcement, prompting the Courier to claim in its headline that this is “Another
Evidence of the Race’s Soaring Interest in Aviation.” And, as was usual in the aviation
campaign in the black press, another outstanding aviation student emerged – Austin Mount in
Erie, Pennsylvania. (“Flyer”).
Black aviation was flourishing – based on the content of the newspaper articles in the
black press – at an unprecedented rate between 1932 and 1935. This trend may be surprising,
given the economic conditions of African Americans during the height of the Great
Depression. As Raymond Wolters explains in Negroes and the Great Depression, in March
1933, “the economic life of the nation was at a standstill. Agricultural prices were less than
half what they had been four years earlier, industrial production had declined by more than
half, and more than twelve million workers were unemployed” (ix). In late 1933, the Federal
111
Emergency Relief Administration reported that 26.7% of African American citizens in cities –
compared to 9.6% of whites – were on relief, and the Urban League informed that in some
cities the conditions were much worse (91). One of the reasons for high black unemployment
was the fact that they were employed as marginal, unskilled workers and thus when
depression hit or new innovations came, these workers were laid off first; many complained
that they were “last hired, first fired” (Wolters 92, Greenberg 27). Moreover, as Cheryl Lynn
Greenberg points out, “there were no longer any purely black occupations [as] there were no
jobs white workers refused to do.” African Americans thus could not rely on access to even
the worst menial jobs (29). The black middle class did not fare very well either. Although
white-collar job opportunities did open in the government sector, black businesses lost the
“hard-won gains from the past twenty years” when the Great Migration had brought about a
rise in the number of business opportunities and clientele. The number of African Americans
entering professional ranks was also stagnant (Greenberg 29-32).
Despite this economic climate, however, black aviation not only survived, but began
to thrive, because aviation clubs attracted professions which were in demand even during the
Depression. As Scott and Womack observe, the Chicago aero clubs founded by Robinson
were joined by doctors, dentists, nurses, lawyers, and educators; and some student aviators
were employed by the Works Progress Administration (61). Many of the aviation pioneers in
the early 1930s also worked as car mechanics and were employed by or owned businesses
predicated on manual, technically-skilled labor. The aviation campaign’s message of
economic opportunities in aviation was thus clearly on point: mechanical and technical
education evidently led to sustainable work no matter the economic climate, and black
aviation represented a visible example of this. More importantly, while, as Huggins explains,
“all Harlem – the entertainer, the artist, and the writer – was in some way, at one time or
another, obliged to the white patron,” the black aviators’ artistry, technical as well as
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commercial ingenuity, and their cultural production flourished exactly when the Harlem
Renaissance is often said to have fizzled out as the Depression hit and white patronage
disappeared. Indeed, black aviation’s ascendancy during 1932-35 indicates that Powell,
Robinson, James, and others kept inventing and finding new ways of representing the race in
a positive light, excelling, despite obstacles, in a field meant, according to Lindbergh and
others, only for the most civilized of peoples.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Robinson, Albert E. Forsythe – one of the most
prominent black aviators during the early 1930s, discussed in Chapter 3.6.4 – and Doris
Murphy, one of Robinson’s female students, had all attended the Tuskegee Institute, where
vocational and industrial training were the primary focus of education. Also, William J.
Powell had fought in the trenches of WW1 and later graduated with a degree in electrical
engineering from the University of Illinois; he, too, preached self-help as he argued that
integration “would come with black economic power” (Hardesty xxii). However, what
distinguishes aviation from being merely another technical field in which African Americans
could have prospered as mechanics and maintenance workers upon receiving their training –
espousing the self-help doctrine of Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee’s founder and main
ideologue – was the fact that black pioneer aviators wanted to fly, not merely repair.
More importantly, they elevated black aviation into a social force in the fight for
economic and civil rights. Powell, writes Hardesty, assumed “the role of civil rights advocate”
in his magazine, appealing to his audience, for example, to “get together. Your future depends
upon your own education, production, and employment of your own sons and daughters”
(xxii). Robinson’s lobbying for the Curtiss-Wright school to open its doors to black students
and his and his students’ subsequent educational successes (in)directly led to the
establishment and participation in the CPTP, a historic civil rights achievement. The efforts to
transform a campaign for access to the United States’ progress in aviation into a civil right
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campaign – given aviation’s essential economic and military role in the era of increasing
modernization – may have been another factor why aviation and its black representatives
persevered despite the harsh economic conditions of the early 1930s. Representation and
survival were their driving force.
In Chicago, by 1933, John C. Robinson was formulating his own strategy of
trailblazing black aviation: through a military organization and an aviation school at
Tuskegee. As Tucker points out, “more than anyone else, Robinson had played a key role in
making Chicago an influential center of black aviation that not only rivaled, but also
surpassed Los Angeles” (60) and William J. Powell’s leadership. In May 1933, Robinson’s
Challenger Aero Club lost its airport in Robbins and its airplanes due to a storm (“Tornado
Plays Prank with Airplane”). The aero club moved to the Harlem Airport on Harlem Avenue
where it remained for the next few years as the Defender noted in its aptly titled article “The
Other Harlem.” In July, Robinson scared baseball players in Douglas Park when his plane
stalled and he had to perform an emergency landing (“Stalled Plane Landed Safely in Chi
Park”). Despite these unfortunate events, however,1933 was a successful one for the aviator
and his group’s educational efforts.
To celebrate Chicago’s centennial, the city held “A Century of Progress International
Exposition” from 1933 to 1934. As aviation featured heavily during the exposition, the event
was visited by Italy’s Minister of the Air Force, Italo Balbo. The future Governor-General of
Libya and Mussolini’s right hand arrived as part of a 24-seaplane fleet, showcasing Italy’s
powerful airforce, the Regia Aeronautica. America fell in love with Balbo – president
Roosevelt presented him with the Distinguished Flying Cross, Chicago named a street after
him, and the Sioux tribe adopted the Italian as “Chief Flying Eagle” (Segre 21-3). Meanwhile,
although neither monographs on the exposition nor articles discussing African Americans’
participation at the event mention Robinson’s group’s presence, in the Transport and Travel
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Building, the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical University held its exhibition, including engines
“assembled by Negro students” attending the institution (“Sepia Air Pilots Thrill World’s Fair
Visitors”).
The Courier used the opportunity of the Chicago World Fair to promote Robinson’s
all-black class of 1931-32 and the Challenger Aero Club, accompanying their detailed report
on Robinson and his students/co-aviators with a large photograph of the major members of
the aero club (“Sepia Air Pilots Thrill World’s Fair Visitors”). Even though Harold Hurd, the
club’s manager, had promised after the destructive storm in May to have the club’s hangars
rebuilt “by the time of the opening of the World’s Fair” (“Storm Destroys Airport”), it is
unclear whether the black aviators actually demonstrated their mechanical skills along with
their flying abilities at the exposition. At any rate, Robinson as an instructor was making a
name for Chicago’s black aviators at the event. Italo Balbo’s and the Regia Aeronautica’s
participation and display of strength at the same exposition as Robinson and his group also
foreshadowed Italy’s powerful air force’s clash with Robinson in Ethiopia in 1935-36.
More importantly, however, the Courier’s coverage indicates that by the time of the
exposition, Robinson had transformed his aero club – which included a number of students
from his university class – into a paramilitary organization. The photograph of Robinson’s
students printed on the occasion of the World Fair featured military ranks in front of the
students’ names: Col. Robinson, Second Lieut. Grover C. Nash, and Lieut. Dale L. White. In
fact, although there are eleven people captured in the photo, only those with military rank are
mentioned by name, while the accompanying article on the fair features several other
Robinson’s students – without ranks. As Scott and Womack explain, Robinson’s group had
“sought membership as an Air Reserve squadron within the Illinois National Guard.” Despite
initial rejection, the group was eventually awarded a state charter as “a Military Order of
Guard, Aviation Squadron,” thereby acquiring similar status to the state militia; though it had
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no administrative connection with the National Guard. Robinson was allowed to label one of
the club’s planes with MOG insignia and members were given quasi-military positions (49).
This would explain the military ranks published in the Courier.
In essence, those belonging to the club served “as members of the first all-black
military aviation unit,” having established a “volunteer para-military aviation organization,”
explains Tucker (61). Whereas Hubert Julian had presented himself in military uniforms ever
since 1922 without advancing black aviation, John C. Robinson and his group actually
founded and formed a technically educated, skilled, and government-sanctioned New Negro
para-military organization predicated upon serving its community in case of emergency. In
fact, Robinson had been connected to military aviation as an instructor even prior to this
event. In his second class at the Curtiss-Wright School, he had taught not only black students,
but also white and Asian ones. Although the Chinese students in his class did crash his own
plane early in their training, they eventually became “the nucleus of the Chinese Royal Air
Force in China’s defense against Japanese aggression” in Manchuria (Scott and Womack 45,
Tucker 44). After more than a decade after the Tulsa riot and Major Simmons’s first black
aviation school in Chicago absent from the pages of the black press, it was Robinson who
managed to considerably narrow the racial gap in aviation by adding a clearly military aspect
to his educational efforts and crusade for black aviation.
Others were attempting to imbue their educational efforts with a military purpose as
well: Irvin E. Wells, William J. Powell’s co-pilot in the Air Derby of 1932, established his
aviation school at the Dycer airport in Los Angeles in early 1934 (“California Women
Become Airminded”). Later in the year, Wells was reported to be preparing to “affiliate
himself with the Pioneer Aero Club of Chula Vista,” a neighborhood in San Diego. The aero
club had been established, per the Defender, to “prepare and train Race students of American
for commercial aviation and government reserve and offensive emergencies” (“California
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News,” emphasis mine). The paper later carried a photograph of Gilbert Williams, the club’s
founder, with his wife, Mary Daughtry – the parachute jumper who had helped organize an
aviation school in Harlem with her former husband, a war veteran (“Found Aviation School”).
In May 1934, Robinson took another crucial step in his educational efforts – he carried
out a goodwill flight from Chicago to Tuskegee in Alabama. The Courier announced
Robinson’s plan in a brief report, stating that “Col. J.C. Robinson, of the local Military Order
of Guards,” along with “Captain C.R. Coffey,” are planning a “mass formation trip to
Tuskegee Institute” on May 18 (“Chicago Aviators Planning Goodwill Flight to Tuskegee”).
The phrasing of the short text suggested a military purpose for the flight, presenting it as a
demonstration of military-level aviation skills and capability. Although Robert Jakeman, as
well as Scott and Womack, date the Challenger Aero Club’s designation as an air squadron
after the Tuskegee trip in May 1934 – in order to fit the narrative that Robinson had been
inspired to fight in Ethiopia by Tuskegee’s refusal and tensions escalating between Italians
and Ethiopians in preparation for war – it is clear that Robinson’s group had by then been
operating as an MOG unit for at least a year and that the black press had taken notice,
beginning to use the designation in its coverage of Robinson.
The objective of Robinson’s goodwill flight was to propose the formation of an
aviation school at Tuskegee, his alma mater. As Scott and Womack explain, Robinson
believed that “they could recreate the Curtiss-Wright experience at a Negro College that
owned huge acres of land and a vocational program featuring automobile engine mechanics
and welding. With Chicago as the hub, they believed a Negro flight service company could
prosper in the Midwest and the South” (46). As early as 1934 then, Robinson was formulating
plans to establish an all-black airline – a vision which he would again attempt to carry out
between 1936 and 1938. Robinson had planned his Tuskegee trip in time with the graduation
of the senior class of 1934, so that his landing would be a homecoming one and would thus
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have a stronger effect on Robert Russa Moton, the Institute’s president (46-7). Although
Robinson crashed his plane en route to Alabama, he eventually managed to land at Tuskegee
on commencement day. As a result, per the Defender, “the establishing of an airport at
Tuskegee and an annual air show is now being considered (“Good Will Flyers Crash,”
“Aviators Drop in on Commencement at Tuskegee Inst.”). In proposing an airport and an air
show in order to promote black aviation education, Robinson was, in fact, utilizing aviation’s
goodwill message in practice. As Tucker observes, “he convinced some of Tuskegee’s top
officials to see the future of black aviation by emphasizing that the institute could benefit
from this vast untapped potential of African American students, the same argument he
successfully employed at Curtiss-Wright” (57).
Robinson probably saw Tuskegee’s reputation for and history of vocational training as
the perfect conduit for spreading aviation’s goodwill message: proper training in aviation
mechanics and other subjects would lead to job opportunities, which were clearly opening in
the ever-growing field. After all, he had received a degree in mechanics from Tuskegee
himself (Tucker 22). Like William J. Powell, who had decided to teach aeronautics at a
government-funded high school in Los Angeles, Robinson sought to expand black aviation
education among more students – first, he had pressured the Curtiss-Wright school in Chicago
to allow him to study, then instruct, and finally open his own class of students of color. Next,
he wanted to teach and showcase black aviation at one of the most renowned black vocational
schools. In this way, Powell and Robinson were hoping not only to provide job opportunities
for skilled black workers and highlight black aviation’s potential to white America, but they
were probably attempting to enlarge the pool of potential black pilots and mechanics in case
of a war, too. Tuskegee had held courses in military science since 1919 and by 1934 it had its
own military department, headed by Col. Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. Indeed, Robinson, a
Tuskegee alum, must have been aware of the potential Tuskegee had in terms of preparing its
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future aviation students for military service. Thus, as Jakeman claims, Robinson’s goodwill
flight “marked the beginning of Tuskegee’s first attempt to enter the air age (1).
Unfortunately for Robinson and his group, Tuskegee did not approve plans for an
aviation school until 1939/40. Still, the Defender carried a photograph of Robinson in his
plane at Tuskegee, being greeted by Captain A.J. Neeley, the Institute’s registrar for whom
Robinson had worked as a student-chauffer during his studies. The paper later reported on
Tuskegee’s General Alumni Association Convention in August 1934, at which Robinson gave
a speech entitled “Opportunities in the Field of Aviation” (“Biddng [sic] the Eagle Good
Luck,” “Tuskegee Alumni Map $10,000 Endowment Plan,” Jakeman 1). Despite his goodwill
efforts, however, Robinson had to return to Chicago without prospects of an aviation school at
Tuskegee materializing. Although he failed in this project, Robinson would break a different
barrier in black aviation in 1935 and 1936: he would become the head of Ethiopia’s Imperial
Air Force and be the first African American pilot since Eugene Bullard to engage in military
action abroad. Also, he would shift and expand the visions for black aviation in the black
press towards internationalism and militarism – this development is discussed in Chapter 3.7.
Before this turn of events, however, the main focus of the aviation campaign in black
press in 1935 remained on Robinson and his students’ and colleague’s educational activities
in Chicago. For example, Doris H. Murphy, Robinson’s student and the first woman
Tuskegee graduate to enter the field of aviation, was planning to attend Tuskegee’s
commencement exercises in May 1935 (“To Fly Soon”). In May, Murphy – who also worked
as the Chicago-Tuskegee Club’s recording secretary – was invited by Marie Daughtry, the
aforementioned aviatrix and educator, to perform at the California-Pacific International
Exposition in San Diego (“Invite Girl Flier to San Diego Expo”). Dr. Earl Renfroe, an African
American pioneer in dentistry and another one of Robinson’s aviation students at the
Aeronautical University, was awarded a limited commercial pilot’s license in September
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(“Dr. Renfroe Passes Air Examination”). Evidently, Robinson’s classes were producing
successful aviators, who continued with aviation as a hobby or a second occupation. And the
black press, typically announcing individual achievements in aviation throughout the years,
was publicizing Robinson’s students’ successes, thereby promoting black aviation and
recontextualizing the alleged inability of African Americans to operate airplanes.
More importantly, Janet Waterford, one of Chicago’s first aviatrices under Robinson’s
tutelage, was making a name for herself and black aviation in the Defender – directly
participating in the aviation campaign in the black press. In April 1935, the Defender began a
series of articles authored by Waterford, intended to teach young African Americans about
aviation and its importance for the community and its progress (“Noted Aviatrix to Teach
Kiddies How to Fly Planes”). In a text subtitled “History of Aviation,” the aviatrix presented
a short overview of pre-modern theories of and attempts at flying, while her following piece
discussed the development of aerial warfare around the time of WWI. The ability to attack
from the air via machine guns attached to planes was one of the “most outstanding
achievements” of the period, claimed Waterford. Given the fact that the other texts in the
series addressed technical, rather than practical aspects of aviation, it is striking that
Waterford used the utilization of aviation in warfare as her point of emphasis. Even though
her texts were published in the “Defender Junior” section of the Chicago weekly, it may be
assumed that adults, as well as their children, were the intended audience. It is thus possible
that Waterford – a close friend of Robinson’s – was using the Defender as a useful channel to
convey her instructor’s increasingly militarized vision for aviation. After all, Robinson’s club,
of which Waterford was a valuable member, and its airport were now the headquarters of an
official paramilitary air squadron.
In fact, from 1932 on, Robinson borrowed strategies of campaigning for black aviation
from Bessie Coleman. The late aviatrix had often presented herself around Chicago in
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military regalia and celebrated African American veterans’ organizations – the black press
advertised Coleman’s endeavors in hopes that she could one day teach black pilots how to
defend their communities against potential attack by a technologically more advanced white
population. John C. Robinson signified on Coleman’s style, to borrow Henry Louis Gates’s
term from The Signifying Monkey, for he, too, did not hesitate to demonstrate the connection
between his aviation instructorship at the Aeronautical University and the Military Order of
Guards, which his club was now a member of. He organized promotional events and
canvassed the South Side neighborhoods dressed in uniform, creating an image similar to
Coleman’s, but with tangible developments to his name.
As Waterford’s articles in the Defender point out, the black press and its aviation
campaign was the ideal vehicle for Robinson’s demonstrations. In March 1935, Nettie George
Speedy – “one of the early African American women journalists to cover sports, courts,
police, and the theater,” also sometimes referred to as the “Dean of Women Journalists”
(“George Nettie Speedy”) – published a piece about Robinson’s students’ graduation
ceremony at the Curtiss-Wright school. The school’s assembly hall was, according to Speedy,
filled with “persons, whose names have become famous in the civic affairs of the nation,”
including Oscar DePriest, Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, famous physician, and Fred Ingram,
president of the Chicago Tuskegee Club. As they were being awarded their degrees, Doris
Murphy, Dale L. White, Edward C. Anderson, and Clyde B. Hampton stepped up in their
uniforms to Mr. Churbuck, the Aeronautical University’s progressive president, in “soldierlike
fashion.” David E. Taylor, editor of the California News, recited Paul Laurence Dunbar’s
“The Colored Soldier” (“One Girl and Three Men Graduated from Chicago Aeronautical
College”).
The military-style presentation in front of the audience’s “deafening” applause seems
to have been no coincidence. As Speedy’s article informed, the Aeronautical University in
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Chicago was “known as one of the best equipped in the country” (“One Girl and Three Men
Graduated from Chicago Aeronautical College”). Therefore, there could not have been a more
ideal place for Robinson to carry out his educational-military mission. With the room filled
with dignitaries and even some military personnel, Robinson was showcasing his
instructorship in numerous ways. Not only had he trained skilled pilots and mechanics and
had proved that a qualified African American instructor was capable of teaching students of
various nations in a subject as complex as aeronautics; but, most importantly, he
demonstrated that his students had been trained in both civil and military aviation. Having
been rejected by the Tuskegee administration in his plans to found an aviation school at an
institute with an established military department, Robinson’s ambition was to educate a
generation of black pilots in military aviation at his place of work and club. In the end,
Robinson’s credentials and willingness to promote and advance black aviation’s military
dimension led to his appointment in August 1935 as the head of the Ethiopian Imperial Air
Force. Robinson was to train actual war pilots and engage in aerial warfare himself. The black
press seized the opportunity and turned Robinson into an aerial warfare hero with
unprecedented technical and technological expertise – his mission is discussed in detail in
Chapter 3.7.
When Italy’s Regia Aeronautica destroyed the Ethiopian air force’s few remaining
aircraft in a massive bombing campaign at the end of April 1936, Robinson was granted
permission by the emperor to leave the country; even Selassie himself was about to flee to
London (Tucker 183). But the Chicago that Robinson returned to in May 1936 was unlike the
one he had left in April of the previous year. The city’s black aviation and main newspaper
had changed and would change even more because of Robinson in two important ways. First,
in Robinson’s absence, his club’s members had shifted their allegiance to Cornelius Coffey,
and Willa Brown – originally Robinson’s protégé – was gradually becoming the face of
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Chicago’s aviation. Their group, which eventually stepped out of Robinson’s shadow in 1938,
would become the main aviation organization advocating participation in the CPTP from
1938 on.
Secondly, the Defender had decided to capitalize upon its city’s aviation hero and had
expanded – and would expand even further in 1937 – its aviation campaign, supporting
Robinson in establishing a network of schools around the country. Consequently, and thirdly,
through the Defender’s newly-expanded campaign, Robinson came to be perceived as a
military aviation instructor – the only African American one in the country. Given his status
as a war hero and a famed educator, articles on his educational endeavors flooded black
newspapers beyond the three papers analyzed here. Between May 1936 and the fall of 1938,
Robinson appeared in the Atlanta Daily World, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Cleveland
Gazette and the Plain Dealer, Chicago’s Metropolitan Post, the Kansas Whip, Kansas’s
Negro Star, or the San Francisco Chronicle. He became one of the most widely discussed
figures in the black press, rivaled only by Haile Selassie and Joe Louis. His popularity also
gave new, military-focused impetus to black aviation and its campaign in the black press and
would serve as a precursor to the drive for CPTP which would begin in 1938, unfortunately
without Robinson in any leading role.
In early 1936, the Defender asked Janet Waterford, who had been reported in the
Courier just two weeks prior to be planning a new all-women aero club in Chicago
(“Sponsor”), to write for the paper about Robinson. The series of articles which ran from late
March until Robinson’s return to Chicago at the end of May 1936, serves as another
indication of the increasing symbiosis between the black press and black pioneer aviators.
Also, it is another instance of black pilots directly writing their own (hi)story. The Chicago
weekly ran an advertisement for Waterford’s story on Robinson in the form of the aviatrix’s
photograph on March 28, 1936 with the title “Let’s Go!” In the first installment, Waterford
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began with acknowledging Bessie Coleman’s crusading role,34
thus indirectly associating
Robinson and herself with the most celebrated black flyer, and noted that Hubert Julian’s
theatrics had overshadowed every black flyer’s accomplishments, including those of
Robinson (“Race Interest in Aviation”). Waterford’s article was accompanied by a small
photograph of the author in a nursing uniform, for as the aviatrix herself explains in Soaring
above Setbacks, she was sometimes referred to as “the Flying Nurse.”
The articles by “Janet” covered all the highlights of Robinson’s career. On April 4, the
Defender carried a large portrait of Robinson, dubbing him “Brown Condor,” and Waterford
wrote about Robinson’s beginnings in Gulfport, Tuskegee, and his early days in Chicago
(“The Real Story of Col. John Robinson”). The series continued with Robinson’s first efforts
to establish an aero club in Chicago, noting that the flyer and his friends lacked funds – a
recurring trope in black press’s aviation coverage (“Robinson Organizes Brown Eagle Aero
Club”). Next came the story of Robinson’s persistence in gaining admission at Curtis-Wright,
his subsequent employment there, and opening of a small airport for his group of flyers
(“Robinson Arouses Race Interest in Aviation”). Waterford also described the aviator’s
teaching style (“Robinson Excelled as an Instructor”) and related the episode during which
the Challenger club’s airport had been destroyed by a storm and reopened elsewhere owing to
the members’ desire to make it in aviation (“First Race Airport”). The series concluded with
the story of Robinson’s goodwill flight to Tuskegee and recruitment by Claude A. Barnett and
Haile Selassie to become the head of Ethiopia’s air force (“John Robinson Wings His Way
Down to Tuskegee”). On the day of Robinson’s arrival in Chicago, Waterford added an
exclusive piece about the Challengers association (“The Race and Aviation”). Her texts
functioned as a distilled version of the black press’ goodwill message of aviation:
perseverance, training in mechanical, technical, and flying skills were highlighted; and
34
Coleman was remembered in a separate article in the Defender in early May (“Recalls Exploits of
Brave Bessie Coleman”).
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Robinson’s success despite lack of funding and support by the larger black community in
Chicago and nationwide was celebrated.
Waterford, however, was not the only aviator associated with Robinson who was
making headlines in 1936.35
Dorothy Darby had recovered from her injuries in 1934 and was
becoming successful as a parachutist. She was studying at the Pontiac civic airport and school
of aviation and gave exhibitions in Michigan, where she was also honored by the Michigan air
forces (“Dorothy Darby to Make Leap,” “Pontiac, Mich.”). The Harlem airport, operated by
the Challengers, witnessed a fatal crash in July, when two people died flying Dr. Earl
Renfroe’s airplane (“Sister Sees Pilot Die in Crash”). The Aeronautical University in Chicago
produced another African American student, Frank S. Reed, Jr., who graduated with a double
degree (“Wins Degrees”).
Most importantly, Willa Beatrice Brown emerged as a new active promoter of
Chicago aviation. Graduate of Robinson’s first class at Curtiss-Wright, Brown is mentioned
by Enoch P. Waters, a renowned Defender journalist, in the seminal American Diary: A
Personal History of the Black Press as the one who revitalized the paper’s aviation campaign
in 1936 (195-99). Although Waters’ account is incomplete and its timeline seems incorrect by
two years, Brown did feature in the black press on numerous occasions in 1936. In January,
for example, she featured in flying gear on the front pages of the Courier next to Robinson’s
photo with J.A. Rogers (“Wants to Fight Italian Bombers”). Crucially, Robert A. Hill credits
this photograph with inspiring George S. Schuyler to write the female chief pilot of the Black
International, Patricia Givens, into the novella Black Internationale (268); this is discussed in
more detail in Chapter 4.3. Brown also became member of the Challengers’ advisory board
35
In other aviation news, Lincoln Payne, an aviator, aviation advocate, and a barn stormer, died in
October 1936 (“Lincoln Payne, Flying Mail Carrier Dead”). Brazil purchased 30 American planes
for its air force to be able to suppress future revolts more easily (“Brazil Buys 30 American
Planes”). Allen Moton, son of former Tuskegee president, announced his plan for a transatlantic
flight with Hubert Julian (“Son of Tuskegee President Plans to Fly Atlantic”). “Flying High,” an air minded
musical made its premiere in Chicago in May (“Fulton Alexander’s Flying High”).
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when the organization voted Cornelius Coffey as its stand-in president for Robinson in
January 1936 (“Robinson’s Chi-Air”). In May, as Robinson was on his return to the US,
Brown featured on the pages of the Defender Junior section – as Waterford did the year
before. The paper announced that Brown had consented to establishing an aviation club in
Chicago – she was going to teach children about the history of aviation as well as take them to
field trips to airports (“To Organized Junior Birdmen,” “To Help Us”). The Defender was
thus targeting its young readers again, promoting black aviation in all its sections.
Robinson needed a few weeks after his return from Ethiopia to pursue new
educational opportunities opening up for him as his own club had elected Coffey to be its new
president. In the articles documenting Robinson’s return, the black press did not fail to
mention that the aviator was going to become an aviation instructor at Tuskegee in the fall of
1936 (“Col. Robinson, Ethiopian Air Ace, Returning,” “Defender Scribe Greets Robinson,”
“Twenty Thousand Greet Brown Condor”). Claude A. Barnett, a Tuskegee graduate like
Robinson, had been discussing the flyer’s potential employment at the Institute with Robinson
for some time – and he had issued press releases for black and white newspapers announcing
Robinson’s future employment and organized, in cooperation with Frederick Douglass
Patterson, an aviation event upon Robinson’ s arrival at Tuskegee (Tucker 202, Jakeman 29).
The exciting news inspired Chicago citizens to donate money for the Col. John C. Robinson
aviation fund, which was intended to purchase a plane for Robinson before his departure to
teach at the institute (“Rally to Buy Col. Robinson a New Plane”).
According to reports in the NYAN, Harlem supporters also contributed as an air circus
starring Robinson was held at Roosevelt Field and a fundraising ball at the Savoy Ball Room
in June 1936 (“All Colored Air Show,” “Robinson Plane Fund Increases,” “Col. Robinson
Fund Plans Benefit Ball,” “Robinson Fund Asks Support on Benefit,” “Robinson Fund Sets
More Cash As Goal,” “$800 Pledged for Air Hero”). In July, Robinson visited Tuskegee,
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where Patterson announced to Robinson and the press in attendance that “a course in
aeronautics would probably be started at the Institute next year” (“Brown Condor at Tuskegee
Institute”). As Jakeman and Tucker concur, Tuskegee, along with Barnett, was hoping to use
the considerable amount of money donated to Robinson’s fund to sponsor not only its aviation
program, but other departments as well. In fact, Barnett was reportedly withholding the fund’s
money from Robinson until late summer 1936, which prompted the aviator to take his
educational plans in another direction (Tucker 208-11, Jakeman 30-32). Despite the setback,
Robinson is still credited with having initiated what would later become the Tuskegee Airmen
program.
Along with debating whether to accept Tuskegee’s offer, Robinson spent the summer
of 1936 giving lectures about aviation, Ethiopia, and visiting his home town as he stopped in
Gulfport, Mississippi on his way to Tuskegee in July (“Home Folks Honor Flyer”). In early
June, Robinson visited the Poro College, a beauty college in Chicago, operated by Anna
Turnbo Malone, the first African American female millionaire (“Col. Robinson is Feted at
Poro College”). At a lecture at Chicago’s Du Sable High School in June, Robinson explained
how Italy had employed its black Muslim troops to fight Ethiopian Christians, thus pitting
troops of color against each other while the white Italian troops barely engaged in battle
(“How Black Troops Won War for Italians”). The highlight of Robinson’s lecture tour,
however, came in late June when he visited New York: twenty two black pilots, including
Alfred Anderson, from Pennsylvania and other neighboring states welcomed Robinson and
escorted him to Roosevelt Field, where over seven hundred people had been waiting, and
performed a short air show. During his visit to New York, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh,
Robinson also discussed his idea of a “chartered air service in the South […] which would aid
the entire section as well as give qualified pilots regular jobs.” The potential success of this
service would in turn convince other companies to hire black pilots, claimed Robinson (“Col.
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Robinson, Ethiopian Air Hero”). Two years after his initial proposal to Tuskegee, the idea of
establishing a segregated airline apparently still dwelled in the aviator’s mind.
In fact, since Robinson’s Tuskegee plans had fallen through, the aviator put his idea of
an air service into practice in Chicago between 1936 and 1937. As Tucker claims, Robinson
owned a four-seat Curtiss Robin plane marked “John Robinson Airlines” (213). As an article
in the Courier suggests, Robinson had indeed established a “flying service” in Chicago by the
end of September. Willa Brown, along with Lola Jones, served as hostesses at the Harlem
airport, or as the paper called it, the “Colonel J.C. Robinson’s Flying Field” (“The Brown and
Jones Girls”). The air service was apparently a business adjacent to Robinson’s new school,
which opened in late September 1936 (Tucker 213).
The John C. Robinson’s National Air College and School of Automotive Engineering,
informed articles in the Courier, the Defender, and the NYAN, was Robinson’s “life dream.”
The school, located on the Poro College’s campus, offered 15 mechanical courses and owned
equipment which were all “above the Government regulations as outlined by the Department
of Commerce.” The school employed experienced and government-licensed instructors,
including Cornelius Coffey and Captain Homer Lewis, who taught Spanish and French, which
were among compulsory subjects. Most importantly, the school was under “military
discipline, directed by an army reserve officer” (“Col. John Robinson Opens Aviation
College,” “Col. Robinson’s National Air College,” “Aviation College is Opened,” “Col.
Robinson Starts Own Aviation College”). When the black press remarked that Chicago “now
boasts of the only Race aviation college and automotive school in the world,” it was not
exaggerating (“Aviation College is Opened”). Rather, it was highlighting the fact that
Robinson’s college offered a unique opportunity for African Americans to bridge the racial
technological gap, which had been slowly narrowing in the automotive and aviation
industries. Robinson’s college had government-approved equipment, staff, and used a nearby
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airport to teach its students to fly. Although the institution was segregated, it more than
equaled white schools, Robinson seemed to project through the black press.
Black aviators’ education efforts were showing that technology could be the African
Americans’ domain as well, even though it had been long determined to belong only to the
allegedly ‘civilized’ peoples. While Powell’s classes at Jefferson High and his Craftsmen of
Black Wings club also offered several courses and used the Dycer airport in Los Angeles for
exercise, Powell was working mostly on his own – as far as the reports in black newspapers
indicate – and did not teach automotive engineering. More importantly, Powell did not
provide on-campus accommodation coupled with strict military discipline. Since the
Tuskegee aviation school proposed by Robinson did not materialize, the aviator transposed
his plan to Chicago and imbued it with as much military instruction as he was allowed at a
civilian institution. Despite obstacles, Robinson – no longer an unfortunate crusader –
repeatedly found ways to offer military-like technical education and training for his students.
First at Curtiss-Wright, where his best students came to form the nucleus of the Military
Order of Guard, Aviation Squadron, and then at his own college. The year 1937 would
expand Robinson’s vision beyond Chicago and his college.
In the Courier in 1937, the aviation campaign reverted to its old form before
Robinson’s mission in Ethiopia. The paper announced in brief notes new student fliers from
around the country: in Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Maryland (“Makes First Solo Flight,”
“Aided by Father of His White School Chum,” “Young Oklahoman Wins Flying Permit,”
“All Ready”). It also published two short texts about Haitian military officers coming to the
United States to study aviation. Lieut. Edouard Roy – later the first head of the Haitian Air
Force in the early 1940s – was reportedly studying at an aviation school at the Roosevelt Field
in New York. Although Roy and his colleague later made headlines with a love story gone
wrong, it is important to note that Capt. Duly Lamothe was studying aviation “with the U.S.
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army,” unlike black Americans (“To Study,” “Haitian Army Officer”). In October, the
Courier announced that there were, according to the Department of Commerce, “103
Negroes, 10 women and 93 men, [who] have qualified as aviators,” 70 of whom, including 6
women, had active licenses (“10 Race Women, 93 Men Qualify as Aviators”).
The Defender did not lag far behind the Courier in its routine aviation coverage. The
paper covered Julian’s escapades (“Black Eagle Hurts Arm,” “In U.S. Again”) as it did
Josephine Baker’s marriage to a French aviator (“Josephine Baker Marries French Broker and
Aviator”). More importantly, the Courier and the Defender continued in promoting aviation
through letters and editorials. The Pittsburgh weekly urged its readers in its “The World This
Week” column to “Watch aviation, young man! Study it. Learn to fly. The bars are up now.
Changing conditions will lower them. […] Aviation is girdling the globe. […] Everywhere
young men are training. What about you?” The Defender published a short letter to the editor,
which asserted that “Race males should be trained at once in aviation, so that when the
inevitable war comes the Race will be able to do their part in helping to save the nation”
(“Train for Aviation”). The letter thus reminded the black press’s readers that black aviation
still had the ultimate objective of preparing black America for the upcoming race war which
would be fought in the air.
Robinson, the war hero educator, appeared in the news repeatedly during 1937,
touring the country and promoting his college. In May, he reportedly piloted a renowned
Chicago card player to a bridge tournament in Cleveland (“To Fly to Bridge Tourney”). It is
possible that this trip was carried out by Robinson’s charter service. In early July, per the
Courier, he took Mrs. Malone, owner of the Poro College, for a trip over Chicago’s South
Side – the Defender printed two photographs from the event later in the month (“Mme.
Malone, Poro Head, Takes to Air”). In the middle of July, Robinson flew Malone to Kansas
City and continued to Topeka to give a speech (“Air-Minded!). According to Tucker, after
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Topeka, Robinson with Mrs. Malone visited Mound Bayou, Mississippi, for the 50th
anniversary “as a self-governing 100% Negro community.” And in early August, the aviator
flew to Jackson,36
where he gave an interview to a Clarion Ledger reporter, gave a speech,
and then visited Meridian for a speaking engagement at a black high school (Tucker 217-19).
What Tucker’s detailed list of activities after Topeka leaves out, however, is that
Robinson apparently also made a speech in St. Louis, Charles Lindbergh’s long-time
hometown. As the Courier’s St. Louis column from July 17, 1937 indicates, Robinson was
planning to open a school in the city, perhaps because of its considerable black population and
aviation infrastructure. Per the Courier, Robinson “set up a tentative program for a local
aviation school which would be an important unit of the Col. John C. Robinson Aviation
Activities.” This program had been formed to “stimulate and promote aviation among our
race; To create positions and connections for jobs for qualified members of our race in all
lines of aviation and automotive mechanics.” Robinson was reportedly planning to open a
branch of his college in St. Louis as well as set up airports in cities where there was a sizeable
black population and connect these via a charter service operated by black pilots. He also
sought to promote goodwill among pilots regardless of nationality. Most importantly,
Robinson’s objective was to “try to get a place in the army corps for members of our race who
desire such placement” (“Chatting with Lue Swarz”). In other words, Robinson was launching
a plan to create a network of colleges, airports, and qualified mechanics and pilots so that
black America could travel by plane, be offered technical and mechanical jobs, and, in turn,
produce viable candidates for service in the country’s military. Robinson’s network of
colleges would have a clear purpose to educate black students for service in skilled positions
in the military.
36
The Defender informed about Robinson’s visit to the city and subsequent exhibition flight at the
end of August in “Mississippian Flies Here with Colonel.”
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The Defender’s coverage of Robinson’s activities during August and September 1937
provides a map of the areas where the aviator was hoping to set up his network of colleges –
like Powell, Robinson was targeting the segregated South. According to Von Hardesty,
Powell, too, in his Craftsmen Aero-News, regularly displayed an “elaborate organizational
chart for his proposed national aviation network [which] called for interlocking black-owned
and -operated commercial airlines, training schools, and aircraft manufacturing firms.”
However, while Powell’s vision was “utopian in scope” (xix), Robinson travelled daily during
July and August 1937 between Dallas, New Orleans, and Jackson, attempting to initiate his
network. In New Orleans, he was the American Legion of Honor’s guest of honor. He also
spoke to, among others, members of the local Poro club (“Col. Robinson Pays Visit to New
Orleans”). An article on another dinner remarked the “Colonel’s intention to establish an
aviation school in the Crescent City” (“Col. Robinson is Guest of Hartmans”) and another text
noted that Robinson was planning to set up a “Primary Flying School” in Jackson37
and was
mulling the possibility of connecting his proposed college in New Orleans with Xavier
University (“May Open Flying School at Xavier”).
In Dallas, Robinson and Mrs. Malone visited the local Poro branch, which was, among
others, teaching a plane modeling class. Robinson reportedly suggested “the formation of
other clubs to promote interest in aviation among the older boys and the adult members”
(“Texas State News”). Finally, per the Courier, Robinson dropped “a football to open the
annual gridiron classic between Wiley College and Prairie View Normal”38
at the Cotton
Bowl and was making arrangements “for his stunt on Negro participation day” at the PanAmerican
Exposition (“To Stunt at Texas Exposition”). The Defender later confirmed
Robinson’s stunt flying (“Robinson Flies a New Plane to City”) and both black newspapers
37
Robinson visited Jackson again in October to give exhibition flights at the Annual Mississippi
Negro State Fair (“…Jackson, Mississippi…”).
38
Prairie View’s newspaper reports on the game do not mention Robinson’s flyover.
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informed that the aviator visited vocational schools in Tennessee in September (“Col. J.
Robinson Makes Flight to Sommerville,” Col. John C. Robinson Honored at Luncheon,”
“Noted Flyer on Southern Lecture Tour”).
Indeed, Robinson’s tour of the South was not intended to promote his aviation
education and business vision only. The articles in the Courier and the Defender report that
the aviator spoke as much about Ethiopia and Italy as he did about aviation (“Tells of Italy’s
Efforts,” “Col. Robinson, Mrs. Malone, Speakers”). Not only was he thus promoting aviation
as a field and a means of acquiring a technical degree, but he was also spreading the spirit of
Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism around the segregated South. It may be assumed that
Robinson’s audience – high school and college students as well as other adults – listened to
the aviator’s inspiring narrative that coupled military aviation and heroism with necessary
technical and mechanical expertise and juxtaposed Robinson’s skills with that of the allegedly
overpowering technological superiority of Italy’s colonial power.
It is also necessary to note that Robinson had spent the summer travelling around the
South with Mrs. Malone aboard his plane, visiting numerous Poro college campuses.
According to Bettye Collier-Thomas writing in Black Heroes, by 1926 Poro claimed to have
graduated around 75,000 black cosmetology agents around the U.S., the Caribbean, and
elsewhere. The Poro college employed up to 175 people. Although Malone’s business
reportedly suffered due to her divorce in the mid-1930s (461), the entrepreneur must have still
had a considerable network of colleges around the country, as the articles on Robinson’s tour
indicate. Given the fact that Robinson’s Chicago college with around 40 students (Tucker
217) was housed on the Poro campus and that Malone was “the nation’s first black
philanthropist” and was perceived as “overgenerous” (Collier-Thomas 462), she was probably
the primary sponsor of Robinson’s efforts to establish a network of aviation colleges and was
perhaps willing to provide space on her various campuses.
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Progressively, however, Robinson’s presence in the black press diminished as his
network of aviation education institutions failed to materialize. Still, in 1939, the Defender
reported that Robinson had been “selected by the National Youth Administration as aviation
consultant for the air mechanics schools now in operation and to be established at various
points throughout Illinois.” Robinson’s school at Poro had been reportedly taken over by the
NYA, but the aviator remained the institution’s director; it is possible that Malone’s financial
trouble hit Robinson as well. Still, the NYA invited Robinson as the only African American
to attend the institute of nationally prominent civil instructors held at the Air Corps Technical,
Chanute Field, and was furnishing the college with $250,000 worth of Army and Navy
surplus equipment. NYA’s aid came with a caveat, though: “this equipment will be used to
give instruction of a purely industrial nature and the commercial aspects of the aviation
picture will be stressed rather than the military” (“Col. Robinson Named Aviation
Consultant,” “Negro Pilot Earns ‘Wings’”). Although Robinson could attend the Air Corps
institute, thereby entering the military environment he had so long sought for black America
and himself, the NYA rolled back Robinson’s school’s initial emphasis on military aviation.
At any rate, Robinson was still allowed to teach his students using military equipment.
After 1937, Robinson virtually disappeared from the aviation coverage in the black
press. Between 1938 and 1940, his name would only be mentioned in passing as his former
protégés were completing their mission to secure a government-funded civilian pilot training
program in case of a war and, in turn, to include an African American division in the U.S. Air
Force. But between the summer of 1935 and December 1937, Robinson had been the face of
the aviation campaign in the black press. Owing to his military displays in Chicago in the first
half of the 1930s and later his missions in Ethiopia and the South, the black press had been
able to double its aviation coverage. Effectively, Robinson’s activities – as well as those of
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William J. Powell and, for a brief period, of Charles E. James – paved the way for aviation
news and editorials to become a common feature in black newspapers by 1938.
Cornelius Coffey and Willa Beatrice Brown replaced Robinson as the most visible and
vocal representatives of black aviation in Chicago and nationwide from 1938 onwards.39
Brown headed the Chicago Girls Flight Club which flew daily at Harlem airport and included
Robinson’s other female students such as Janet Waterford, Dolores Jackson, Doris Murphy,
Lola Jackson – formerly a member of the Harlem-based Black Squadron from 1935 – and
Lola Jones (“Chicago Aviation Enthusiasts”). Brown truly took the torch from Robinson
when the Courier, the Defender, and the NYAN all vigorously reported on the aviatrix
successfully passing her private pilot’s license exam in July 1938. Brown became the first
black woman in history to hold the license allowing her to transport passengers; Bessie
Coleman held an international license only. Besides mentioning her instructor, Cornelius
Coffey, the black press especially highlighted the fact that Brown had passed the exam with
the highest mark among fourteen other students, all of them white men. Brown’s attractive
face accompanied the celebratory reports on the cover pages of black newspapers to promote
black aviation. The aviatrix even acknowledged and praised the support in an August letter to
the Courier, thus emulating Powell’s active collaboration with the black press
(“Congratulations!,” “Young Woman Flyer Gets Pilot’s License,” “Our Women Advancing in
Aviation,” “Plans Coast to Coast Flight,” “Overcome with Joy,” “Solo Licenses Go to 2
Women,” “Woman Flyer Is Awarded Pilot License in Chi”). In fact, at that point, Brown
openly and officially cooperated with the Defender, particularly with Enoch P. Waters,
according to the journalist’s autobiography, American Diary: A Personal History of the Black
Press (195-210).
39
The trio’s relationship has been recently treated in fiction by Severo Perez in The Challengers
Aero Club (2012) and Willa Brown & the Challengers (2016).
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In September 1938, Brown and Coffey organized a large air circus at which Willie
‘Suicide’ Jones established a new world record in a parachute jump when he leaped from
29,400 feet and opened his ‘chute’ mere 2,400 feet above the ground (“‘Cuts Capers’ in Air”).
Later in the month, the two aviators and their colleagues from the Challenger’s group
participated in a large aviation competition. To advertise the event, the Defender introduced
Coffey as the most experienced black participant for he was the only “Race man in the
country holding a combination of commercial pilot’s license, instructor’s rating, and airplane
and engine mechanic’s license” (“12 Race Pilots Invited”). At the event, Chauncey Spencer,
another one of the Challengers and later a goodwill aviator who flew to Washington, D.C. to
lobby for the Civilian Pilot Training Program, parachuted from two miles in the air (“Spencer
Thrills Huge Crowd”). Brown and Coffey thus entertained Chicagoans with air events and
their stunts – in April 1939, for example, Brown gave an airplane ride to Horace R. Cayton, a
prominent sociologist and co-author of the seminal study Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro
Life in a Northern City (1945) (“Free Flights Make Chicago Air Conscious”). Unfortunately,
neither Cayton’s autobiography, Long Old Road (1965), nor Black Metropolis mention the
phenomenon that black aviation was during the 1930s in Chicago and nationwide.
During their campaigning, Brown and Coffey never forgot to continue in the military
displays which Bessie Coleman had started in the 1920s and Robinson took up in the first half
of the 1930s. On November 11, 1938, at 11am, Brown and Coffey flew across Chicago’s
South Side on behalf of the Inter-racial Business Council to drop leaflets in commemoration
of World War I veterans. Importantly, the aviators again strengthened the bond between black
aviation and the black press as they undertook their ‘bombing mission’ in a Chicago Defender
goodwill airplane. The newspaper ran a picture of the duo in front of the machine on its cover
page the following week, highlighting its participation in the aviation campaign and
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celebrating the two most recognizable faces of black aviation (“Community Crusaders and
Fliers Spread Goodwill Message,” “Fliers Who Scattered Leaflets on Chicagoans”).
In 1939, Brown and Coffey further intensified their promotion of black aviation and
eventually achieved what almost two decades of campaigning in the black press ultimately
sought: the acceptance of black aviators to be trained at government-funded facilities in case
of a potential armed conflict. After Robinson’s historic mission in Ethiopia and his
subsequent educational and organizational efforts, black newspapers ran dozens of editorials
between 1936 and 1939 which lobbied for the inclusion of African Americans in the Air
Corps. That is why, in a text accompanying another photograph of Brown and Coffey testing
an airplane for another license test in January 1939, the Defender informed its readers that
President Roosevelt would soon “name a Negro college as one of the several schools selected
to train 20,000 pilots annually” (“Aviatrix in ‘Tail Spins’ Test Flight”). A lengthy editorial in
February announced that, perhaps owing to Robinson’s inspirational activities, “we may
finally see Race men wearing the uniforms of the officers in the United States Air Corps
[since] they have demonstrated once and for all that Race citizens want to fly and can fly, and
intelligent people can no longer dispute this” (“U.S. Air Corps May Soon Admit Race
Applicants”). The black press’ strategy of recontextualizing and providing emotional, logical,
and ethical arguments and evidence to advocate for black aviation would no longer be
necessary.
To that purpose, the Challengers and Waters decided to form a nationwide
organization which would lobby Congress on behalf of black aviators. Coffey was voted its
chairman and Brown its secretary. The newly-established National Airmen’s Association
invited black aviators across the country to attend a conference in the summer of 1939
(“Study Plans for National Air Meet in Chicago,” “Local Fliers Organize to Foster Meet,”
“Coffey Named Chairman for National Air Meet”). The goal of the national meet in Chicago
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was to “acquaint the pilots with each other socially [and] map a permanent program for the
advancement of aviation among the Race.” In the end, the conference brought together most
of the living black aviators who had appeared in celebratory reports and photographs in black
newspapers during the previous decade. The imagined community, connected through the
black press for more than a decade, finally formed an actual community. Having made
considerable headway in the field and having made black America air-minded through the
black press, the aviators, under the leadership of Brown and Coffey finally founded an allblack
aviation organization which represented the community’s needs and goals to the public
in a unified voice and effort. Although Robinson, Powell, and Julian did not attend the event
as they were being replaced by younger fliers, the N.A.A. did award Dr. Porter A. Davis from
Kansas City for his 11-year long contribution to the development of black aviation (“To
Honor Outstanding Pilot at Air Meet,” “Doctor Wins Aviation Award”).
After Chauncey Spencer and Dale L. White carried out their goodwill flight from
Chicago to cities along the East Coast in May 1939 – discussed at the very beginning of this
chapter – and after her vigorous activity in establish the N.A.A. and lobbying the Mayor of
Chicago and the Congress on behalf of black aviators, Willa Brown appeared in the Time
magazine as the first black aviatrix ever (“Aviatrix is Cited in ‘Time,’” “City Fliers Make
Appeal to Mayor Kelly”). After thousands of people welcomed Brown in her hometown of
Louisville, Kentucky, in August 1939, the aviatrix and Cornelius Coffey could celebrate in
October when the United States Civil Aeronautics Authority named the Coffey School of
Aeronautics at the Harlem Airport near Chicago as one of the non-college facilities to train
black aviators within the framework of the Civilian Pilot Training Program (“Louisville Hails
Chicago Aviatrix,” “Airport for Pilots Named”). When the program at Coffey’s school proved
successful during the next year and a half, the Air Corps agreed to send the Chicago students
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to be taught at the newly-established military facility at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama
(Scott and Womack 98).
The duo of Chicago aviators – along with John C. Robinson – have been rightfully
hailed as the aviation educators, whose erudition, ingenious promotional and organizational
activities, as well as flying, technical, and mechanical skills ensured the success of the initial
stages of the Civilian Pilot Training Program which then opened the door for Tuskegee to
emerge as an incubator for black combat pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen. What Brown and
Coffey did and achieved, however, was simply the next logical evolutionary step in the black
aviation campaign launched by the black press back in the 1920s during the heyday of Bessie
Coleman and then her successors. Although the Courier and the Defender have been
celebrated for their contribution during the late 1930s to the establishment of the Tuskegee
flying program, their interest in and propagation of black aviation, as is shown in this
dissertation, reaches much further into history.
At any rate, Chicago – along with California and New York – paved the way for
Tuskegee and it was ingenious New Negro Chicago aviators who saw the aviation campaign
through to its culmination in 1941 in the constitution of the 99th
Pursuit Squadron, an allblack
flying unit in the United States Army Air Corps. The development of black aviation of
Chicago throughout the 1930s then stands in clear contrast to what Bigger Thomas and his
friend Gus declare in Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son. “I could fly a plane if I had a
chance,” says Bigger to Gus. “If you wasn’t black and if you had some money and if they’d
let you go to that aviation school, you could fly a plane,” replies Gus (14). Robinson, his
colleagues and students flew freely over Chicago at the time Wright wrote his famous novel
as they, unlike Bigger and Gus, created and pursued as New Negro aviators their own
opportunities in black aviation.
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3.5 Aviation as African American Celebrities’ Hobby
The aviation campaign in black newspapers lasted almost two decades, during which black
aviation became increasingly popular. Indeed, the black press promoted a goodwill message
of aviation education and consequent economic opportunities as a way of persuading race
members to enter the field and represent black America during the golden age of aviation.
However, the newspapers did not rely merely on reports on and celebrations of new schools
opening and pioneer aviators teaching – they popularized aviation also by way of informing
on flights taken by various local figures and businessmen, celebrities such as Harlem
Renaissance artists, journalists, and political figures; as well as community leaders such as
members of the clergy. Combined with successful transcontinental and international flights by
black pilots from 1932 on, aviation became a common feature in any given section of black
newspapers – it appeared in entertainment, serious reporting, local news, and the children’s
sections. This section briefly records some of the popularization articles in the black press,
while the next one traces and analyzes the coverage of long-distance flights and explores the
rarely discussed immigrant participation in early black aviation.
Although local individual new students or newly-licensed aviators appeared in black
newspaper regularly, the reports were usually brief; they included perhaps a photograph and a
soundbite. But there were exceptions, of course. One such special report was published in the
Courier in March 1930, when the paper informed about a local youth, Irvin Lee McEnheimer,
who had just received a private pilot’s license in California, where he had studied under T.C.
Ryan, the constructor of Lindbergh’s “Spirit of St. Louis” plane. The young pilot claimed that
he had been inspired by Bessie Coleman and wanted to pursue aviation in Pittsburgh, but was
denied because of his skin color (“Local Youth Wins Pilot’s License”). The newspaper
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carried an advertisement for McEnheimer’s upcoming show as well, and on October 18
published an article, along with a photograph of McEnheimer in full gear, in which it invited
its readers to the “brown-skinned Lindy’s” show and the “youth to enter aviation field”
(“McEnhimer [sic] to Stage Air Show at Butler Airport Oct. 30”). In a report on the show
itself, the Courier quoted the air field’s white commandant as saying that “McEnheimer is a
credit to aviation and his people should be doubly proud of him, considering the handicaps he
had to overcome to secure his training and credentials.” Over 300 spectators came to see the
show on a fair-weather day and the paper had reportedly received dozens of letters expressing
pride in the pilot (“McEnheimer’s Air Show Proves Big Thriller, Gay Crowd”). Pittsburgh,
too, was becoming air-minded, no doubt owing to the aviation coverage provided by the
Courier.
There were also the odd reports on aviation events and flights in local news. In 1929,
the black press celebrated the first flight by a “colored passenger over the Transcontinental
Airlines” between Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio. The passenger was a local businessman
and his arrival was reportedly attended by over two hundred African American spectators
(“Flies from Business League Meeting”). Another two brave souls were highlighted when
they flew from Chicago to Detroit via the Stout Aviation Company. The brief report
exclaimed that “colored Chicago is becoming more and more air-minded” (“Chicagoans Fly
to Detroit”). In 1930, the Courier’s children section told the story of a black child
experiencing his first plane ride (“Junior Club Member Reports Airplane Ride”). In 1931, the
Defender, for example, reported on a San Diego ex-slave, who took the first plane ride of her
life at the age of 103, thereby fulfilling her birthday wish (“Ex-Slave, 103, Takes Joyride in
Plane”). And Harlem’s business figures were also reported to have been taking airplane rides:
C. B. Powell and Dr. Philip H.M. Savory enjoyed riding up in the air in 1928, 1931, and in
later years (“Along the Rialto,” “New Yorkers Make Trip to Chicago by Plane”). Powell and
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Savory would purchase the NYAN in 1935/36 and gradually turn it into the second most
influential black paper in the nation. The two would also become major organizers of proEthiopian
clubs and charities during the Italo-Ethiopian war (“C.B. Powell”).
Popular black clergymen could not escape the call of the heavens either. In 1931, for
example, Hubert Julian took Junius Caesar Austin, the renowned Garveyite pastor of the
Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago’s Bronzeville, for a short airplane ride, after which the
preacher explained that “Heaven, so much farther away, must be the place of pure joy that he
had been preaching about” (“Rev. Austin, in Plane, Sees Way to Pearly Gates”). At Easter
1934, Julian rode “a twelve-passenger monoplane” over Harlem with Reverend Major Jealous
Divine, Harlem’s legendary spiritual leader and civil rights activist, on board (“Chanting
Throng Parades in Harlem”). Another Garveyite pastor, Brooklyn’s Rev. Dr. Thomas Samuel
Harten, began to fly regularly to church meetings and conferences from 1934 on, branding
himself the “first flying minister.” His arrivals at various locations on the East Coast, in the
Midwest, and the South were attended by hundreds of spectators (“Harten Uses Plane to
Speed His Work,” “Pastor Flies to Capital Revival,” “Harten Says He’s First Flying Parson,”
“Flying Minister Disappoints Delegation of Greeters”). Still, Harten was not New York’s only
flying man of God: Harlem’s infamous “Black Hitler” and the “Fuhrer of Harlem,” Bishop
Amiru Al-Minin Sufi Abdul Hamid, the founder of the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility,
a street leader of numerous protests and boycotts during the Harlem Renaissance era (Lewis
300-1), and a heavily featured figure in the NYAN, owned a private plane in the mid-1930s,
routinely flying it over Harlem and Brooklyn. In June 1938, his plane ran out of gas and
crashed in Wantagh, N.Y. According to graphic descriptions in the black press, Sufi and his
white pilot expired in the plane’s flames (“Harlem ‘Hitler’ Killed,” “Died in Crash”).
Along with businessmen and clergymen, aviation was also registering as a popular
hobby with African American celebrities: in 1930, Noble Sissle, Harlem’s favorite jazz
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composer and playwright performed at the American Club in Paris in honor of the French
transatlantic flyers, Coste and Belonte. His band then took a plane ride to London (“Sissle and
Band Fly to England”). Josephine Baker, a renowned dancer and a friend of Bessie Coleman’s
from their early days in Chicago, announced to the Defender in August 1935 that she was
“planning to enter the field of aviation” and that she believed “her race should develop its
own aviators.” In October, Baker was already flying every day before breakfast to work up an
appetite (“Josephine Baker to Attempt Aviation,” “Pretty Jo Baker, Home Again,” “Jo Baker
Takes Daily Trips in Her Own Plane”). Meanwhile, Stepin Fetchit, a popular comedian, was
being considered by Fox Studio for a lead in an “aviation story depicting the aspirations of a
young colored man, ambitious to put his race on a par with the white race in air
achievements” (“Fox May Shelve Air Story”). Although the film did not materialize, the
Courier did note in its profile of Fetchit in April 1936 that the movie star was “a veteran plane
fan and flying is his hobby” (“Stepin Fetchit Made Over $62,000 Last Year”).
Louis Armstrong began to routinely fly to performances across the country in the late
1930s (“Ol Satchmo Flies to Hollywood Friday”). Duke Ellington sponsored Powell’s club in
California and Oscar DePriest attended numerous aviation events. Finally, Joe Louis, the
world heavyweight champion also routinely rode the skies to fights – and was connected to
popular black aviators. He visited with William J. Powell in Los Angeles and was celebrated
by Dorothy Darby, one of Robinson’s students, when she flew over his camp in the summer
of 1938 (“Louis Rushes to Detroit to See Big Fight,” “Flier is Ready for Hop to Joe Louis
Camp”).
Popular black journalists also demonstrated that their reports on aviation were not
mere words. In 1927, Joel Augustus Rogers, a Jamaican-American and Harlem Renaissance
journalist, historian, and a close friend of George S. Schuyler’s, visited the flying field of Le
Bourget, Lindbergh’s non-stop flights destination, and took a plane flight. The essay on his
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experience ran in the Courier and the NYAN: in it, Rogers admitted to having the “highest
respect […] for the law of gravitation” as well as newly-found appreciation of “the feats of
Lindbergh and the other aviators” (“J.A. Rogers Goes Up in the Air in Paris,” “Up in the
Clouds”). In 1929, Rogers reminded the Courier readers of Eugene Bullard, the famed black
aviator living in France (“The Paris Pepper-Pot”), and between 1935-37, he covered John C.
Robinson’s mission in Ethiopia and his educational tour across the country after his return.
Another famous journalist working for the Courier, Floyd J. Calvin, the first ever
radio program host sponsored by a black newspaper, often reported on Hubert Julian, and
went up in a plane in 1929 (“Calvin Makes First Flight in Airplane”). In April 1930, the
Courier published a column by Alice Dunbar Nelson, a Harlem Renaissance poet and
journalist, which described her first experience with flying aboard a plane (“Alice Takes to
the Air,” “So It Seems”). William Pickens, a long-time NAACP officer, author of The Heir of
Slaves (1911) and Bursting Bonds (1923), and a NYAN contributor, wrote about his
experiences with flying for the Harlem-based paper in 1928 and 1932. In Bursting Bonds,
Pickens famously refuses to ride in a Jim Crow car in Arkansas, and so it comes as no
surprise in his short writings about aviation that he viewed this means of transport as a way to
“avoid day and night in Jim Crow” (“Reflections: Up in the Air”). Overall, Pickens, an
influential writer and orator during the Harlem Renaissance, proclaimed in 1928 that “with
reasonable human care the air is as safe as the land or the water, and a great deal more
thrilling” (“Lindberghing from Los Angeles to San Diego”). Finally, even George S. Schuyler
wrote in 1935 about his own experiences with being an airplane passenger, telling his readers
enthusiastically that “if you haven’t seen the earth from the air you haven’t seen it” (“Views
and Reviews”).
Among its many popularizing texts, the black press also published occasional cartoons
and poems celebrating black aviation. In June 1930, the Courier printed a cartoon – a genre
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which it had last used for aviation purposes in 1922 to celebrate Bessie Coleman’s
achievements – accompanied with a poem. Entitled “Where There’s A Will,” the cartoon
depicted a black male student with a parachute labeled “Training,” running towards an
airplane labeled “Pluck” and “Brains.” In the distance, a large cloud in the form of a beautiful
white woman labeled “Success” was looming. The black student is depicted as saying “Huh can’t
I? Watch me.” And the accompanying poem reads:
With bold resolve and heads held high
The youngsters leave their classes;
To them Success seems very nigh
Without the aid of glasses.
Old folks may smile but Youth is right,
Training makes their chances greater;
With Pluck and Brains to aid their flight
They’ll surely overtake her.
The poem’s message showcased the Courier’s commitment to the aviation cause by
expressing encouragement, especially for the paper’s younger readership, to pursue technical
and mechanical education. The fact that the student’s parachute, rather than the plane, is
defined as “training” points to the aviation campaign’s continuous emphasis on ground work
and education first, flying second. After all, as both the cartoon and the poem indicate, classes
do come before practical flying exercise. In 1931, the paper published another poem on
aviation called “Call of the Wings,” in which Harry Levette, a California-based journalist for
the Associated Negro Press and later a Hollywood actor, implored readers to “listen to the call
of the wings,” and reminded them that “A mere girl pioneered for the Race // But our men let
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her sacrifice fail.” The poem prompted a response in the form of a letter, whose author
proposed setting up an aviation fund under the auspices of the Tuskegee Institute (“Call of the
Wings - letter”).
Along with experimenting with new genres and providing space for renowned and
respected public figures to relate their flying experiences, the black papers were also adding
new expert voices to speak on aviation. In August 1930, the Courier advertised an upcoming
column by James Lincoln Holt Peck (“Air-Minded”) to be serialized during September.
Peck’s texts offered personal musings on the nature of aviation, piloting, as well as on
discrimination in the field and the hard work that was required to succeed. The essays
provided space for an actual aviator to relate his experiences with and observations on
aviation outside of the traditional and constricted genre of articles, reports, editorials, and
letters to the editor. Crucially, Peck’s last essay asserted that “a flyer is a free man, with
unlimited territory” (“Aviation”). Until 1932, no black flyer would succeed in crossing US
borders in a plane, but, at least, Peck suggested in his writings that such an opportunity
existed and that aviation offered not only economic opportunities and military use, but also
connection with foreign lands.
Peck was studying aviation on the side, but eventually transformed his studies into a
prolific career, embodying the aviation campaign’s message. He would later join the
Republican side in the Spanish Civil war as a pilot, write a series of essays on aviation in
1938 and 1939 as the Courier’s campaign for inclusion in the CPTP was culminating, author
two acclaimed books on aviation – Armies with Wings (1939) and So You’re Going to Fly?
(1941) – and numerous magazine articles on aeronautics in the 1940 and the 50s for
magazines such as Popular Science, Harper’s Magazine, Scientific American, Science Digest,
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Popular Aviation, or Air Trails.40
In his first writings for the Courier, however, Peck
demonstrated that the newspaper and a few individual crusaders were taking the aviation
campaign seriously, would devote time and resources to its success, and that aviation opened
up black America’s opportunities to connect with other nations and peoples of color. The
Courier would run several similar essay articles by Herman Banning, Powell’s colleague, in
1932 to celebrate his successful transcontinental flight.
Popularization through articles, photographs, and teasing the black press’s readership
could last only so long, however – by 1932, the black American public was still awaiting a
historic achievement by a black aviator. Indeed, Powell and James had organized and
participated in popular circuses around the country, new aviation schools were being opened,
but nothing remotely similar to Lindbergh’s goodwill tours and non-stop flights had been
carried out by pilots of color. It was high time a black aviator had flown across the continent
or abroad. Such a feat would represent the literal breaking of another geographical and racial
barrier as the black aviation community would prove its humanity, technical ingenuity, and
recontextualize the fact that it allegedly could not participate in and contribute to the United
States’ aviation progress. Also, such a feat would considerably narrow the racial technological
gap between white and black aviation.
3.6 Flying the Distance: Breaking Geographical and Racial Barriers
Between 1932 and 1935, the dreams of Bessie Coleman, Joel Foreman, Hubert Julian, and
James Holt Peck to cross arbitrary political boundaries and explore unlimited territories as
well as connect with other nations and peoples came true in the form of historic first
transcontinental and international flights. These efforts then culminated with John C.
Robinson’s military mission in Ethiopia; they also paved way for the black press and black
40
Distinguished African Americans in Aviation and Space Science has a profile on Peck as does
George Edward Barbour’s “Early Black Flyers of Western Pennsylvania, 1906-1945.”
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aviators to symbiotically lobby for the establishment of the CPTP. Crucially, some of these
pioneering and groundbreaking aviators were not black Americans, but rather black migrants
from the West Indies. The history of early black aviation and the aviation campaign in the
black press may thus be read as thoroughly inter- and trans-national: African American
aviators dreamed of flying abroad and spreading the gospel of aviation, while black migrants
to the United States wished to participate in the larger project of pan-Africanism and black
inter- and trans-nationalism and prove their humanity and technical aptitude along with black
Americans. The black press, too, was developing an increasingly international perspective
after WW1 – on display in its aviation campaign – as it sought to foster connections between
“imagined [diasporic] communities” of Africa-descended peoples across the globe.
New York in general and Harlem in particular were at the forefront of black aviators’
attempts to cross the country coast to coast and to fly abroad. During the larger Harlem
Renaissance, Harlem became, according to Huggins, “a capital for an international black
race” where DuBois and Garvey ushered black America onto “an international stage, placing
the Afro-American behind the Pan-African movement” (22-30). During the first half of the
twentieth century, Harlem transformed into an “urban crossroads [which] acquainted black
Americans with their international brotherhood of blood and color” (302) with the help of
various organizations, clubs, protests, boycotts, print culture, and other activities. In its
centripetal dimension, explains Fabre and Feith, the Harlem Renaissance and its metropolis
served “as an antidote to black diasporic dispersion: people of African descent, who had been
kept separate by a history beyond their control, were now able to unite again into a new [interand
trans-national] entity.” Harlem’s centrifugal dimension existed in the form of numerous
international capitals such as Paris, London, or Marseilles playing a role in articulating “a
transnational [black] consciousness” and exuding the vitality of “the very diaspora that
[Harlem] recenter[ed]” (3).
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Aviation emerged as one such potential means of connecting and bringing together
black Americans with the rest of the world; as well as a means of placing African Americans
in the leading position among Africa-descended peoples and nations. Black aviation in the
1930s demonstrated and embodied Harlem and its Renaissance’s push and pull forces –
Harlem became the locus of long-distance flights by virtue of its concentration of immigrants,
businesses and finance, media, and geography. Harlem became a starting point as well as a
destination. Nationally, it was connected via aviation with Chicago’s black aviation boom and
a budding Chicago Black Renaissance, as well as Los Angeles’s offshoot of the Harlem
Renaissance and William J. Powell’s endeavors. An informal national network of and
cooperation between black aviators, with the vigorous help from the black press, can be traced
in the black press throughout the 1930s – well before the establishment of the Tuskegee
Airmen program, which has long been the center of attention of black aviation’s scholars.
Internationally, immigrant aviators, inspired and supported by pioneers from Chicago
and Los Angeles, set off from Harlem to return to their homelands, particularly Haiti and the
Bahamas, but also to visit and bring the gospel of aviation to other countries such as Cuba,
Trinidad, or the U.S. Virgin Islands. And when black America’s attention turned to Ethiopia’s
war against colonial Italy in the mid-1930s, an African American aviator emerged as the only
one to fight in person against Italy in Africa, capturing his countrymen’s imagination and
adding a new dimension to Harlem and Chicago’s Renaissance’s centrifugal tendencies; as
well as materializing Alain Locke’s vision of African Americans leading Africa into the
twentieth century. The immigrant and African American aviators employed aviation’s
goodwill message to communicate anti-colonial and anti-imperial sentiments, thereby
bolstering local resistance movements and promoting interracial understanding. Some of them
fought in the skies for a foreign black nation or peoples in the name of Pan-Africanism, black
internationalism, and transnational black consciousness. In short, black aviators in the 1930s
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embodied the inter- and trans-national dimensions of the New Negro – these developments
can best be traced via the aviation campaign in the black press.
3.6.1 The Loudest Voice of Black Aviation: Hubert Julian
Hubert Julian, having started his career in Harlem in the early 1920s, remained the loudest
voice in black aviation until the late 1930s – non-aviation articles about and interviews with
Julian continued until the 1960s – and the only representative of a black immigrant aviator
until 1932. Black as well as white newspapers, such as the New York Times, often reported on
Julian’s bold plans and brash words. Julian’s tall tales even made it as far as the Czechoslovak
press – his sojourn in Ethiopia, for example, was discussed with admiration in Brněnské
Noviny in August 1930 (“Kariéra Černého Letce”).
Unfortunately, as throughout the 1920s, Julian’s bombastic style would overshadow
other black aviators’ achievements. For example, because of Julian, even John C. Robinson’s
widely covered and celebrated mission in Ethiopia is a mere footnote in seminal period texts
such as Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming (1943) and the newly discovered Amiable with Big
Teeth (1941) by Claude McKay, both of which address black America’s reaction to the ItaloEthiopian
war. Ottley does devote considerable space in his oft-cited history of Harlem to
mocking Julian as “a race missionary of individual persuasion [whose] profitable love of his
race encompassed the whole world of black folk” (107-8). Yet little space is then left to
celebrate Robinson, who is briefly referred to as Selassie’s “personal aviator” (107). McKay’s
“piquant burlesque of political machinations in Harlem during the mid-1930s in response to
the Italian invasion of Ethiopia” (Cloutier and Hayes Edwards x) is also preoccupied with
satire of Julian and omits Robinson’s name completely. McKay, with his typical sharp wit,
writes that, upon his return from Ethiopia in 1936, Julian’s “views were widely publicized and
inwardly the Aframericans were dismayed, for they knew that the picaresque Colonel Hubert
Fauntleroy Julian was not the type that would desert a good ship, if it were not in danger of
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sinking” (176). As a cartoon in the Courier in February 1935 aptly put it, “Julian [Was]
Always a Good Copy.” In essence, Julian was a foil to successful black aviators depicted in
the black press.
In July 1931, the New Yorker ran a two-part profile on Julian based on the
Trinidadian’s own account of events. The lively text explained that with Julian “to dream was
to do – or at least make a mighty try at it” (“The Black Eagle- II”). Indeed, try he did. In
1928, for example, the Courier reminded its readers of Bessie Coleman’s message and
achievements in a series of articles about Reverend Junius Caesar Austin of the Pilgrim
Baptist Church in the heart of Chicago’s Bronzeville, who devoted his sermons, among other
things, to collecting funds to erect a monument for the intrepid aviatrix. The monument was
eventually unveiled in June 1928, with several thousand Chicagoans in attendance. Hubert
Julian had been scheduled to parachute over Coleman’s grave, but he never made his
appearance (“Throngs Hear Rev. Austin in Brilliant Sermon,” “Monument to Bessie Coleman
Unveiled in Chicago”). Despite Julian’s unreliability, Austin took a plane ride with the
parachutist in 1931, cementing his position as one of the most vocal supporters of black
aviation in Chicago (“Rev. Austin Takes Airplane Ride with Col. Hubert Julian”). Julian
would pilot many a clergyman’s plane in the following years when he finally received a
license.
In 1930, Julian seemed to advance black aviation and its campaign’s objective to
become international when he travelled to Ethiopia to perform at Haile Selassie’s coronation
as the newly-named colonel in the Imperial Air Force. However, he allegedly crashed
Selassie’s favorite French Gipsy Moth monoplane and was immediately banished from the
country. Still, Julian returned to the United States in an Ethiopian-army uniform, claiming that
he was to raise funds to buy airplanes for Ethiopia. His assertions were then refuted by
Malaku E. Bayen – the emperor’s relative, who had recruited Julian to come to Ethiopia and
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would later recommend John C. Robinson to Selassie. Despite this failure, Julian was honored
in Harlem by the Brotherhood of Sleeping-Car Porters and other supporters (“All Harlem in
Tribute to Julian”) and kept appearing in the black press. In November 1930, for example, the
Courier published a half-page interview with Julian, along with several large photographs of
the parachutist and his brand-new plane. Despite its somewhat sarcastic tone, the article
provided much-needed publicity for the Trinidadian (“Ethiopia Banishes Julian After Plane
Crash”).
George S. Schuyler, however, found only critical words for Julian. In his November 8,
1930 column, Schuyler called Julian’s career a “sad commentary on the gullibility of most
people,” as the parachutist’s name had been nowhere to be found on the recently-released lists
of licensed pilots. Dubbing Julian the “Garvey of the air” and hinting at William J. Powell’s
efforts in California, Schuyler lamented that “people like him can get applause and money
while worthier individuals are practically starving to death” (“Views and Reviews”). In his
column, Schuyler identified one of the main issues plaguing the black press’s coverage of
black aviation. His assessment of Julian and the publicity he had garnered contextualizes
Powell and his group’s valiant efforts which had been criticized and denigrated in the
newspapers by jealous colleagues. Occasionally, the black press would not differentiate
between honest, yet failed efforts to promote black aviation and con artists such as Julian.
Harsh, critical, if not sarcastic tone would sometimes accompany reports, thereby casting a
negative light on aviation crusaders, despite existing evidence of their honesty; whereas
Julian’s dishonesty would bring him constant access to journalists.
As the aviation campaign was transformed into a full-fledged one by 1931 – with
Powell, Julian, James, Peck, and other aviation crusaders filling the black newspapers’ pages
– attention seemed to have turned to discussing who should be the role-model aviator to
represent the African American community in recontextualizing existing stereotypes of black
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America’s alleged technological ineptitude and inability to fly. As a result, Julian’s
flamboyant style and rhetoric gradually came under scrutiny. He dominated the newspapers in
1931 as he travelled the country, giving parachuting and flying exhibitions to raise money for
several of his proposed transatlantic flights. Powell was still planning to organize an air circus
to show off the flyers from his Los Angeles-based group. Gradually, James also became black
aviation’s rising star and black journalists as well as readers of the black press could not but
compare the three pilots and voice their opinions on who should represent the race.
Hubert Julian’s activities and rhetoric were the exact opposite of Powell and James’s
humility – but they brought him much attention. In 1931, the Courier and the Defender
published at least 15 articles on Julian combined, with the NYAN tallying 10 texts. The aviator
planned another transatlantic flight to Ethiopia (“Black Eagle to Make Ocean Try Again, is
Claim,” “If Hubert Julian Can Hop Three Ifs Then He’ll Hop Ocean,” “3,000 See Julian in
Stunt Flying”), India (“Julian Starts First of His Exhibition Flights”), or Rome, Italy (“Plans
Long Air Voyage”). He was touring the country, fundraising for these flights (“Julian Seeks
Funds for Fine Plane”), but never buying any plane as he was never able to raise enough
money. But not only did he never raise enough funds – Julian also forfeited the money he had
raised as a deposit for the numerous planes he had hoped to buy over the years. Although
Julian did perform several exhibitions in front of considerable crowds, he neither bought a
plane, nor flew outside of the United States; let alone across the ocean. And in seeking funds,
Julian exploited the power of the black press when he took a Courier writer, and a supporter
of his, Floyd J. Calvin, up in the air (“Calvin Taken for a Ride”). He did not hesitate to ask
churchgoers for money, either, exploiting Chicago’s reverend J.C. Austin’s goodwill and
interest in aviation (“Rev. Austin Takes Airplane Ride with Col. Hubert Julian”).
Although the tone of the newspaper coverage was somewhat mocking towards Julian,
the black press constantly reported on Julian and his plans. Perhaps, journalists were hoping
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to finally have a black pilot who would lead and represent the race’s aviation progress as well
as bridge the racial technological gap. But also, Julian had mastered the goodwill message of
aviation. In August 1931, he received a commercial pilot license (“Col. Julian Passes Test for
Pilot Rank”), having allegedly been a holder of an international pilot’s license since 1924
(“Lieut. Herbert Julian Finally Receives His U.S. Aviator’s License,” “Julian Secures Pilot’s
License”). He was thus allowed to fly over and drop flowers during A’Lelia Walker’s funeral
rites (“Julian Drops Flowers from Airplane”). Walker had been one of Harlem’s most
influential figures and a patron of the Harlem Renaissance arts. Her salon, the Dark Tower,
effectively functioned as a gathering place where Harlem’s artists socialized with royalty as
well as their Greenwich Village counterparts” (Hughes 177-8). Julian thereby associated
himself with a beloved Harlem figure to boost his reputation, a tactic he had used with J.C.
Austin in Chicago and would use with Powell in Los Angeles.
Julian even used Haile Selassie’s name to promote his own flights and activities. On
the occasion of his solo flight in Harlem to receive his new license in 1931, sponsored by the
NYAN (Black Eagle in Air Carnival”), Julian provided an explanation – one of many – of
what had happened in Ethiopia, from which he had been banished. Julian claimed that he had
been asked to protect Selassie against rebellious tribes, even though he had allegedly “assured
[Malaku E. Bayen, the emperor’s envoy] that he had no compunctions about bombing
anybody.” Selassie, however, did not need Julian to protect him and rather employed aviation
in an attempt to overpower opposition forces (“Col. Julian Passes Test for Pilot Rank,”
Tucker 184) Still, in presenting himself as the emperor’s protector – and thereby a protector
of the race that Ras Tafari represented – Julian, an immigrant, was trying to thrill the black
public and its desire for an internationally-minded and -connected black pilot. A pilot skilled
in combat. A pilot, who would finally erase the technological gap in aerial warfare.
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In this way, Julian reminded the black press’s readership that any black pilot’s
achievements had military connotations. One week after having received his license, he added
that he wanted to “bring to the Negroes of the world the importance of aviation. […] In time
of war, we proved our worth in every branch of fighting except in aviation.” Therefore, “in
case of another war I should like to see them prepared for the emergency” (“Julian Starts First
of His Exhibition Flights”). Julian’s message was a combination of the Garveyite rhetoric of a
race war and the racial technological gap, typical of the early aviation coverage in the black
press. It was also decidedly transnational. Given his travels and experience in Ethiopia, Julian
presented himself in black newspapers as the one pilot who had his race’s best interests at
heart, and who was willing to take his skills abroad and teach other people of color to fly and
defend themselves. The fact that he was willing to bomb other people of color – as the
colonial powers had been doing since the Great War – did not contradict his message of
spreading the military gospel of aviation, but may have rather strengthened Julian’s position
as an aviator on par with white pilots skilled in combat. After all, it was the Ethiopian
emperor himself, who had chosen him as an aerial bodyguard.
Although having Hubert Julian on the front pages of black newspapers may have been
attractive for most readers, the reactions that the Courier received from some of its readers in
1931 suggest that Julian’s message, as well as the newspaper’s coverage of aviation, was not
always received in kind and was considered unprofessional, verging on yellow journalism, by
some. For example, John W. Greene, a Boston-based pilot, wrote a letter to the editor in
October 1931. Greene later became Cornelius Coffey’s National Airmen’s Association’s vicepresident,
opened in 1940 a widely successful aviation school at the Phelps Vocational School
in Washington, D.C., and, after WWII, operated the Columbia Air Center, the nation’s largest
airfield owned and operated by African Americans (Gubert, Sawyer, Fannin 141-2). In his
letter, Greene expressed doubts about Julian’s claims, made in his interviews since 1924, that
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the Trinidadian had been the first to receive a pilot’s license. Greene also added that when the
Courier had reported on Charles E. James as the second pilot to receive a license, the
newspaper had not clarified what kind of license it was. Greene challenged the way that the
Courier was reporting its aviation news and also tried to protect his own reputation as a
pioneering aviator for it had been him – not Julian or James – who had become only the
second black pilot to have received his commercial and transport pilot’s license. To rectify the
situation, he suggested that the newspaper carry a regular aviation column “with the senior
pilot as editor” (“On Negro Pilots”). Although Greene41
thus acknowledged that the Courier
was trying to run an aviation campaign, he sought for the paper to find a more accurate and
effective way.
Other readers of the Courier also took issue with the way the newspaper had been
informing on aviation, and on Hubert Julian in particular. An unidentified “transport pilot”
wrote a letter to the editor in November 1931, in which he directly attacked Floyd J. Calvin,
one of the newspaper’s most famous journalists, for being biased in favor of Julian. Calvin
had written a number of articles about Julian since 1924 and was perhaps the only journalist
who had always promoted, rather than mocked, Julian’s piloting skills and bold claims. The
transport pilot explained in his letter that Julian’s skills, as reported by Calvin, were negligible
compared to many other black pilots who had not received as much attention as Julian. The
letter called Julian a “ground flyer” and asserted that Calvin’s preference for the inept Julian
is an “injustice to the other pilots of your race, who are making the grade.” Let’s hear of this
guy,” ended the letter, “when he learns how!” (“On Julian”). A reaction to the letter came the
following week, in which another reader opined that Julian had been “deceiving race folks by
the simple expedient of taking advantage of our ignorance of things connected with aviation.”
He also suggested that “it behooves us to rid ourselves, once and for all, of this unnecessary
41
In June, Greene sent another letter to the editor enumerating the initial investment he had had to
put into learning to fly (“High Cost of Flying”).
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evil, and this reflection of our intelligence” and asked for a senior pilot of color to write to the
paper and explain how much of an impostor Julian was (“Another on Julian”). It seems that
while the black public was willing to learn more about aviation and to celebrate black
aviator’s achievements, it also desired its newspapers to be more conscientious and serious
about the way they reported on the field. Finally, black aviators such as Greene and the
mysterious transport pilot were taking it upon themselves – as had Powell – to address the
black press directly and shape aviation’s goodwill message.
The Courier’s annoyed readers-aviators were joined by George S. Schuyler. In
reaction to the news that Julian had finally received a pilot’s license, Schuyler quipped that
“Julian should have done this years ago instead of going around fooling Negroes and white
folks into backing him with coin of the republic.” Schuyler also reminded his readers that he
had exposed Julian’s scam in the 1920s and expressed doubts whether Julian, newly licensed,
would be able to fly, as he was again proposing, to Abyssinia – over 6,000 miles away – when
the world’s distance record was 5,000 miles (“Views and Reviews”). Julian never stopped
promising to undertake a transatlantic flight for the sake of his race and Schuyler reprimanded
him again in 1932, opining that “it will be easier to believe this fledgling pilot can hop to the
distant African country [of Ethiopia] if he will first fly from New York to Chicago or across
the continent” (“Views and Reviews”).
Schuyler’s latter comment came on the heels of two long-distance flights announced
by Julian in 1932. Julian had attended William Powell’s air circus in December 1931 and,
perhaps realizing how much attention Powell was still receiving from the press and how much
a successful transcontinental flight would mean for the propagation of black aviation and
himself, the Trinidadian proposed a transcontinental flight with Powell in February (“Plan
Transatlantic Flight”). In April, Julian proposed a transatlantic flight to India, with Powell as
a navigator: he was hoping to bring a bale of cheese cloth with him as a gift for Mahatma
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Gandhi (“Col. Julian and Partner Plan Flight to India,” “Julian Names Aids for Hop Over
Sea”). The latter article provided biographical information on both flyers, stating that Powell
was a “War Vet.” Julian was again proving his promotional skills: not only did he propose a
flight to a people of color, but he also planned to meet a famous world leader of color –
thereby presenting himself as a messenger of goodwill and aviation’s apostle – and prove that
black veterans could now fly long-distance and challenge their white colleagues. Exploiting
the symbiosis between black aviators and the black press, he had also christened one of his
planes “Pgh. Courier” (“Julian to Name Plane Phg. Courier”). As previously with Julian,
however, no flight ever took place.
Between 1932 and 1935, others ventured on historic long-distance flights – and, as
before, Julian exploited their popularity in the black press. He proposed a goodwill flight to
Montreal in July 1933, another non-stop flight to India, and another one to Aden in
September, naming his unpaid-for plane “Abyssinia,” thus again invoking Pan-African
sentiments in his audience. In another article for the Defender, Julian’s plane was named “The
Haile Selassie, King of Kings” (“Christens Julian’s Plane,” “Col. Julian to Make Good-will
Flight,” “Colonel Hubert Julian Prepares for His Sea Flight,” “Colonel Julian May Fly the
Atlantic,” “Julian Back from Boston Flight,” “Christens Julian’s Plane”). As can be gleaned
from the newspaper headlines, Julian was also invoking his military credentials as a “colonel”
from his alleged service as “air minister” under Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie. In May 1934, the
Courier announced another one of Julian’s proposed flights with the mocking title “Chanting
His Annual Song!” and in June it carried a brief text informing that Julian was, once again,
raising funds for his flight (“Black Eagle Appeals for Donations of 5 Gallons of Gas”). As
others were filling the pages of black newspapers with their successful goodwill trips, Julian,
again, borrowed from his successful colleagues and was making Schuyler’s criticism and
mockery ring true.
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Despite never delivering on his bold promises, Julian’s escapades had been constantly
reported in the black press, because – as he proved with Bessie Coleman’s goodwill message
– Julian could package and market other flyers’ words better than their original authors. When
Albert E. Forsythe and Charles A. Anderson announced in 1934 that they were bringing
goodwill letters to the people in Pan-American countries, Julian pounced on the idea. He
proposed to “carry several hundred pounds of mail aboard his large black and gold monoplane
[..] on his flight to Ethiopia this summer.” The letters would “be sent by his people here in
America to the kingdom of Abyssinia as a message of good will and friendship.” Finally, the
letters would be backstamped in Ethiopia and “each piece of mail will be handsomely
engraved and will bear the autograph of the famous Black Eagle,” effectively serving the
function of “souvenirs of Colonel Julian’s flight” (“Colonel Hubert Julian to Carry Good Will
Letters on Hop to Abyssinia”). Julian’s “annual song,” to borrow the Courier’s phrase, kept
black aviation in the black press and his inability – or unwillingness – to turn his proposals
into actions eventually highlighted the honesty, hard work, and dedication of other, less
famous black pilots such as Powell, Banning, Forsythe, Anderson, and, ultimately, also John
C. Robinson. Julian’s role as a foil would become most apparent in his second embarrassing
engagement in Ethiopia, followed by Robinson’s heroics.
Since Julian had occupied the front pages of the black press since 1922 and had
proposed a flight to Ethiopia or Liberia on numerous occasions, he may have become in many
black readers’ eyes the face of black aviation combined with Pan-African worldview. That
might explain why a letter to the Courier in March 1935, as tensions between Italy and
Ethiopia were rising, inquired if “there is a fund or committee for the purpose of raising
money to build an Ethiopian air force” and proposed that “all we need is some good man to
start the fund and lead an expedition to our homeland. I would say that Colonel H. Julian
would be the man, for he is our greatest colored pilot” (“Italy’s Greed”). By that point in
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1935, Julian had been already on his way to Ethiopia (“Julian Arrives in London on Way to
Ethiopia,” “Julian Not Hailed by Haile Selassie”).42
In April, the Defender even announced
that Julian had escorted “the largest shipment of arms ever received in the African Empire”
from Czechoslovakia (“Convoy”), while the Courier claimed one week later that Julian “got a
cool reception” upon arrival in Addis Ababa, “carrying two bags crammed with pictures of
planes he hopes to sell the government” (“Italy Ready for Peace; Africa Mobilizes Men,
Women for Hostilities,” “Julian Not Hailed by Haile Selassie”). Since Czech and Slovak
military historians deny the fact that a planned consignment of weapons for Ethiopia ever left
the country because of France and Britain’s embargo (Chmiel 48), it may be assumed that
Julian was once again merely playing to the black readership’s hopes of black American
volunteers aiding Ethiopia in a meaningful way.
Despite his reputation and history in Ethiopia, however, Julian stayed in East
Africa for several months, receiving positive coverage especially in the Defender and the
NYAN. In July, he gained Ethiopian citizenship and thus became eligible to sign up for
military duty (“Julian Becomes Ethiopian Citizen,” “Julian Reported Again in Air Corps”).
As late as November 1935, the Defender published a photograph of “Colonel Julian,
American air ace” assigned “the duty of training men for aerial service (“Ethiopia Prepares to
Take to the Skies”). In mid-August, as war was in the air, Julian cabled to the Courier that
“patriotism [is] at fever heat and Ethiopia is ready.” The country’s “military plans [are]
cloaked in secrecy but American Negroes can feel assured that unpleasant surprises [are]
awaiting invading army,” informed the Trinidadian. Along with acquiring an unspecified role
in the Ethiopian army, then, Julian began to effectively work as a reporter for the black press,
promising that “additional articles and pictures [were] on the way” (“Hubert Julian Cables the
Courier”).
42
Despite Julian’s forced departure from Ethiopia in 1930, his wife traveled repeatedly to work as a
social worker in the East African country (“Brooklyn Societies and Clubs”).
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It was John C. Robinson’s reporting for the Associated Negro Press and his flying
skills that eventually ended Hubert Julian’s sojourn in Ethiopia. Not only was Julian no longer
needed as a source of information about the happenings in the country, but his inability to
teach and perform flying tasks were gradually exposed by Robinson and in the black press.
When Robinson “sent home a story [in August 1935] in which he had discounted Colonel
Julian’s activities in Ethiopia in disparaging terms,” claims William R. Scott, Julian attacked
Robinson and was consequently demoted and replaced by Robinson as the Commander of the
Air Force (225-6). A letter in the Courier mocked Julian as a “runner-up to Baron
Munchausen” (“On Julian”), and George S. Schuyler devoted his entire column in early
September to Julian’s career, noting that while the demoted Julian “is now drilling Ethiopian
infantry recruits in the remote Wallaga region, […] John C. Robinson […] is flying over
Addis Ababa every day in one of the emperor’s best airplanes and electrifying the populace
with his ability” (“Views and Reviews”).
Although Julian later claimed in the Defender that he had “personally asked His
Majesty to place me in an infantry command instead of aviation where I was a mere servant to
a French flying expert” (“Col. Julian Restored to King’s Favor”), he left Ethiopia in
November 1935 in disgrace (“Julian Quits Ethiopia,” “Col. Julian Leaves Ethiopia for U.S.”).
The Defender published a short fictional story on Julian entitled “Black Star,” in which the
Trinidadian “fights, bleeds and dies for Ethiopia, but in doing so covers himself in glory” and
in December, the paper reported that Julian had written a 68-page manuscript entitled “Why I
Resigned from the Abyssinian Army” in which he was ready to tell of “Ethiopian horrors”
(“Colonel Julian Has Story”). The Courier’s “The World This Week,” probably authored by
Schuyler, summarized Julian’s brief career in Ethiopia most aptly, when it quipped that “he
never succeeded in getting higher off the ground than a mule’s back.” Meanwhile, “Colonel
John C. Robinson, a Negro who is a real aviator and a credit to his race […] achieved high
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place in the Ethiopian air force. […] Julian will soon be back here collecting for another
flight.” Julian’s more than a decade-long role as a foil set the scene for Robinson’s
emergence.
While Robinson’s glory covered the pages of black newspapers in 1936, Julian was
deemed “another Benedict Arnold.” It was reported that he had allegedly made a deal with the
Italian consul in London to give damaging statements about Ethiopia in return for money
(“Julian Sold Out for $1,250, Alleged”). Julian was even preparing a tour around the US, in
which he would make pro-Italian statements – but was barred from one such proposed event
by the Boston Urban League (“Ask Hub Mayor to Bar Julian”). In late February, Schuyler
reprinted a letter from Charles Diggs, an American doctor living in Paris, who claimed that
“Julian is a disgrace to the color of his skin. He is here trying to sell some documents [from
Ethiopia] to the highest bidder” (“Views and Reviews”). Finally, in March 1936, the
Courier’s J.A. Rogers reported that he had “yet to hear a single Ethiopian, European or
American, say a good word for Julian,” who was, along with Ras Gugsa, a defector, among
the most hated men in the country (“Ethiopia Glad to be Rid of Julian”).
Increasingly ludicrous reports appeared in the black press about Julian from 1937 on –
few related to aviation, however. In October 1937, the Courier announced that, according to
the Department of Commerce and despite his numerous proposed flights, Hubert Julian was
listed under a student’s license only (“10 Race Women, 93 Men Qualify as Aviators”).
Despite that, Julian had appeared on NBC radio in May and in Harlem with an Egyptian
princess in December, having failed to join the Chinese Air force as he had promised in
October (“Negro Flier on Ripley Program,” “Dashing Colonel Julian Returns with Corpse,
Princess and Monocle,” “Julian, with Monocle and Princess, Back in Harlem,” “Black Eagle
Julian is Hurt,” “Black Eagle Hurts Arm,” “In U.S. Again”). After 1937, Julian turned from
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an aviator crusader to a globetrotter, whose military escapades entertained black America for
a few more decades. The Ethiopian fiasco effectively ended his aviation career.
Over the course of fifteen years, Julian had been instrumental in forming and loudly
voicing black aviation’s goodwill message – often with military overtones – and its
international dimension. One can trace black America’s longing for black aviators to finally
fly abroad to Julian’s incessant proclamations as the Trinidadian repeatedly held air circuses,
exhibitions, and fundraisers to promote his proposed hops to other continents. Harlem was
air-minded in the 1920s and the early 1930s in part because of Julian’s omnipresence in the
black press and at the borough’s social events. Julian represented one of the many notorious
figures of the Harlem Renaissance era as his endeavors brought fame to black aviation, but
also cast doubt on there ever being a successful and earnest black aviator. Although Julian
provides a perfect study in the ways in which the black press symbiotically worked with black
aviators on campaigning for black aviation, it must be noted that his (in)actions overshadowed
and partially hindered black aviation’s progress – benefactors and patrons often sought
publicity and, for a long time, Julian seemed to be the best investment for them despite his
repeated failures.
3.6.2. Flying Haiti
In the end, it was a Haiti-born immigrant aviator, previously unknown to the readers of the
Courier and the Defender but a well-known name in Harlem, who advanced black aviation
and its goodwill message with an international long-distance flight. The Courier announced
Leon Desire Paris’s43
flight from New York to Haiti in mid-March with a photograph of the
pilot in full gear and an article explaining that the aviator had been hand-picked by William
H. Davis, the owner of the New York Amsterdam News. The text by Floyd J. Calvin described
43
Spelling of the name varies across newspapers and monographs – Paris, Parris, or Parrish – but
Haitian newspapers confirm that the surname is Paris.
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Paris’s credentials, the technical details of his plane, and mentioned that Davis was insisting
that Paris first undertake a test flight from New York to Washington and to Pittsburgh
(“Harlem Publisher Backs Cross-Country Hop”). Davis had previously sponsored Charles E.
James’s career and had bought a plane for his newspaper. Since James had gone a different
route – touring the country with exhibition flights and lectures – Davis had to invest in
another flyer. First, he invested in Julian, but since the Trinidadian’s plans failed, Davis
decided to back another migrant from the West Indies. Paris began his hop on April 6 and
reached Cuba probably on April 24 or 25 (“Paris Reaches Cuba in Flight to Haiti”). He then
reached Port-Au-Prince at the end of the month and Haiti declared a three-day national
holiday in honor of the historic accomplishment (“Aviator Arrives in Haiti”). Since Paris’s
journey had been planned to span 2,626 miles, the Haitian became the first successful longdistance
and international black aviator in history.
Haitians were closely connected with New York, especially with Harlem and its
residents of color. As Mary A. Renda points out, some of the most recognized Harlem
Renaissance figures such as Arthur Schomburg, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Katherine
Dunham, Jacob Lawrence, or Zora Neale Hurston “mined the riches of Haitian culture and
history for their work” (20) during the Harlem Renaissance. Although little is known about
the volume of Haitians’ immigration to the United States prior to 1932, according to Michel
S. Laguerre, “the first significant group of Haitian migrants, about 500 upper-class urban
families, came to the United States in the 1920s (23). Between 1932 and 1950, only 5,544
Haitians immigrated to the US (Levinson, Ember 228). The Haitian community, residing
mainly in New York, was thus very small, especially compared to the other groups of West
Indian immigrants. By 1924, when the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act came into effect, “U.S.
residents of West Indian birth or derivation numbered more than 300,000 (Parker 100).
Despite their low numbers, Haitians were active in organizing clubs, groups, and businesses
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such as the Haitian Afro-American Chamber of Commerce, Utilities d’Haiti, or the HaitianAmerican
Craftsman Club, Inc. (“Haitian Treasury Secretary Honored by Harlem Leaders,”
“Expect Big Crowd at Paris Meeting”). Haitians thus played an integral part in the social and
political life in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, because as the support of various Harlembased
organizations, such as the Elks, for Paris’ flight indicates, the cooperation between the
West Indian and African American communities was alive and well.
Ever since the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804, black Americans had
been fascinated by the first black republic. It became a destination for at least 7,000 black
Americans in the 19th
century alone and was hailed as both “a model of governance,
prosperity, and refinement” (Yingling 3, Contrary Destinies 13-14) as well as “the keeper of
liberty in the New World” (Haitians and African Americans 102). During the U.S. occupation
of the island, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and James Weldon Johnson, among others,
railed repeatedly against U.S. colonialism. The NAACP, along with the black press,
supported Stenio Vincent, the opposition leader, in his successful presidential bid in 1930
(Plummer 139, Haitians and African Americans 110-17, Suggs 73, Putnam 60-61). DuBois,
who had familial roots in Haiti, reacted in The Crisis immediately after the US Marines
invaded Haiti in 1915. Calling Haiti “almost the sole modern representative of a great race of
men among the nations,” he exhorted his readers that “American Negroes, to a much larger
extent than they realize, are not only blood relatives to the West Indians but under deep
obligations to them [since] without the Haitian Revolt, there would have been no
emancipation in America as early as 1863.” He explained that due to the U.S. intervention,
“the anarchy in Hayti is no worse than the anarchy in the United States at the time of our Civil
War” and that “the lynching and murder in Port-au-Prince is no worse than, if not as bad as,
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the lynching in Georgia” (quoted in Haitians and African Americans 104).44
African
Americans, Haitian emigres, and Haitians cooperated throughout the 1920s and early 1930s
on achieving the deoccupation of Haiti and the transfer of power from the Marines to the
Haitians. Dantes Bellegarde, Haiti’s ambassador to the US, vowed, upon arrival to
Washington in 1930, to “bring about the military and financial liberation of Haiti” (Haitians
and African Americans 125).
Paris’s flight thus held a deeply symbolic meaning. Although the New York Times
reported in late March 1932 that Harlem had a new flying ace planning a trip to Haiti, the
article failed to highlight the significance of Paris’ flight (“Harlem’s New Ace Ready for
Flight”). The black press, on the other hand, namely the NYAN, which sponsored Paris along
with the Negro World, as well as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, informed
on Paris extensively. Paris first appeared in the NYAN in a 1928 announcement of a play
called “The Glory of Our Race” being put on by the Hayitian Progressive Club (“Haytians in
the Drama Here”). In 1930, the same paper reported that there were two Haitian student pilots
in New York, studying and training at Roosevelt Field in Long Island; the legendary airfield
would later become the hub of black aviators in the 1930s (“Two Young Haitians Take to
Air”). Afro-Caribbeans, among them Haitians, were often considered and framed as a model
minority (Johnson 80), and so it was no surprise when the NYAN followed up on Paris’s
success story in August 1930 as he earned his pilot’s license (“Gets Wings”); and one year
later when Paris performed stunts at an air circus alongside more seasoned African American
aviators such as James, Greene, and Daughtry (“2,000 View Circus Staged at Airport”).
While Paris never expressed his desire to fly to Haiti in the first interviews for the
black press, he did propose in December 1931 a hop to his native country. Unlike Hubert
44
DuBois here uses the traditional Taino designation for the island, indicating that the island’s
history is fraught with the legacy of slavery, colonization, and imperialism even in its very name.
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Julian, another West Indian pilot, Paris was serious about his flight. In March 1932, he was
quoted in the NYAN as saying “I won’t say much; I won’t promise anything – but all I know is
that you can depend on me” (“Group Lauds Paris for Proposed Hop”). According to the
Defender, Paris’s ambition was to “establish friendly relations between this country and
Haiti” and he also “wished to demonstrate the performance value of trained race pilots” (“Hail
New York Flyer on Good Will Trip to Haiti”). This was especially necessary given the
sensationalist and exoticizing discourse of Haiti in the U.S. due to the American occupation of
the country (Renda 21).
In December 1931, Paris had helped establish the International Colored Aero
Association (ICAA) along with Leon F. Desportes, who would later become member of the
Committee for Ethiopia, led by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., in 1935; thereby demonstrating the
connections and cooperation between Africa-descended people in the United States (“Ethiopia
Seeks Negro Doctors”). The ICAA’s objectives were to back Paris’ flight and to “encourage
men and women to play a part in aviation as navigators, pilots, mechanics and instructors.”
The group also planned to establish scholarships to help aviation students and Paris was
hoping that with the help of the organization, “a commercial air transportation company”
consisting of black staff could be eventually established (“Aero Organization Begins at
Meeting”). In other words, Paris shared the aviation campaign’s emphasis on education and
proposed a business and civil right vision of an all-black company later promoted by Powell
and Robinson. The Haitian was thus a true aviation crusader, rectifying the reputation that
Julian had given to immigrant aviators.
In March 1932, a photograph of Paris in full gear in front of his new plane appeared
along with articles in several black papers, detailing the 2,452-mile long “army route” that
Paris was planning to take (“Leon Paris Will Make Flight to Haiti,” “Harlem Publisher Backs
Cross-Country Hop”). A social gathering in honor of Paris later in March was advertised by
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the Haitian-American Crafstmen Club, Inc. and attended by the Honorable Lucien Lafontant,
Haiti’s consul-general to the United States (“Invitation”). Paris was also being backed by the
Elks, for whom he flew over Harlem in late March (“Group Lauds Paris for Proposed Hop”).
Unlike Charles Lindbergh’s goodwill flight to the West Indies, Paris’s hop was financially
humble and low-key. Instead of a non-stop flight, Paris was planning to fly to Haiti in several
short trips. He was also self-funding his adventure, although numerous black trade
organizations collected almost $50 for Paris and gifted him a parachute.
Paris’s humble means notwithstanding, his flight was implicitly compared in the black
press to Lindbergh’s groundbreaking feats. During his allegedly goodwill flights between
1928 and 1932, Charles Lindbergh surveyed the Caribbean for Pan Am’s planned expansion
into the region. Also, in the context of the United States’ foreign policy towards the
Caribbean, Lindbergh’s success and fame allowed the U.S. diplomacy and businesses to
present dominance in commercial aviation in the region as progress rather than power, and
“hegemony as neighborly friendship” (Van Vleck 78). However, while it is a fact that
Lindbergh’s goodwill flight and the subsequent rise of the Pan American Airways drove the
ascendance of the United States as aerial power and the aviation craze among Americans, the
Caribbean’s “transportation backwardness” remained unresolved (Salvatore 680). In the case
of Haiti, Lindbergh’s visit only led to the modification of the Marine’s military airfields into
hubs for civilian air travel but had little effect on the development of aviation among the
general Haitian population.
During his goodwill flight, the mainstream newspapers had likened Lindbergh to
Christopher Columbus, a conqueror and discoverer of new lands. Similarly, as Paris’s flight
neared, black newspapers began to focus on the name of Paris’s plane, Toussaint
L’Ouverture, titled after Haiti’s legendary anti-colonial leader. The tone of reports and articles
highlighted the revolutionary act, symbolized by the plane’s name, of a black Haitian pilot
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flying to his still-occupied homeland and defying the United States’ control over the Haitian
skies (“Group Lauds Paris for Proposed Hop,” “N.Y. Aviator Plans Haiti Hop,” “Throng at
Dedication of Airship”). In essence then, the black press designated Paris as black Lindbergh
and depicted him as a liberator of the air and a conqueror of a technology previously
associated with and dominated by white aviators. He was bringing to his homeland the gospel
of aviation as well as its military potential. Paris’s flight can thus be read as liberation of Haiti
from the US aerial power. Paris arrived in Haiti accompanied by a Pan-American mail plane
at a time when Pan-Am was expanding its “empire of the air” (Roorda 270) and with a white
co-pilot. In other words, he showed that a black man could pilot a plane the same way
American occupants had done. Moreover, he arrived in a plane named after a Haitian leader
who, too, had previously mastered warfare, an art in which white colonizers had also been
believed to have an upper hand over the colonized.
Upon arrival in Haiti, Paris – like Lindbergh before him – was received with military
honors. He was welcomed by Haiti’s chef de guerre, paraded around the statue of Jean
Jacques Dessalines, one of the founding fathers of the Republic of Haiti, had a street as well
as a sporting arena named after him, and was invited to the Parliament, the Presidential
palace, and celebrated at numerous festive events (Bernard 156, “Fete en L’honneur de
L’Aviateur Paris,” “L’Aviateur Paris,” “Soirée Desiré Paris,” “Le Festival de Samedi Soir,”
“Propos Humides,” “La Chambre et Desire Paris,” “La Reception de L’aviateur Leon D.
Paris”). Early newspaper reports also let Paris describe his flight in much detail and with
technical terminology so as to showcase his expertise – his subsequent exhibition flights
around Haiti then confirmed the ever-spreading legend of his skills (“Paris Survole Jacmel,”
“L’aviateur Paris sur Jacmel”). Along with his technical, mechanical, piloting, and navigating
skills, Haitian papers also praised Paris’s patriotism as he was promoting aviation across the
island; as well as his race consciousness in emphasizing the importance of success in aviation
169
for his people’s racial pride (“L’aviateur Paris sur Jacmel”). Haitian president Stenio Vincent
even received a letter of congratulations from J.A. Rogers and other supporters and donors
from the ICAA, in which Paris was recognized as a hero for all Africa-descended people (“Le
Courrier des Etats-Unis et L’aviateur Paris”).
Paris was most interested in promoting aviation in Haiti through education, echoing
the black press’s goodwill message and expanding it internationally. In interviews for Le
Nouvelliste and Le Matin, the aviator explained that along with its anti-imperialist message,
the name of his plane also symbolized Haiti’s entrance into the aviation age. Paris saw his
success in aviation as a sign of his country’s progress, prosperity, and dignity. Consequently,
he expressed hope to establish the country’s first aviation school as an “indispensable” part of
Haiti’s future independent army and later began calling for the establishment of a full-fledged
Haitian air force (“Interview de F.D. Paris,” “Un Quart d’Heure,” “L’aviateur Paris Nous
Visite”). In reaction, Le Nouvelliste’s editorial staff began to lobby for Paris to be promoted to
the rank of Colonel; especially since Lindbergh, too, had been promoted by the US Army
after his goodwill flights (“La Modestie de Desire F. Paris”). Paris thus brought black
aviation’s complete goodwill message with him: education, international cooperation, and
military employment played a central role in Paris’s vision for the Haitian revolution in
aviation.
Paris’s ambitions – supported financially and later at least verbally by his New Yorkbased
donors – were symbolic of as well as a reaction to the political situation in Haiti in
1932. The aviator arrived on the island at a moment when his homeland was in the process of
Haitinization, or transfer of power to Haitians. Various administrative departments, including
the military, were being transferred to Haitian officials, which would pave the way for Haiti
to become a sovereign, self-governing nation again by August 1934. For Paris – and the
opposition newspapers supporting him – to lobby for the establishment of a Haitian air force
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went beyond mere transfer of power from the US colonial government to Haitian bureaucrats
and elites. It was a declaration of power; an attempt at reversal of Lindbergh’s demonstration
of US imperial and technological dominance during his flights in the late 1920s. It was also a
direct challenge to the Marines’ control of Haitian airfields and air space. To confirm its
radical stance towards the US occupation and its support of Paris’s visions for Haitian
aviation, Le Nouvelliste published a series of editorials in mid-May of 1932, in which it urged
Vincent to establish an aviation school within the Haitian military as soon as possible.
Drawing from a seventeen-year experience with the occupation and acknowledging the fact
that the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor, was rapidly building an air force, the
newspaper stressed the crucial role of aviation for Haiti’s future defense and independence
(“Que Fait-on de Paris,” “Ce Qu’il Faudrait Faire pour Leon D. Paris,” “Il Faut des Actes”).
At first, the Haitian government embraced aviation. On May 20, 1932, Paris was
named first lieutenant in Garde d’Haiti and was assigned the task to organize an aviation
school (“Dans le Theatre,” “Le Lieutenant Desire Paris,” “Desire Paris est Nommé Premier
Lieutenant”). Enthusiastically, Le Matin then proclaimed him the first Haitian military pilot; a
man in charge of Haiti’s air flotilla, who will integrate an aviation unit into the country’s
military, and train Haiti’s future pilots (“Propos Humides”). However, despite the official
ceremonies of putting Paris in charge of the aviation unit of the Garde d’Haiti, the
government never delivered on its promises. There was confusion whether Paris’s position
was even real or mere sham. Finally, in late May, Paris announced that he was leaving the
country, disgusted, and disenchanted with its politics and inactivity in aviation matters (“Leon
Desire Paris,” “Leon Desire Paris s’en Va”). The Courier confirmed Paris’s planned return to
the US in its July 30 issue (“Aviator Paris Will Come Back”). With dreams of ushering Haiti
into the aviation age crushed, Paris, on leave of absence from the Garde d’Haiti, arrived in
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New York in October 1932. As the NYAN quipped in its report, the aviator’s future plans –
much like the development of Haiti’s aviation – remained “uncertain” (“Airman Returns”).
In the end, Paris’s plans could never take off, because he had to deal with conditions
similar to those that black pilots faced in the United States. He had to rely on himself as the
Haitian government was reluctant to invest in developing an aviation unit within its military
despite the process of Haitinization. Although the NYAN reported in 1935 that Paris became a
lieutenant at the local École Militaire and was named “director of the Haitian Military
Aviation School” (“Aviator Paris Will Come Back to United States,” “Heads Flyers,”
“Airman Returns”), no other sources confirm this piece of information. In fact, Paris would
disappear from the Haitian and U.S. press after 1935. He died, forgotten, in New York in
1983 (Bernard, Damas, Dejoie 157).
In existing seminal monographs dealing with black aviation, Paris’s flight has been
relegated to a brief note; the Haitian is merely mentioned in passing and his story has never
been told in detail. As this dissertation uncovers and presents here, however, Paris’s flight
represents not only the first successful achievement in black aviators’ ambitions to fly abroad,
but also functions as a tangible, but largely forgotten, example of the vigorous cultural
exchange and political cooperation among black America, migrant groups in Harlem, and
West Indian countries themselves during the Harlem Renaissance. The historic flight
demonstrates black aviation’s potential for encouraging anti-colonial and anti-imperial
sentiments and promoting black inter- and trans-nationalism. Aviation helped erase or at least
bridge distances between black America and other nations and peoples of color in the
Americas. Finally, Paris himself is a testament to the crucial role played by West Indian
migrants in the rich cultural, social, and political life of the Harlem Renaissance.
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Individual Haitian flyers tried following in Leon Paris’s footsteps and went to study in
the United States. In 1936, the NYAN reported that Ernst Rey, a 19-year old son of the
municipal medical director of Port-au-Prince, had earned a private pilot’s license in Texas
(“Gets Wings”). Then, in May 1937, the Pittsburgh Courier and the NYAN carried the
photographs of Capt. Duly Lamothe, district military commander of the Haitian National
Guard at Jeremie, and Lieut. Edouard Roy of the Haitian National Guard, who was pursuing a
two-year aviation course at Roosevelt Field in Long Island; just like Leon Paris (“To Study,”
“When Soldiers Meet”). The two students were popular guests at Harlem parties and made
headlines quarreling over a “charming Harlem widow” (“Swing Music Goes to Haiti,”
“Haitian Army Officer Decorated with a Black Eye”). It is unclear what happened to
Lamothe, but in 1938, Edouard Roy repeated Paris’s feat and flew from New York to Port-auPrince,
solo. (“Haitian Birdman Weds Rich Texan”). Upon his arrival, Roy was named the
“black Lindbergh,” thereby replacing the memory of a legendary white aviator with a fresh
image of Haiti’s very own flying ace. (“Haitian Air Force”). A few years later, Roy completed
Paris’s decade-old mission by becoming the first head of Haiti’s air force. Finally, in 1943,
the Baltimore Afro-American reported on two graduates of the Haitian Ecole Militaire and
one former mechanic in the Haitian Air Force, who had all become part of the Tuskegee
Airmen. Sgt. Raymond Cassagnol, Lieut. Philippe Celestin, Lieut. Alix Pasquet were depicted
in their military uniforms and short profiles of their education were given (“3 Haitians
Learning to Fly”). In the end, five Haiti-born pilots graduated from the Tuskegee program:
Ludovic Audant, Cassagnol, Eberle Guilbaud, Nicolas Pelissier, and Pasquet45
(“Tuskegee
Airmen Pilot Listing”).
Paris’s achievement also inspired other black aviators in the United States and
launched a new era in black aviation history. In covering Paris’s flight, the Defender
45
Pasquet died in 1958 during a coup attempt against Haiti’s dictator, Francois Duvalier (Heinl
439).
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introduced a new term in its aviation coverage; one that would become a catchphrase for any
future bona fide flights by black pilots: the goodwill flight. While it was during the 1920s and
the early 1930s that the goodwill message of aviation in the black press had been formed, the
term goodwill flight seems to have been used first in reports on Paris; perhaps because of
Paris’s success. Indeed, it was not an original term, as Charles Lindbergh has used it for his
cross-country tour in 1927. At any rate, black good will flights became an extension of what
has been termed a good will message here – in essence, they were intended to spread the
message of the importance of aviation education and job opportunities opening in the field to
people of color around the United States and, possibly, abroad. Once Paris had succeeded and
thus defined what a goodwill flight in terms of black aviation was and demonstrated what
type of effect and reaction it may engender, the black press would consequently label all
successful flights by black pilots as good will ones.
3.6.3 Writing the First Transcontinental Flight and Erasing Another Boundary
The first transcontinental flight by black aviators, carried out in late 1932, was also called a
goodwill one by the black press. Coming mere months after Paris’s historic success and the
recent death of Charles E. James, it received considerable coverage in the black press.
Especially so in the Courier during Robert L. Vann’s mission to persuade black America to
switch its allegiance to the Democratic party and its presidential candidate, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt – the aviators even dropped fliers supporting Roosevelt over towns in
Pennsylvania. During the fall of 1932, black newspapers brimmed with ecstatic articles and
essays on African Americans’ future in aviation and the promise that Roosevelt’s election – or
Herbert Hoover’s end – would hold for African Americans. For, on September 21, 1932,
James Herman Banning, pilot, and Thomas C. Allen, mechanic, took off from Los Angeles –
and landed nineteen days later at Roosevelt Field, Long Island (Jakeman 665, Broadnax 18,
Scott and Womack 37-8), completing the first transcontinental flight by black pilots.
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The city edition of the Courier did not announce the beginning of the flight until
October 1, when it briefly informed on page four that Banning and Allen were attempting to
“scan the country in record time” (“Fliers Heads East on Record Hop”). One week later,
however, in “Daring Aviators Near Goal,” the paper reported on the flight with two large
photographs, all-capital headlines, and a detailed article. According to the text, the aviators
were flying 75m/h and were backed by no organization. The Courier’s reporter accompanied
by Robert L. Vann, nicknamed Banning and Allen the “sun-tanned editions of the Lindy of
yesteryear” as well as the “glorious hoboes of the uncharted skies;” hence the flyers’
nickname “The Flying Hobos.” The following week’s front page included another large
photograph of the two flyers and a large headline “Aviators End First Cross-Country Flight.”
The Courier informed that the hop had spanned 3,613 miles, 41 hours and 27 minutes of
actual flying time and that, upon landing, the aviators received “the conqueror’s welcome.”
The flyers made history and the Courier was ecstatic with praise and superlatives, employing
the language previously used in white newspapers’ coverage of Lindbergh’s achievements.
Banning and Allen would be featured on the pages of the Courier until March 193346
as the newspaper hoped to take advantage of the historic feat and draw in more readers than
the Defender, which severely lagged in the coverage of the first transcontinental flight. The
Courier’s theater and screen page, for example, provided a list of the events that Banning and
Allen had attended in Harlem after their arrival, the people they had met, and the praise that
had been heaped upon them. Among others, they had met Captain Edison McVey, Hubert
Julian’s former pilot, member of UNIA’s flying corps, and the Negro World’s aviation
columnist; William H. Davis of the NYAN, perhaps black aviation’s most generous
benefactor, and Cab Calloway, a regular performer at Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club
46
Lonnie Bunch claims that the aviators wrote their texts for the paper for nine weeks. Rather,
evidence suggests that texts about the aviators as well as their serial featured in the Courier for nine
weeks.
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(“Newsy Newsettes”). Floyd J. Calvin celebrated the flight by exclaiming that “it is certainly
wholesome and stimulating to know that we have heroes who have come to light in the very
worst of times” (“Calvin’s Digest”), underscoring the fact that Banning and Allen had had to
rely on other, often white people’s generosity in providing them with fuel and food on their
journey because of the Great Depression.
To capitalize even more on the image of the two heroes that the paper itself had been
fostering – employing the most crusading of tones during its coverage – and to provide the
flyer’s old plane with a new engine for their return trip, the Courier invited the aviators to
perform in Pittsburgh in November (“Noted Aviators in Exhibition at Bettis Airport”). The
performance was successful, the refurbished airplane was named “The Spirit of the Pittsburgh
Courier” in reference to Charles Lindbergh’s legendary plane, and some of the paper’s staff
even ventured to take a plane ride in an effort to promote aviation (“Banning, Allen to Fly
Courier Plane at Game,” “Coast to Coast Aviator Thrills Hundreds,” “Up in the Air”).
More importantly, though, the Courier saw an opportunity to bolster its sales and
promote black aviation even further when it announced that on October 22, the paper would
begin publishing an exclusive serialized account of the “epochal flight” (“Advertisement”).
Along with giving interviews for articles about their flight, Banning and Allen would thus
also become writers of aviation for a short period of time, taking the baton from Powell and
Peck, and would shape the goodwill message of aviation directly. The four-part serial “Coastto-Coast,
Via the Aerial Highways” assumed a similar tone and purpose as James Holt Peck’s
three essays in 1930: relating the beauty and thrill of flying to the reader. Banning and Allen
began each text by welcoming its readers, inviting them into the cockpit, and then proceeded
to describe individual parts of the trip in first person as if they had been explaining it to a copassenger
onboard of the plane. The four texts presented flying as a safe and enjoyable
activity which required complex training. In the end, though, it was worth it, Banning and
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Allen seemed to be saying. Even more importantly, the narrative showcased the flyers’
technical, mechanical, as well as flying skills. Despite numerous forced landings and
technical difficulties, the flyers’ ingenuity and creativity allowed them to continue their flight,
eventually land in New York, and relate their experience to the black public.47
The texts
served as a gripping recontextualization – written by black writers themselves – of the myth
that back flyers could achieve anything ground-breaking in the field of aviation, while the
overall newspaper coverage transvalued their poverty and lack of funds into a heroic tale of
aviation crusaders.
The essays must have been a success – reaching perhaps more than a quarter of a
million black readers (Scott and Womack 37). As a result, the Courier commissioned
Banning to write two more pieces for the paper later in November and December, again
advertising the texts’ exclusivity (“The Day I Sprouted Wings Advertisement”). Banning’s
December essay on his early flying days was an exciting short story of trials and errors before
he could fly solo (“The Day I Sprouted Wings”). His “The Negro and the Airplane,” however,
assumed a much more critical tone than the essays he had co-authored with Allen. Likening
his profession to African American soldiers, scientists, and laborers, Banning presented
aviation as a serious endeavor and explained that aviation constituted yet another step in the
rapid development of transportation. With only ten licensed pilots, Banning said, the position
of the African American community “in the new industry [is] relegated to the rear.” Most
importantly, he exhorted his readers to decide whether they were going to “match [black
aviators’] skills with our dollars or […] joke at the efforts.” In conclusion, he asked “Are our
pilots going to fly crates or airplanes?”
47
Jack Lynn rewrote the story into Hallelujah Flight (1989), based on Thomas C. Allen’s personal
account as well as various newspaper clippings.
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In berating his readers for lack of support of their community’s progress, Banning was
deploying one of the oldest tropes in black press’ coverage of aviation: decrying lack of
funding. It also highlighted the fact that black aviators were representing the race to the rest of
the world. Written at the end of November, the essay’s pointed critique was perhaps the result
of Banning and Allen’s unfortunate end in Pittsburgh. The two flyers had crashed their
refurbished plane and had had to take the bus back to California (“Flying Hoboes Start Back,”
“In Crash Now,” Bunch 102).
It is important to note that in their coverage of Banning and Allen’s flight, the Courier
and the Defender did not only celebrate the two flyers and the advancement of black aviation,
but also indirectly challenged Hubert Julian, his self-presentation, and, somewhat shockingly,
their own yellow journalism. In an article for the Defender, for example, Banning explained
that Allen and he had “left Los Angeles without any publicity, and we arrived in New York
minus the ballyhoo. We did not name our plane, or state our intentions.” Although one of the
reasons why this was so had been the lack of funding on the two flyers’ part and initial lack of
interest on the black community’s part, Banning was indirectly objecting to the fact that the
black press preferred to provide space for Hubert Julian’s claims and bold plans, rather than
follow the everyday toiling of honest black aviators. “[T]oo often individuals tend to make
announcements and then fall down. We preferred to do the stunt, and then let the others herald
it,” Banning added. The paper described Banning and Allen as sincere, unheralded (“Two Fly
from Coast to Coast in Old Airplane”).
Floyd J. Calvin, Hubert Julian’s main supporter in the Courier, noted, too, that
Banning and Allen were “of a serious and studious turn of mind. They are quiet and
unobtrusive, not flashy and gay. They look like what you would expect fliers to look like”
(“Calvin’s Digest”). In this way, not only did Banning and Allen manage to represent aviation
– in successful flying and writing – as a serious profession and transform – or reverse – the
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image of black aviators, but they also disabused the black press’ readership of the notion that
Julian and his flamboyance represented black aviation. Unlike Julian, Banning and Allen
achieved a historic feat, and were rewarded with deserved publicity.
Importantly, the aftermath of Banning and Allen’s successful flight and extensive
coverage had a military dimension as well – after all, the two flyers, and Leon Paris before
them, had just reached a crucial milestone and thus narrowed the racial technological gap in
aviation. The Courier published an article in January 1933 by a student from the West
Virginia State College, an institution that would be among the first to participate in the CPTP
in 1939. Entitled “Man Sprouts Wings,” the text was “published with the hope of advancing
the cause of aviation.” The Negro youth of today is becoming air-minded,” argued the paper,
“and what with the epochal cross-country flight of Banning and Allen, this article is deemed
extremely timely.” In other words, the newspaper was adding yet another piece to its growing
aviation campaign. Importantly, while the article provided a truncated history of aviation in
the first third of the text, the rest also discussed the impact of aviation on warfare. It described
the employment of planes in the Balkan war of 1911-12 and World War I, implying that the
rapid progress of civil aviation that was being witnessed was accompanied with similar
advancements in aerial warfare. Implicitly, then, the article and the editor’s note
accompanying it tied the progress in black aviation, symbolized by Banning and Allen’s
flight, to hopes of having black military pilots in the future.
The outlook of black aviation was thus hopeful at the end of 1932 and beginning of
1933. As Robert J. Jakeman puts it, “the Banning-Allen flight ushered in a new era in black
aviation” (66). Unfortunately, as with Charles E. James, the hopes invested into Banning’s
future leadership in the field were short-lived. On February 5, Banning died in a plane crash
when piloted by an inexperienced white student-pilot. The Courier devoted a large portion of
its front page on February 11 to an article on Banning’s successes, the description of the
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accident, and an interview with two white men in charge of the Bettis airport in Pittsburgh
who commended on the late flyer’s skills (“Banning Dies in Air Crash,” “Loses Pal,” “Local
Airport Officials Pay Flyer Fine Tribute”). The news, as Scott and Womack observe, was
viewed as “similar in many ways to that of Bessie Coleman […] and with a similar sense of
loss” (39); especially since it came quite soon after Charles E. James’s death in August 1932.
As with Coleman, the Courier explained that Banning’s death was a white pilot’s fault and
that Banning, like Coleman, could not have done anything to save his life (“Blame White
Flier in Quiz of Banning’s Death”). The news was so shocking for the African American
community that the Courier even published a short article relating how “ill and destitute”
Banning’s wife was (“Mourned Aviator’s Wife is Destitute”). In a report from Banning’s
funeral, the paper informed that the flyer’s friends, led by William J. Powell, were planning to
purchase a monument for the late aviator (“Plan Monument to Banning”).
Although Banning had not carried or presented himself as an aviation crusader – the
same way that other black aviation pioneers had before him – did not stop the black press
from portraying him as one. The Courier printed a cartoon on February 11 entitled “May His
Spirit Never Die!” in which Banning’s ghost is hovering over a wrecked plane labeled “For
the Advancement of Negroes in Aviation.” Along with it, an editorial titled “J. Herman
Banning” called the pilot’s transcontinental trip a “goodwill” one and pointed out that
Banning had helped distribute flyers for the Roosevelt campaign while travelling the East
coast. The text portrayed Banning as fearless, intelligent, and a trailblazer. Two weeks later,
Harry Levette, an Associated Negro Press reporter and author of numerous articles on
aviation in California as well as the poem “Call of the Wings,” wrote “Herman Banning: An
Ode to a Great Aviator.” In it, he described Banning’s transcontinental flight as a “race
against time [and] the scoffers [and] race prejudices.” Banning was depicted as a martyr and
Levette exhorted his readers to “put black men in the great Pullmans of the air; black men
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flying the US mail; black men piloting the myriad busy ships of commerce […] for his sake
and for Bessie Coleman’s sake.” Finally, the Defender reminded its readers in an editorial that
the African American community needed to provide more support for martyrs such as
Banning as well as for other young men and women trying to make it as aviators.
“Somehow,” asserted the text, “we have not yet learned to profit by our mistakes and the
mistakes of others” (“Our Duty to Aviation”).
Fortunately for the future of black aviation, Banning’s death – as well as the coverage
of black aviation in the black press which gave space for aviators to promote their field and
depicted successful aviators as crusaders – provided inspiration and impetus for new aviators.
In response to the Courier’s editorial on Banning’s passing, Dr. A.E. Forsythe wrote a letter
to the editor, in which he praised the paper’s treatment of aviation: “I wish to highly
commend your paper upon the stand it has taken on Negro aviation in the past and especially
for the way your paper handled the recent unfortunate Banning incident. In both your news
and editorial column you have made every aviation enthusiast […] feel that yours is the most
air-minded publication in the country.” A pilot’s-license holder himself, Forsythe explained
that even successful flyers of the past were struggling to make ends meet during the economic
crisis. It was therefore crucial that the Courier informed the African American community on
the hardships that black aviators had to experience trying to advance black aviation (“An Ode
to Banning”). Inspired by Banning’s success and the Courier’s devotion to technical progress
and aviation, Forsythe would become a source of headlines in aviation coverage for the
following two years.
3.6.4 Forsythe and Anderson’s Goodwill Flights for Interracial Understanding
In early July 1933, the Courier published Forsythe’s plea for funds for a transcontinental
round-trip. The flight was being backed by the Atlantic City Board of Trade, as Forsythe,
according to his nephew’s account in Black Flight, wanted to engage Atlantic City’s white
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community in the project because he felt that “we won’t accomplish anything if only the
coloreds are involved” (166). At the same time, Forsythe established the National Negro
Aeronautical Society, which would sponsor the flight. The organization was asking for
$2,000, assuring the public through Forsythe that “this is nothing like that fake Harlem flight
to Liberia,” thus distancing itself from Hubert Julian’s notorious efforts (“Seek Support for
Airplane Project”).
Forsythe’s organization raised the necessary funds, the cross-country flight became
another successful story of black aviators, and the Defender, probably sensing a shift in black
aviation’s fortune joined the Courier in covering Forsythe and Anderson’s epochal hop. The
Courier ran an ecstatic article on July 22, in which it remarked that Anderson had used to
teach Forsythe how to fly and noted that the flyers were on schedule, having visited
Pittsburgh and Cleveland on their way. Forsythe and Anderson landed safely in Glendale,
California in 33 hours and 15 minutes (“Forsythe-Anderson Arrive on Coast after Record
Flight,” “Cross-Country Flight Now On,” “Coast Flyers Leave Kansas”). The Defender also
mentioned the name of Forsythe and Anderson’s plane, “The Pride of Atlantic City,” which
the flyers had chosen in order to attract the city’s white Board of Commerce to support their
flight. The name also referred back to Charles Lindbergh’s legendary plane “The Spirit of St.
Louis,” and, according to Black Flight, it was meant to “appeal to another cities [sic] pride
and turn [the flight] into a state project, not just a one-city project” (“Flyers Nearing Goal,”
Black Flight 167). Forsythe and Anderson’s goodwill flight was, in other words, designed to
invite even more publicity and interest in black aviation than ever before.
And attract it did – the flyers were given ceremonial welcomes in Los Angeles, where
2,000 people led by William J. Powell were awaiting them, as well as in Pittsburgh and
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Chicago.48
The African American community was, indeed, becoming air-minded and an
editorial in the NYAN asserted that the two aviators “are not Lindberghs, Balbos, Mollisons or
Posts, but they are heroes worthy of admiration and assistance. May their tribe increase”
(“The Air Trail Blazers”). The aviators also carried a goodwill letter from the mayor of
Atlantic City to the mayor of Los Angeles, thereby finishing a task that Joel Ace Foreman had
not been able to complete in 1927 (“Cross-Country Flyers Stop in City,” “Westerners Joyous
at Flyers’ Success,” “Chicago Gives Welcome to Coast-to-Coast Flyers,” Black Flight 188).
The biggest welcome was given at Atlantic City and Newark, however. The mayor of Atlantic
City and other white and black dignitaries, along with 2,000 spectators, presented Forsythe
and Anderson with commemorative medals, organized a parade with “uniformed
representatives of Veterans of Foreign Wars of the Rheims post and Kenneth Hawkins post,
who constituted the guard of honor.” The flyers were later hosted by the New Jersey
governor, too (“Throngs Greet Air Aces,” “Atlantic City Had Dinner for Flyers,” “Coast to
Coast Flyers Feted by N.J. Governor”). Black aviation was thus being celebrated and
appreciated by both white and black communities, fostering and improving interracial
understanding.
It is important to note, too, that Albert Forsythe was not only changing the image of
black aviation as a frivolous activity, but was also replacing Hubert Julian as the AfroCaribbean
representative of black aviation in the United States. Forsythe had arrived from the
Bahamas to study at the Tuskegee Institute, where he had become a student-chauffeur for and
mentee of Booker T. Washington himself. He had graduated in 1913 and subsequently earned
a medical degree from McGill University in Montreal – which Julian had also claimed to be
an alumnus of. Forsythe had been a fan of aviation since his childhood and so when his
income had allowed him to become a pilot and purchase a plane, he asked Alfred Anderson to
48
Forsythe and Anderson were given a special performance of Powell’s play upon their arrival.
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teach him, which led to a successful partnership that would change the face of black aviation
(Black Flight 1-120, Scott and Womack 40). In 1934, Forsythe – following in the footsteps of
Leon Paris, another Afro-Caribbean pilot –continued to break barriers for black aviation when
he proposed a “Latin American goodwill flight,” partially sponsored by the city of Newark
(“Newark to Honor Famous Aviators”).
The cross-country flight by Forsythe and Anderson had brought considerable attention
to black aviation and demonstrated the importance of goodwill tours in raising publicity and
interest in the African American community’s endeavors in the field. It demonstrated what
successful representation of black America – the very objective of Harlem Renaissance’s
ideologues and artists – in aviation may lead to. As Anderson noted upon landing in Atlantic
City, “all along the route of the flight great interest had been shown in the project” and, more
importantly, “a better interracial understanding had been brought about, as well as greatly
increased self-confidence and self-esteem among the members of the race, especially among
the youth” (“Throngs Greet Air Aces with Tremendous Ovation”) In Atlantic City, the flyers
were celebrated by a crowd of 15,000 at one event (“Coast Flyers Given Tribute”).
The flight did not only inspire young African Americans to engage in aviation – a
message that the black press had been trying to convey for a decade – but it also indicated that
sponsorship of black aviation events and feats was a worthwhile investment. As a result of the
transcontinental flight, Forsythe’s nephew notes, Anderson established “a flying school and a
charter flying service” near Philadelphia – the school was designed to “train more coloreds
and create more pressures for change,” while “the charter service would show that there was
an income potential” in aviation (Black Flight 203). Forsythe and Anderson thus embodied
and spread the goodwill message that aviation education and endeavors brought about
employment and advanced the community in the white population’s as well as the black
community’s eyes.
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“The airplane,” explained James Herman Banning in “The Negro and the Airplane”
in 1932, “has made neighbors of every nation on the globe.” And it was to United States’
neighbors that Forsythe and Anderson’s sights turned in 1934. First, the two flew from
Atlantic City to Montreal (Broadnax 18) and then announced in March 1934 that preparations
were on the way to carry out a Pan-American flight later in the year. Black newspapers
reported that Dr. Stanley Lucas, the head of the National Negro Aeronautical Society, had left
for Haiti and Latin American countries to forge “another definite link […] in the promotion of
a proposed good-will flight to Pan-American countries in the interests of the Race.” The Race
Aviation Promotion Society of America had started raising funds for the flight and other
groups were expected to join in the effort (“Dr. Stanley Lucas Off on South American Tour,”
“Good Will Hop to Pan America Budding”). The goodwill message of black aviation was
about to go international, beyond Haiti and Canada.
The reason why Forsythe and Anderson, heavily supported by various organizations,
decided to deploy their goodwill message in the West Indies and Latin America was to
combat racial prejudice and fight for civil rights. As Jason Parker explains, the Harlem
Renaissance – brought about by the migration of African Americans as well as West Indians
to the American North – was a precursor of the transnational black activism of Caribbean
decolonization in the 1940s and the 1950s as the two groups “were building networks for
promoting black freedom” (98-100). In 1920, the West Indian population in New York
comprised a quarter of the city’s black population; by 1930, it was still a fifth (Foner 4). The
cultural, intellectual, and commercial exchange between various groups of people of color in
New York was rich and it was perhaps here that Forsythe, himself a West Indian from the
Bahamas, and Anderson learned more about the plight of people of African descent in the
region.
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The West Indies were dealing with a strong legacy of colonialism and slavery, as well
as tensions between the Hispanic and African cultures. As Jason M. Colby explains, “slavery
and Spanish colonial rule left a powerful legacy of hierarchy and inequality [as] Hispanic
elites generally shared white American prejudice toward peoples of African and indigenous
descent” (9). Black workers and immigrants across the region and in Central America were
looked down upon and maltreated by Hispanic workers, especially in the shrinking job market
of the Great Depression, and were also perceived as “inseparable from the problem of U.S.
domination, […] Yankee imperialism and racial degradation” (151). As Roosevelt’s Good
Neighbor policy of non-intervention gradually returned power to the Hispanic elites in many
of the region’s countries, this shift came “hand in hand with the rise of authoritarian regimes
and the cresting of anti-black xenophobia” (177). Rafael Trujillo’s massacre in 1937 of
approximately 12,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic would represent the era’s
climax of such tensions and racism.
The shared plight of people of African descent in the United States and the West
Indies, as well as Central and Latin America, was thus the driving force behind the proposed
Pan-American goodwill flight for improved interracial understanding. As Dr. Lucas explained
upon embarking to Haiti, “Many well-thinking people are beginning to realize that the
difficulties confronting us as a race are due to the fact that our aims and aspirations are so
little understood by other peoples.” Aviation was “a means of advancing the race [and] no
other method,” asserted Lucas, “can so effectively and at such small cost change the false
viewpoint and attitude that millions of people have toward the colored race as the carrying out
of the goodwill program.” “Improved inter-racial relations,” added Lucas, “are as essential to
us as protective legislation” (“Good Will Hop to Pan America Budding”).
George S. Schuyler concurred with Lucas when he argued that “the only way
effectively to smash the inferior-Negro propaganda is to disprove it by deeds.” Indirectly
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criticizing the image of black aviation that Hubert Julian had fostered, Schuyler explained that
Forsythe and Anderson “are not mere parachute jumpers or men who only fly off at the
mouth, but aviators with solid accomplishments behind them in the best tradition of Bessie
Coleman.” Schuyler urged his readers to help the flight financially, too, arguing that “with
$100,000 or more behind them they [Forsythe and Anderson] will bring glory to the entire
group” (“Views and Reviews”). In this way, Lucas and Schuyler first openly formulated the
anti-racist and civil rights dimension of the goodwill message of black aviation. At the same
time, they acknowledged the importance of fostering black aviation’s international and
decidedly Pan-African dimension. Through aviation, African Americans were cooperating
with their Afro-Caribbean counterparts in bringing about Alain Locke’s vision that black
America would lead other nations and peoples of color into contact with the twentieth-century
civilization.
The flight was to be, given its scope and importance, a serious undertaking. Forsythe
decided to transform the National Negro Aeronautical Society into a more fittingly-named
The Interracial Goodwill Aviation Committee, appointing Mary J. Washington as the
publicity director and establishing a Flight Advisory Board – the newly-formed group
organized a Flight Boosters Club which, among other activities, sold buttons to raise funds for
the flight (Black Flight 205-6). To add to the project’s credibility, Forsythe asked, for
example, Oscar DePriest and Eugene Kinckle Jones from the Urban League to serve as
members of the Advisory Board. In adding Jones, Forsythe aligned himself with one of the
most influential power brokers in the world of the Harlem Renaissance. One of the founding
members of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Jones had helped Charles S. Johnson launch the
Opportunity magazine in 1923 and later served as a member of Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet
(Gates, Higginbotham 472-3).
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The black press reported in August that the West Indian Federation of America and
the Caribbean Union lent their support to the flight as they hoped to make it “a fitting climax
to the celebrations that are already under way to commemorate the centenary of emancipation
in the British West Indies.” The emancipation was a result of the Slavery Abolition Act of
1833 and so it was only fitting that at a time when Hispanic and black workers clashed in the
West Indies and black workers were ostracized, black aviators would fly through the region
spreading their goodwill and mutual understanding. To appreciate the support of the two
organizations and to underscore the importance of black aviation in improving interracial
relations, Forsythe made a speech entitled “Aviation and the Destiny of Our Race” at a
celebration of the emancipation’s anniversary in Harlem. Finally, the New Jersey State
Federation of Colored Women’s clubs asked that the flyers relay a message from them to the
“women of the West Indies and the Latin America countries” (“Race Flyers Plan South
American Good Will Tour,” “Good Will Flyers to Get Royal Welcome,” “Emancipation
Anniversary Observed by West Indians,” “Promise Help for 2 Airmen,” “New Deal in B.W.I.
Sought”). More and more groups became invested in the goodwill message of black aviation
and, as with Leon Paris’s flight to Haiti at a period of political tensions between the United
States and his homeland, the flight was transformed into a serious political endeavor, too.
Perhaps as a consequence, the articles in black papers on preparations for the flight
were devoid of sensationalism. Unlike Hubert Julian’s proposed flights, the Pan-American
goodwill hop was gaining credibility: William H. Davis, publisher of the NYAN and a
longtime aviation benefactor, announced his paper’s support for the flight. Congressman Isaac
Bacharach of New Jersey announced that he would facilitate assistance from the director of
aeronautics of the Department of Commerce and from the State Department. A World War I
ace sent a recommendation letter on behalf of Forsythe and Anderson to the director of the
United States Bureau of Aeronautics. Various officials from the destination countries had sent
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welcome letters and assurances that they were ready to receive the flyers (“Paper to Aid
Negro Flyers”). And the NYAN urged its readers to express financial support (“The Goodwill
Flight”).
For Forsythe and Anderson needed a new plane for their long hop. They flew to St.
Louis in August 1934 to pick up their new Lambert monocoupe – while waiting at the factory,
the flyers met Charles Lindbergh and discussed their planned route and other details with him
(“Aviators Talk to Lindy”). With the new plane, they made fundraising stops in nine eastern
cities. While fundraising in Chicago, for example, they met Duke Kweisi Kuntu, who was
“anxious to encourage aviation in West Africa” and suggested that “the West African
Aborigines Society would aid in sponsoring [the flyers’] coming in 1935 and especially for
the Great World’s Fair there in 1938” (“Aviators Pause Here to Tell Chicagoans of Flight,”
“All Roads Led to Chicago,” “Cross-Country Flier Addresses Youth Meet,” “U.S. to S.
America Flyers Stop at County Airport,” “Ready for Their Hop to South America,”
“Goodwill Flight Program Booms as Plans Progress”). Clearly, as Samuel Broadnax puts it,
“the team of Anderson and Forsythe, as much as anyone, brought worldwide recognition to
the abilities and undeniable aviation skills of black pilots (18-19).
While Forsythe and Anderson were making fundraising appearances along the East
Coast, Mary J. Washington, their publicity director, was writing elaborate pieces on the
complexities of flying long-distance flights, highlighting the two flyers’ experience,
credibility, and technical prowess. In “Aviators Map Course for Latin American Flight,” for
example, Washington explained that the aviators had spent a year studying maps and charts as
well as aerial navigation. They had also been preparing to deliver their goodwill message in
French, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese and had been trying to secure all necessary
permissions from foreign governments as well as the various U.S. departments. Washington
also prepared a list of “the major newspapers on the islands that would be visited and a list of
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many in America to use for press releases [and] compiled a list of two ham radio operators for
each island” to relay information about the departures, arrivals, and weather (Black Flight
214). Furthermore, the Interracial Goodwill Aviation Committee had written a letter about the
proposed flight to President Roosevelt – his office encouraged the flight in its response,
which, in turn, facilitated the State Department’s cooperation in granting the flyers permission
to the various islands (210). The promotional campaign for the flight was thus reaping
success, which, at the same time, highlights the crucial role which the black press had been
playing in making black America air-minded.
The final promotional step to maximize the Pan-American flight’s impact was to
engage Forsythe’s alma mater, the Tuskegee Institute, in lending its founder’s name to the
flyers’ plane. According to Robert Jakeman, Forsythe’s committee had contacted Robert
Moton, the Institute’s president, in early September and a plane-christening date was set up
for September 15. F.D. Patterson, the future president of Tuskegee, and Col. Benjamin O.
Davis, Sr. were present, along with Nettie H. Washington, Booker T. Washington’s
granddaughter (9-10). Upon christening the flyers’ plane, an exhibition flight and photographs
were taken – Dr. Moton with Forsythe and Anderson, in front of the freshly-christened plane
appeared on the pages of black papers (“Pan-American Flyers to Name New Plane Booker T.
Washington,” “R.R. Moton to Christen Plane of Noted Flyers,” “Mrs. Moton Christens
Airplane,” “Booker T. Washington to Soar Over Americas”). The Institute also helped
organize a fundraising committee, collecting $350 (Jakeman 10). Finally, on November 2,
Mary J. Washington announced the final list of destinations, reiterated the purpose of the
goodwill flight, and provided examples of foreign dignitaries who had communicated their
excitement to welcome the aviators (“U.S. Approves Flight of Goodwill Aviators”). Among
them featured Marcus Garvey of Jamaica – he would finally see black aviators bridging the
racial technological gap and demonstrating that black pilots, too, could fly.
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The black press followed the actual goodwill flight as vigorously as its preparations. In
their brief but excited reports, black newspapers did not fail to highlight that Forsythe and
Anderson’s flight had been sanctioned by the president of the United States, the Department
of State, and the Department of Commerce, which imbued the hop with an official tone and
purpose (“Aviators Hop Off This Week,” “Good-Will Aviators Ready for Take-Off,” “Crowd
Welcomes Race Aviators in Nassau”). The flyers suffered a gas-line break in South Carolina,
but were waited upon by the Miami airport officials, and were later welcomed by a crowd of
5,000 in Nassau, Bahamas, Forsythe’s homeland. The papers then detailed how
ceremoniously spectators and officials welcomed the flyers in Kingston, Nassau, Havana,
Santiago, Port-au-Prince, Santo Domingo, San Juan, and Port of Spain (“Thousands Cheer
Fliers in Nassau, Havana, and Santiago,” “Winging Way to South America,” “Goodwill Fliers
Honored in Haiti,” “Pan American Flyers Are Given Ovation”).
While the black press provided little commentary in its numerous yet brief texts, Mary
J. Washington continued to celebrate the flyers in her articles. She wrote a long piece on
Forsythe’s homecoming in Nassau (“Pan-American Fliers Complete Water Hop”) and, once it
had become clear that the flight was in serious trouble after a number of “close calls” in Haiti
and the Dominican Republic (“Forsythe, Anderson Continue Flight,” “Welcome Good Will
Flyers in South America”), she began portraying the flyers as crusaders, spreading Booker T.
Washington’s racial uplift and their own goodwill message. As previous black aviation
pioneers, Forsythe and Anderson were depicted as martyrs for the advancement of the race.
The “two cool-headed, thorough, daring men,” Washington observed, “travel with hope for
the welfare of a race in their hearts.” They believe that “They are happiest // Who do the most
// For others.” This Booker T. Washington’s quotation, exclaimed Washington, “may guide
our men on courageously through this modern quest of the silver fleece and bring them safely
to the happy landing that is HOME” (“Hazards Dot Route of Good Wil Fliers”). One day
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later, the flyers crashed the “Booker T. Washington” in Port of Spain, Trinidad, hopelessly
damaging the plane and thus ending their flight only 4,000 miles into the 12,000 originally
planned (“Plane of Forsythe, Anderson Wrecked,” “Aviators in Crash; Plane Falls in Yard,”
“Crash Ends Good-Will Tour,” “Damaged in Forced Landing”).
Once black newspapers published the article on Forsythe and Anderson’s crash at the
end of December 1934, coverage of Forsythe and Anderson’s endeavors almost disappeared
from the Chicago and Pittsburgh weeklies, but continued in the NYAN. The Defender did
carry a photograph of the two flyers with the governor of the Virgin Islands in early January
1935 (“Wing Way to Virgin Islands”) and the Courier published a letter to the editor, which
praised the flyers for their fight for “greater accomplishments and goodwill for our people,
and increased respect, so that we who follow may be a little closer toward equality of
opportunity, regard and status” (“Proud of Flyers”). Despite the abrupt ending, the flight was
thus still seen as an achievement by many and the image of aviation may have finally been
transformed from a pastime into a civil rights cause. As Jakeman puts it, however,
“embarrassed, tired, and disappointed, the Goodwill fliers quietly returned to the United
States” and the abrupt ending to their visions eventually “ended Forsythe’s active
involvement in aviation (19-20). Anderson remained active and would later become an
instructor in the CPTP at Howard and Tuskegee.
Harlem still welcomed Forsythe and Anderson warmly in early March at a reception,
which demonstrated that the Pan-American goodwill flight had accomplished its raciallyuplifting
objective of building inter-racial relationships despite its unfortunate ending. At the
event held at the St. James Presbyterian church, Forsythe and Anderson, among other things,
presented the “addresses written on scrolls of parchment to the fliers in recognition of their
outstanding achievement in promoting international and interracial understanding and good
will” (“New York Gives Welcome to Pan-American Flyers,” “Good-Will Aviators Honored
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in Harlem”). Two editorials in the NYAN celebrated the flyers as well. One, titled “Aviators
Who Fly,” criticized Hubert Julian and lauded Forsythe and Anderson, while the other, “They
Did Not Fail,” explained to the readers that the flyers “won admiration and amity for
American Negroes in some ten countries. In addition, they gained experience which will serve
them in the future. There is no cause for lamentation or derision. Heroic efforts in noble
causes always bring their rewards.” The NYAN saw the flight as a success.
As further evidence of the flyers’ achievement, in his report for the December 1934
issue of the Tuskegee Messenger, Forsythe noted that “this trip is proving to be of great help
to the colored people of the United States and [of these West Indian countries]. Here […] it
makes the people of color feel very proud of themselves and is entirely changing their
conception of the colored people of the United States.” Forsythe observed that West Indians
thought of African Americans as very black because of the term “Negro” used by the
Associated Press, which in Spanish means black. They also believed that African Americans
were slaves or servants, could not vote, were unimportant and had never achieved anything of
substance. Consequently, black Americans were considered lazy and without aspirations.
Forsythe claimed that “this flight alone has immediately proven everyone of these ideas to be
false,” thereby recontextualizing existing prejudices against African Americans’ technical and
technological prowess. “It would have been even better if we had been both very dark,”
closed Forsythe his report in a joking manner (“The Good Will Fliers in the West Indies”).
Despite technical failures and an abrupt ending, the flight did achieve what in spirit it set out
to do: through a historic achievement in aviation, a cutting-edge technical field historically
dominated by white aviators, Forsythe and Anderson connected people of color across nations
and filled them with pride. They also lived up to the omnipresent racial-uplift undertones of
black aviation coverage in the press and reversed as well as recontextualized the longstanding
stereotypical tropes of black Americans’ technical and technological ineptitude.
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Long-distance flights carried out by black aviators had always been intended to form
a building component of aviation’s goodwill message. Without achievements such as these,
the aviation coverage in the black press had been one-dimensional, emphasizing pioneering
efforts and crusading pilots through transvaluation, while leaving the black newspaper
readership somewhat disappointed. Marcus Garvey and Hubert Julian had envisioned black
pilots flying to Africa to fight against colonial powers, yet Julian never took off. Bessie
Coleman, too, had hoped to spread aviation’s gospel in Pan-American countries, but did not
get an opportunity. And William J. Powell had been planning a transcontinental race of two
planes piloted by black aviators before James Herman Banning and Thomas C. Allen decided
to fly it alone. The success of Paris and the first cross-country flight, however, had added a
dimension to aviation coverage of achievements comparable to those of white flyers. It thus
provided the black press with evidence to begin recontextualizing the existing stereotypes and
tropes of people of color’s innate technical and technological lack. It also brought about a
sharp rise in the number of articles in the black press about aviation and its role in the civil
right struggles of African Americans. The output of texts doubled.
It was the achievements of Paris, Banning-Allen and Forsythe-Anderson’s longdistance
flights that transformed the image of aviators in the black press, too. As newspapers
carefully reported on the details of preparations for flights and informed about the interest that
successful long-distance and international flights had sprung in both black and white
communities, the image of aviators changed from individualistic crusaders to goodwill
messengers with a political purpose, carrying out the era’s inter- and trans-nationalist
ambitions. They became the race’s New Negro representatives to the rest of the world,
emulating and complementing the achievements of other Harlem Renaissance artists. Success
– technological in demonstrating the ability to fly over long distances and political in bringing
about interracial understanding – did not only make black Americans increasingly air-minded,
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but, more importantly, it turned aviation and the position of black aviators within the system
of American civil and military aviation into a civil-rights, political issue. Through self-help,
hard work, and technical ingenuity – the most essential tenets of the racial uplift ideology –
African Americans and immigrants of color were finally represented in aviation. In reaction,
the black press started lobbying for further representation in official military structures.
3.7 The Next War Will Be Fought In the Air: Black Aviation’s Military Dimension
Between 1925 and 1937, explains Samuel L. Brodnax in Blue Skies, Black Wings (2007), the
Army War College (AWC) carried out a dozen studies on the integration of black Americans
in the U.S. military – the U.S. Air Corps relied heavily on these in its policy of no admittance
to people of color. For example, in its 1925 report “The Use of Negro Manpower in War,” the
AWC “began with a statement that regarded the Negro as a subspecies of the human family”
and “espoused that Negro men instinctively believed they were inferior to white men.” The
report did acknowledge that African Americans could perform well as “laborers but [were]
inferior as technicians and fighters.” The report also concluded that “blacks were deeply
superstitious and filled with a common abundance of moral and character weaknesses” such
as “thieving, lying and promiscuity.” Most importantly, as Broadnax points out, the report
asserted that “in physical courage, the American Negro falls well back of the white man and
possibly behind all other races” and therefore held that “no Negro officer should ever
command a white officer, because it believed Negro officers lacked courage and the mental
capacity to command” (10). African Americans hoping to join their country’s military’s
flying units thus faced almost insurmountable barriers.
Throughout the almost two-decade long aviation campaign in black newspapers,
aviation education, economic opportunities, and the international, barrier-breaking potential
offered by the increasingly popular field crystallized as the central tenets or tropes of
aviation’s goodwill message. However, since the events in Tulsa in 1921 and subsequent
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coverage of the military employment of aviation in various African colonies as well as the
Central American and Caribbean region, aviation’s military aspect had also become a
recurring trope in black aviation newspaper coverage. Black newspapers regularly
underscored the fact that the AWC and the U.S. military in general were working on studies
and rules barring black Americans’ admission to, among others, the country’s flying units.
Consequently, the black press repeatedly ran editorials lobbying for the inclusion of black
pilots in the U.S. Air Service and the Air Corps. Black aviators played their part as well:
Hubert Julian often invoked the race war trope in his proclamations, and aviation schools
across the nation announced their military aspirations, as the dissertation has shown so far.
Although their intentions had not been stated explicitly, many a black aviation school had
been established with the implicit objective of training potential war pilots in a segregated
environment. This section of the dissertation discusses the evolution of black aviation’s
military dimension among black aviators and in the black press even further. In particular, it
analyzes some of black press’s editorials and John C. Robinson’s mission in Ethiopia.
In 1929, while the aviation campaign was taking off especially due to the Courier’s
vigorous reporting on and cooperation with William J. Powell, the Defender, perhaps owing
to the way aviation education was being organized in Chicago under Major Simmons, devoted
its last aviation editorial of the year to the armed forces issue. One year after the paper argued
that barring an officer in the Liberian Frontier Forces from a US army aviation school may
lead to decreased loyalty of the nation’s units consisting of soldiers of color, the November 30
editorial reiterated the Defender’s views on the color bar in the armed forces. The text
asserted that the U.S. military and naval authorities seemed to believe that African Americans
“seek to serve our country on the battlefields in time of war,” but it is in fact in peace time as
well, the paper declared, that black soldiers want to serve and be effectively trained. That is
why African Americans “must be trained in every department of military and naval science.
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We must get into the aviation schools so that we can learn, experiment, sacrifice our time and
resources and even die for our country.” Connecting civil rights with aviation and
representation of black soldiers in the military again, the editorial finally declared that “We
want all the rights or none” (“Patriotism”). As aviation was gaining traction among the black
public, and as several aviators had shown their skills in Chicago, California, and elsewhere,
there was no reason why army aviation schools should be only for whites, opined the paper.
The discussion of aviation and its military context appeared again in black
newspapers’ editorials in 1930. As in 1929, the year ended with an editorial in the Defender
discussing the military employment of airplanes. In “The New Order,” the Chicago weekly
observed that “this is an era in which distance has begun to succumb to the repeated
onslaughts of speed. A fleet of planes, flying at [182 miles/hour] can transport an army from
Boston to New Orleans in less than a day; can leave St. Louis at noon and destroy Montreal
before midnight, and refuel in Detroit for the return trip.” It was because of this dangerous
shortening of distances through aviation, the editorial argued, that Haile Selassie, the emperor
of Ethiopia, which is 250 miles from the sea, “shut off by Italy and France,” had taken up
aviation. Reportedly, “he owns a fleet of planes and is training young students in European
schools in the latest methods of handling aircraft.” Such precautions could allow Ethiopia to
prevent any foreign fleet from landing near it in case of an invasion, the text concluded. In
fact, as Tucker (102) explains, Selassie was using military aviation against his local
opponents, having realized aerial warfare’s potential in the late 1920s.
While reports on and from Ethiopia had appeared regularly in the black press, aviation
in connection with the east-African country would be hardly ever mentioned – with the
exception of Hubert Julian’s fiasco of a visit in 1930 – until 1934 and 1935, when Selassie
and Malaku E. Bayen accepted John C. Robinson’s proposal to lead the empire’s fledgling air
force. It is unclear from which source the Defender acquired its information on Selassie
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investing heavily into training his troops in aviation – perhaps from Julian – but the fact that
Italy and France, two colonial powers, were presented as predators preventing Ethiopia from
efficiently protecting itself served as a first among many pieces that were to document
Ethiopia’s fight for survival against colonial powers and their use of modern weaponry. It
seems clear that the Defender’s reporters were painfully aware that a war was brewing in
Ethiopia’s vicinity and that it would involve airplanes – as Garvey had predicted almost a
decade before. This developing situation only underscored the ever-increasing racial
technological gap and the need for further development and support of black aviation.
As discussed in previous chapters, Julian, Robinson, and others promoting black
aviation’s goodwill message – such as Leon Paris – occasionally underscored their crusading
endeavors’ importance for their race’s representation in aviation and, more importantly, for
helping raise a generation of flyers technically and mentally prepared for any upcoming war
or an event like Tulsa. Julian’s repeated proclamations, Robinson’s military displays in
Chicago, and Paris’s overtly anti-imperialist flight to Haiti ensured that the black American
public was keenly aware of the vital role black aviators’ readiness would play in case of a
conflict. Although these attempts by black aviators were merely symbolic attempts to
demonstrate and advertise their skills for potential military service, the successful longdistance
flights by Paris, Banning-Allen and Forsythe-Anderson had by 1934 created a mood
in the African American public of bewilderment over the fact that the US military would not
allow black flyers to join the service.
E.L. Best, probably one of William Powell’s students at Jefferson High, wrote a letter
to the Defender in October 1934, noting that “there are approximately 2,500 airplanes of
various military types in use in America today [yet] of all the 20,000 men who go to make up
the personnel of the Air Corps […] there is not one Negro.” “Since the nations of the world
are madly preparing for war [and] America is too,” Best observed, “it is up to us to make the
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Government see fit to begin giving us this training right now [because] we, the younger
Negroes, demand the right to efficiently and ably protect ourselves” (“The Race and
Aviation”).49
As the letter shows, since New Negro aviators’ skills improved, their frustration
with being ignored grew exponentially.
The Courier, true to its historical reputation as a crusader for the inclusion of black
troops in the military, ran an editorial in 1934 which commended “colored former army
officers” on establishing an organization, reminded its readers that black soldiers were barred
from “aviation, engineers, artillery, signal units, chemical warfare units and tank corps,” and
called for action to be taken: “We have never made a concerted nation-wide attack on this
problem. We have never let our desires be known to the legislators in Washington. It is time
to get busy” (“Don’t Forget the Negro Soldiers”). Perhaps partially inspired by its very own
full-fledged aviation campaign, the Courier called for further progress in military inclusion in
general.
In the end, John C. Robinson’s military displays, career as a military-style aviation
educator in Chicago, and as a vigorous proponent of establishing an aviation school at the
Tuskegee Institute brought the aviator to Ethiopia and made black aviators’ and the black
press’s calls for engagement in warfare true. Now a well-known figure on Chicago’s South
Side, Robinson caught the attention of Claude Barnett, the director of the Associated Negro
Press (ANP), who introduced Robinson to Malaku E. Bayen, Haile Selassie’s cousin and
emissary to the United States. On Bayen’s recommendation, Robinson was appointed “chief
of the imperial air forces of Ethiopia by Emperor Haile Selassie” in late August 1935
(“Ethiopian Air Chief”). Robinson was to train actual war pilots and engage in aerial warfare
himself.
49
The Defender published Best’s letter to the Federal Aviation Commission in November 1934 (“No
U.S. Race Aviators”).
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3.7.1 Ethiopia’s Significance for Black Aviation
In early October 1935, the full-scale Italian invasion into Ethiopia began. Protests against
Italy’s aggression were widespread. As S.K.B. Asante explains, “the tales of the unjust war in
Ethiopia were told not only in British West Africa, but also in the neighbouring East African
colonies of Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika, in the vast territory of Egypt, in the far minority,
white-ruled southern Africa, in the West Indies, as well as among the black communities in
America, Britain, and Europe” (4). In the United States, the war in Ethiopia “became a
fundamental question in Negro life,” according to Roi Ottley, a journalist and historian of
Harlem. “It was all but impossible for Negro leaders to remain neutral, and the position they
took toward the conflict became a fundamental test. The survival of the black nation became
the topic of angry debate in poolrooms, barber shops, and taverns” (109). The crisis stirred
emotions in the African American community in an unprecedented way – as Magubane
claims, “besides Garvey’s UNIA there is no other phenomenon that stirred the rank and file of
the Afro-American as did the Italo-Ethiopian war” (170). Ethiopia featured on the pages of
the black press ceaselessly. Between January 1935 and December 1936, when Ras Imru
finally surrendered to the Italians, the Courier and the NYAN carried over fifty each and the
Defender thirty editorials concerning Ethiopia. Dozens of articles and photographs were being
published weekly.
Tens of organizations raising funds to aid Ethiopia sprung up. In African American
Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936-1941, Joseph E. Harris lists the Provisional Committee
for the Defense of Ethiopia, the Committee for Ethiopia, the Friends of Ethiopia, the
American Committee on the Ethiopia Crisis/American Aid for Ethiopia, the Medical
Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia, and the United Aid for Ethiopia Alliance as the most
important fund-raising groups in New York. The influential Ethiopian Research Council was
based in Washington, D.C. (49). Even though, as William R. Scott, a historian of the war,
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points out, “the average black may not have joined any of the pro-Ethiopian organizations, or
contributed financially to the cause, or even to have been quite certain what he stood to gain
or lose by an Ethiopian victory or defeat, […] the prime thing of importance to him was that
black men were being threatened by whites” (167). There was no escape for Africa-descended
people living in the United States from the news on and implications of the Ethiopian crisis.
Black aviation and the aviation campaign in the black press were also affected by the
Ethiopian crisis. Robinson’s involvement as the Ethiopian Imperial Air Force’s head helped
finally shift the center of black aviation from Los Angeles to Chicago. At the same time, it led
to the gradual disinvestment by Robinson from the Challenger Air Pilots’ Association after
the war. Most importantly, however, the crisis finally turned the scope and attention of the
aviation campaign towards militarization and increased pressure by the black press on the
inclusion of African American pilots in the US military. After all, as Tucker correctly
observes, “the most prominent American military aviator in a high-level leadership position
and in command of an independent air force in a wartime environment [in the interwar period]
was John Charles Robinson” (117-8). The black press seized the opportunity and turned
Robinson into an aerial warfare hero with unprecedented technical and mechanical expertise.
The Italo-Ethiopian war has been studied in the United States mostly in the context of
Pan-African sentiments and organized efforts on the part of the black population in the US to
aid Ethiopia. Despite John C. Robinson’s involvement, however, the black aviation aspect of
the conflict has been neglected. Indeed, Robinson’s military endeavors in Ethiopia as a
precursor in black aviation history to the Tuskegee Airmen have been the focus of Tucker’s
Father of the Tuskegee Airmen (2012), Thomas E. Simmons’ The Man Called Brown Condor
(2013), as well as portions of Jakeman’s Divided Skies (1992) and Scott and Womack’s
Double V (1994). But, as this dissertation argues, Robinson’s mission was more than another
step forward in black aviation history. It was a unique act of Pan-Africanism: Robinson
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showcased and utilized aviation – a technology historically associated with progress,
civilization, and, in the eyes of the black press and nationalist leaders, also white colonial
power – to combat Italian colonialism in the name of a mythical black nation. While Bessie
Coleman, Leon Paris, Forsythe and Anderson – and also, to a degree, Hubert Julian – had
only hinted in their flights and rhetoric at the potential of aviation to defy boundaries, connect
peoples across nations and inspire a violent struggle for their own liberation, it was Robinson
who finally carried out Marcus Garvey’s vision of a black aviator fighting for sovereignty and
independence of a black nation against a colonial power. Robinson’s Pan-African aviation
mission was technologically and martially oriented.
The focus of this section is therefore Robinson’s resistance to Italy’s air force, which
had helped colonize and would keep under control Libya, the Italian Somaliland, and Italian
Eritrea. As Federico Caprotti correctly points out, “the fascist regime in Ethiopia was
successful partly through aerial superiority.” Italy’s military, and later civilian aviation was
“represented as progressive and as a superior technology” in Italy’s African colonies, for it
served as a “metaphor for a civilized fascism that would develop the silent colonies.” In this
sense, Italian dominance in aviation “juxtaposed the airplane and the aviator with the
indigenous and tribal” (386-398). Robinson’s excellence in his flying missions and skirmishes
in Ethiopia, however, disrupts this dichotomic narrative of black vs white as technological lag
vs technological prowess with civilizing purpose. The fact of the matter is that at a time when
there were no more than 60 licensed black aviators in the United States, an African American
pilot demonstrated the ability to stand up against a technologically superior colonial power by
utilizing its own technology against it. In short, Robinson reversed the trope of an inept black.
This fact visibly reverberated in the black press’ coverage of black aviation. In their
reporting on the Italian invasion, military strategies, and Robinson’s heroics, black
newspapers registered the importance of aerial warfare in the process of Italy’s gradual
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colonization of Ethiopia. In other words, black America was watching how the racial
technological gap in aviation facilitated Italy’s advance against and submission – though
never final – of the mythical Ethiopian nation. At the same time, the fact that Robinson
prevailed – despite inferior technology, training, and, in the colonizer’s eyes, origins –
confirmed to the black public that black aviators could, if properly trained and supported,
equal even the most technologically advanced air force in the world. Robinson’s Pan-African
mission gave the aviation campaign a new impetus as Robinson became a leader for the black
press in its drive to prepare black pilots for war. After Robinson’s return in 1936, and then in
1937, the Defender capitalized upon the aviator’s popularity and engaged in the
aforementioned campaign to establish a network of aviation schools under Robinson’s
leadership and to present the aviator as the race’s role model and leader; a savior figure.
Robinson’s historic engagement in Ethiopia transformed the Defender’s involvement in the
aviation campaign and solidified the black press’ incessant overall argument that black pilots,
too, could and would fight if their nation – or people – called them to arms.
3.7.2 Black America’s Fascination with Ethiopia
That black America saw itself as a stakeholder in Ethiopia’s fate was not surprising, since
African Americans had had numerous long-standing connections to the world’s oldest
Christian nation. Religious connections between the United States and Ethiopia were
exemplified by the existence of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which derived its name from
the “august appearance [of Ethiopia] in the King James Bible” (Scott 21). In particular, Psalm
68, the psalm of David, prophesies that “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon
stretch forth her hands unto God.” The verse depicts Ethiopia as representing “not only the
ancient kingdom by that name, but all of Africa and the entire African race,” explains Wilson
J. Moses. Moreover, “the Bible verse was seen as a prophecy [in the 19th
and early 20th
century] that the great days of Africa and all her scattered children were in the future. It was
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seen as a promise that a people of distinction were to come out of Egypt and that Africans
were soon to witness the day of their glory” (51).
The verse thus had political significance as well. Not only did many African
Americans refer to themselves as Ethiops, but Ethiopia came to be associated in the middle of
the 19th
century with black liberation (Scott 12-18). Based on this historical connection of
Ethiopia with black power, sacredness, and liberation, African American Christians viewed
modern Ethiopia with great respect, especially since Haile Selassie “traced his lineage to a
liaison between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba” (Meriwether 30). Selassie’s
coronation in 1930, heavily publicized in the white and black press, only strengthened the
reverence of religious African Americans for the country and the emperor: “Marcus Garvey
may have been regarded at one time as the Black Moses, but Haile Selassie seems to have
been widely looked upon in the early thirties as the Black Messiah,” explains Scott (105).
Working as a personal pilot for the emperor and heading his royal air force must have thus
increased John C. Robinson’s stature in the African American public opinion – he was
protecting the black messiah. This, in turn, also raised black aviation’s profile.
Finally, along with religious ties to Africa-descended people in the United States,
Ethiopia served as an example of a black nation which had resisted and defeated a colonial
power. In 1896, Menelik II secured Ethiopia’s sovereignty against Italy at the Battle of
Adowa. As Scott points out, this military victory “established unequivocally in the minds of
some Afro-Americans the belief that Ethiopia was the pre-ordained defender of all black
people in the world and that it would one day lead them to freedom” (31). Symbolically, then,
Ethiopia had long existed in the minds of the United States’ black population.
Still, it was not until 1919 that African Americans came into direct contact with
Ethiopians. First contacts between the two groups took place on Ethiopian soil (Scott 37-68),
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but in 1919, a diplomatic delegation including Dedjazmatch Nadou, one of the signatories for
Ethiopia when it was admitted to the League of Nations, and Belanghetta Herouy, the Mayor
of Addis-Ababa and later Minister of Foreign Affairs, came to Harlem and visited the
Metropolitan Baptist Church (Ottley 106). In 1927, another mission, headed by Dr. Azaz
Wahrnek Martin, invited African Americans to settle in Ethiopia (Ottley 107). However,
according to Scott, no repatriation movement was launched after the 1919 mission, and only
about one hundred African Americans, inspired by Selassie’s coronation, migrated to the
country between 1930 and 1935 (85-107).
In 1922, Malaku E. Bayen, Haile Selassie’s mother’s first cousin, was sent to the US
and in 1928 began studying medicine at Howard University. He, too, was charged with
bringing African Americans to Ethiopia: he brought Hubert Julian in 1930, Dr. John West as a
Public Health Organizer in 1931, Cyril Price as an educator in 1932, and John C. Robinson in
1935 as an aviation instructor (Scott 255, Bayen 5-6). In 1936, Bayen became Selassie’s
representative in the United States and in January 1937 began publishing The Voice of
Ethiopia, a weekly newspaper of the Ethiopian World Federation, Inc., which functioned as
the official fund-raising organization on behalf of the emperor in Harlem (Bayen 7-8). Africadescended
people living in the United States were thus connected to Ethiopia not only in
terms of history, religion, and politics, but had also established interpersonal ties prior to the
outbreak of the Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935.
Given these ties between black America and Ethiopia, the black press in the United
States covered the Ethiopian crisis in detail. One of the aspects of the conflict which the black
press registered immediately and reported on continuously was aerial warfare. In April 1935,
the Courier announced “the introduction of obligatory military service” in Ethiopia –
Selassie’s army was estimated to consist of up to one million men (“Italy Ready for Peace;
Africa Mobilizes Men, Women for Hostilities”). The Defender and the NYAN then reported
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on Ethiopia’s mobilization in June; they showed a collage of photographs of Ethiopian
soldiers, including “Flight-Lieutenant Teera, ace-pilot of the Ethiopian Air force” (“War
Clouds Still Gather over Ethiopia,” “Black Ruler Defies Italy”). The Courier’s mid-July issue
finally connected black Americans’ interest in the Ethiopian situation with the emperor
himself. The paper reported that Selassie was ready to accept US volunteers “for war service,”
noting that the emperor “is concentrating on developing an air force with which he hopes to
compete with Italy.”50
Importantly for the aviation campaign which decried the lack of
opportunities for soldiers – including aviators – to join the US military, the text informed that
Ethiopia would accept World War veterans “as officers in all branches of the Army and
Navy” (“Ethiopia Welcomes U.S. Volunteers”).
Despite the fact that the U.S. Department of State immediately barred US nationals
from enlisting in Ethiopia, the reaction to Haile Selassie’s call was unprecedented – the
NYAN, for example, ran multiple articles in every issue on events held in Harlem to support
Ethiopia. One week after the emperor’s cablegram virtually invited black Americans to join
the Ethiopian army, the Courier announced the disappointing news from the State
Department, but also carried a photograph of a bomber plane, entitled “Who Said Ethiopia
Didn’t Have Airplanes,” and an article informing that “twelve [white] American flyers were
[…] ready to fight for Ethiopia against Italy.” Led by Hal du Berrier and aided by Major
Granville Pollock of the Lafayette Escadrille, the group was hoping to “form the nucleus of
the Ethiopian Air Corps” (“12 White American Aviators”). The paper then envisioned in
another article how “Italy would be whipped if American Negroes and Whites get
transportation to Abyssinia” (“U.S. Whites Volunteer for Ethiopian Service”). The following
week, along with reiterating du Berrier’s claim and confirmation that the State Department
50
The article also informed that “unconfirmed reports hint of an alliance with Japan for buying
materials of war.” Etsuko Taketani discusses black America’s fascination with Japan and its
potential aid to Ethiopia in The Black Pacific Narrative (2014).
206
was “definitely opposed to American citizens enlisting in the armies of either Ethiopia or
Italy,” the Courier – along with the NYAN – brought the news that Japan may be ready to help
Ethiopia prepare for the upcoming clash (“War News…Airplanes…Japan,” “Move to Halt
Recruiting for Ethiopia is Launched,” “Japan May Aid Ethiopia,” “Japan Seen Forcing
Hand”). The Pan-Asiatic Association even held an event in Boston where it assured the
audience that Japan and China would “come to the aid of Emperor Haile Selassie” (“Says
Japan May Defend Ethiopia”).
Most importantly, however, the Courier published an entire page in late July with
letters from volunteers from around the country, black and white.51
Among these, a group of
pilots that was “decidedly in sympathy with the Ethiopian people” asked the paper if Ethiopia
needed “airplane pilots, instructors and mechanics” (“In Sympathy with Ethiopian Cause,
Whites Ask to Go”). An aviator from Ohio offered his services “if the price is right” (“Flyer is
Ready”), while another volunteer from Detroit with “experience with aeroplanes” felt that it
was his duty to “answer the call of Ethiopia” and “give all that is in me to help the just cause
of the black race” (“Air-Minded”). Finally, a reader from Illinois inquired “if there is any
chance of our getting into the Ethiopian air service” (“For Air Service”). It seems that the
Courier’s readers had also registered the role that aviation was going to play in the upcoming
conflict. Especially since the Pittsburgh weekly titillated its audience with incessant news
about potential Japanese involvement – thus entertaining the notion that two sovereign nations
of color could form an alliance against a colonial power – as well as the wish of white
experienced flyers, led by du Berrier, to engage in aerial warfare against Italy’s vaunted Regia
Aeronautica.
51
Meriwether estimates that there were letters from at least thirty eight states (45). The NYAN also
regularly ran letters from volunteers for Ethiopia.
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Even though the black press provided space for its readers’ expression of Pan-African
sympathy with Ethiopia, the Courier along with the Defender, also initially discouraged
African Americans from direct engagement in Africa. As Meriwether points out, the Defender
carried a rare front-page editorial in July 1935 as letters from volunteers flooded the Courier’s
and the NYAN’s offices, in which it asked its readers: “Go to Ethiopia? Why not fight at
home? Is there not enough here to fight for? Why don’t you fight lynchings, peonage,
bastardy, discrimination, segregation? Why don’t you fight for jobs to which you are entitled?
Why don’t you fight for your own independence?” In its conclusion, the text asserted that
“Yes, you MUST think of Ethiopia. You MUST be world minded. You MUST realize that
you have kinship with all peoples of the world – but above all you MUST FIGHT to correct
evils at home” (40).
The Courier addressed its readers in a similar way, when its July editorial asserted that
“black America needed to keep money and resources at home” (Meriwether 39). In its
discouraging message, the text, titled “Helping Ethiopia,” noted that “the purchase and
equipment of a Douglas bomber will build 1,000 playgrounds with swimming pools [and that]
the price of one good-sized airplane bomb will win a school segregation case in the courts or
snatch some innocent Negro from the shadow of the electric chair.” Although the paper thus
registered that an air force – or lack thereof – would play a crucial role in the conflict, it
encouraged its readers to invest in its community at home. In this way, the Courier also
rejected its readers’ aspirations to fly and fight for Ethiopia. The NYAN urged its readers to
offer aid in the fields of medicine and even warfare but noted solemnly that “Negroes in
America face an economic situation no less grave than the political one facing [Ethiopia]”
(“Aid for Ethiopia”).
Despite the initial isolationism and encouragement to develop and advance black
communities nationally, rather than inter- and trans-nationally, however, the black press
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eventually changed its tone and message. Perhaps it was because the Defender’s readers
rejected the paper’s stance and sent numerous letters to the editor to voice their disagreement
with the logic expressed in the paper’s July editorial. One reader, for instance, expressed her
view thusly: “Let every heart within a black man’s body be with Ethiopia, the country which
is ours. Ethiopia hasn’t been the uncivilized place the U.S. is, with lynching, rape and murder.
[…] I really feel that everyone should love Ethiopia the way we love Joe Louis. One of the
greatest, proudest loves in the world” (“Why Go to Ethiopia – Letter to the Editor”). Another
reader opined that “the so-called Negro should think internationally rather than nationally if
he is to triumph over his conditions” (“Why Go to Ethiopia – Letter to the Editor”). Finally,
another letter criticized the paper’s hypocrisy: “Had you written such an article advising our
boys against the enlistment in the World War to save a Democracy of which they then and
now have no part, I would have agreed with you. And now, you invoke a respect for the laws
which you continually assure your readers do not guarantee the Race the protection to which
they are entitled.” The authors concluded their argument by asking “will you not admit that
with the American Negro contributing to a victorious Ethiopia the reaction would be
beneficial to those of us remaining here” (“Why Go to Ethiopia”). As Meriwether observes,
the black press then “quickly shifted from urging caution and a focus on America to offering a
more pan-African view” (44).
The fact that the State Department forbade recruitment for Ethiopia and the black
press was initially non-committal did not deter Harlemites from active preparations for war.
As Victor A. Berch points out, “black nationalists generally believed that the indifference on
the part of Western nations […] was nothing short of an act of racism” and that the upcoming
invasion of Ethiopia “was merely the first skirmish in what they viewed as a worldwide race
war” (25). This may explain why “one militant group in Harlem boasted of two thousand
volunteers and discussed plans to buy or charter a freighter and sail for Ethiopia,” explains
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Scott, and why another group, the Black Legion “reportedly three thousand strong,
inaugurated a training camp in up-state New York with instructors for five hundred aviation
students and for two full regiments of infantry” (192).
The case of Black Legion’s preparations for war – especially its aviation squadron –
was reported in the black press. Initially, in “Flyers Get Their Wings” from March 1935, the
Defender showed two aviators, Thomas Mills and Leonard Yates, and informed that they
were part of a 15-student group comprising a “Race aviation college with a ground school and
class in Harlem”52
– their equipment was at Roosevelt Field, the same airport which had been
previously used by the US Army Air Service, Bessie Coleman, Lindbergh, Earhart, and
Banning and Allen. Importantly, the paper also reported that neither flyer was “interested in
offers to fight in the air for Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia” – the NYAN subsequently
informed that Mills and Yates had been inundated with “abusive letters from American
supporters of Ethiopia (“Aviators Abused”). Apparently, the pilots’ attitude had changed by
August 1935. The Courier and the Defender published a photograph of the “Black Legion,”
or “what is said to be the first Negro air squadron,” including Mills and Yates. Clad in
uniforms and standing in front of a plane, the group was expected to “go through an advanced
flying course to prepare for possible duty in Abyssinia against the Italians.” As both papers
noted, one of the flyers and later a student of Robinson’s in Chicago, Miss Lola Jackson,
“eventually expects to form a women’s flying corps to serve as nurses” (“Harlem’s Pride
Ready for Air,” “Harlem’s Air Squadron,” “Harlem Trains Black Legion with the Infantry
Regiments”).
Although the group had put on such a military display, none of its members were
dispatched to Ethiopia. As Harris shows, the FBI became involved in the matter and their
52
Their aero club was probably the Nathan Flying Squadron Aviation club, which had organized an
air show at Roosevelt Field in May 1934. Mills and Yates were listed by the Defender and the NYAN
as licensed pilots and members of the club in its short report on the event (“Race Aviators to Give
Air Show Decoration Day,” “Airmen Offer Holiday Show”).
210
investigation concluded that “although Lola Jackson had told a journalist that she planned to
go to Ethiopia if she could be helpful there, she had no such plans.” In fact, no members of
the group, according to the investigation, were “considering service in Ethiopia.” Mills and
Yates initially showed interest, but, in the end, no service in Africa materialized (57). Again,
the black press titillated its audience with news about a black squadron willing to engage in
aerial warfare abroad. If the group had actually engaged in fighting in Ethiopia, it would have
represented a new milestone in black aviation history and also a new dimension in the PanAfricanism
displayed by black America. However, advancing Pan-Africanism and military
aviation was left to John C. Robinson.
3.7.3 From Chicago to Ethiopia
John Charles Robinson was appointed “chief of the imperial air forces of Ethiopia by
Emperor Haile Selassie” in August 1935 (“Ethiopian Air Chief”). However, before delving
into the analysis of the newspaper coverage Robinson received during his mission in Ethiopia,
it is necessary to contextualize Robinson’s recruitment by Claude Barnett for Haile Selassie’s
government, and examine the sources of the pilot’s Pan-Africanism. According to Janet
Waterford, Selassie reportedly said to Malaku E. Bayen, his recruiter in the United States, that
“if this young American [Robinson] can construct an aeroplane from the ground up, he would
be considered. Ethiopia has everything to make planes, from the ore to the most expensive
woods. I have flyers. What I want is someone to teach mechanics and everything that goes
with it” (“John Robinson Wings His Way Down to Tuskegee”). Robinson, however, became
more than just an instructor in Ethiopia for he may have left for his mission there with more
than an instructor’s job in mind.
The accounts of how Robinson met with Barnett differ (compare Scott 199, Tucker
69, Scott and Womack 51), but, in any case, the pilot offered his services to the Ethiopian
government through Barnett, who had long known Bayen as the Ethiopian had previously
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translated Ethiopian news from Amharic into English for the ANP (Harris 54). According to
Tucker, Robinson “made the promise that he would volunteer to serve to defend Ethiopia’s
independence in the face of Italian aggression” because he “viewed Ethiopia as the most
visible stage and positive means to promote black aviation to the world” (69). Initially,
Robinson did not offer only his own services, but those of his group as well. The members of
the Challengers Air Pilots’ Association “felt their designation and experience as a Military
Order of Guard Aviation unit provided the expertise needed to assist Ethiopia in the
development of an Air Force.” That is why it was reported that “at least seven Challengers
planned to serve as a volunteer air squadron for Ethiopia” (Scott and Womack 50). As with
Harlem’s Black Legion, however, the plan did not materialize and only Robinson had traveled
to Ethiopia before the State Department barred Americans from enlisting.
While Robinson had obvious military ambitions in Ethiopia – given the fact that he
was hoping to enlist his para-military group – his Pan-Africanist sentiments were also a strong
pull factor for his mission. Tucker claims that it had been Robinson’s continuous exposure to
the Star Order of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Missionaries to Abyssinia’s activities, as well as
the official Ethiopian delegation visiting Chicago and recruiting black professionals in 1927,
that inspired the pilot’s Pan-Africanist philosophy (75-6). Also, some of the Challengers were
members of the NAACP, the Urban League, and other black political and social organizations
which were “focused on developments in regard to the fate of people of color far beyond
America’s shores” (62). Finally, however, it should not be omitted that Robinson and the
devout members of the Challengers worshipped at the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago’s
Bronzeville (60).
The church’s reverend, Junius Caesar Austin was the master of ceremonies at Bessie
Coleman’s opulent funeral in 1926 and had initiated and sponsored the annual flyover over
the aviatrix’s grave. He had supported and urged his parishioners to financially aid Hubert
212
Julian in 1931. Austin was also a founding member of the Challenger Air Pilots’ Association,
according to Burkett, a historian of various black churches (326). Most importantly, Austin
preached Pan-Africanism at his church. In 1922, the reverend had given a speech entitled
“Representing the Negro Clergy” at the UNIA’s conference in New York. Austin was a
Garveyite from early on. In 1924, he had been elected to head the Foreign Mission Board for
the National Baptist Convention and the Pilgrim Baptist Church had consequently become
one of the largest foreign-mission contributors in the country (327-8). The reverend’s
activities reflected his focus on Africa and so must have his sermons – in January 1936,
Robinson thanked Austin for having donated $100 to Ethiopia (“Ethiopia Gets Check”).
Claude A. Barnett also attended Austin’s church (Burkett 334) and, although it is not clear
whether Barnett and Robinson made their acquaintance there, it may be assumed that they
shared Austin’s Pan-African philosophy. Furthermore, given Austin’s affinity for black
aviation, Barnett must have repeatedly heard of Robinson’s group at the church.
Similarly, he must have heard of or even met Robinson at the regular meetings of the
local Tuskegee club, of which the two men were members, along with Doris H. Murphy, one
of Robinson’s students. Barnett and Robinson may have also met in August in 1934 at
Tuskegee, where both men had given speeches (“Tuskegee Alumni Map $10,000 Endowment
Plan”). Given these connections between the two men, it is clear that Barnett must have heard
about the military dimension of aviation that Robinson’s group was emphasizing at its events
and aviation students’ graduation ceremonies. In other words, it may be safe to assume that
when Barnett, the owner and director of a news agency that had been reporting on black
aviation for fifteen years, recommended Robinson to Bayen, he knew that he was promoting
black aviation and its military potential, as well as fostering stronger Pan-African ties between
black America and Ethiopia.
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Claude Barnett’s Associated Negro Press reported constantly on Ethiopia during the
mid-1930s. Barnett’s agency functioned as an important cog in the wheels of the black press.
He had started the company in March 1919, emphasizing “constructive news that would offer
readers models to emulate and would win respect from both blacks and whites for the
responsible black press” (Hogan 48). The initial news release from March 1919 went out to
eighty members of the agency, including all the major weeklies, except the Courier, which
joined in 1924, and the Defender, which did not become a subscriber until 1940 (57). It is
unclear when exactly the NYAN began subscribing to the ANP, but the earliest date seems to
be August 1927. The agency sent out news releases on Fridays and Mondays so that its
members had time to utilize the news by their Wednesday deadline (59).
While the agency proved invaluable, especially for its smaller, local members during
such national events as the Scottsboro case in 1931 and the second Italo-Ethiopian War, it
also played a key role in providing news to the black press on black aviation. Many a story
about William J. Powell and John C. Robinson in the Courier was reported courtesy of the
ANP correspondents in California, namely Harry Levette, and in Chicago. There are dozens
of texts from the Golden State and the Windy City, as well as much regional news on aviation
that appeared in the Pittsburgh weekly. Furthermore, it was the ANP that had been able to
deliver the news about Forsythe and Anderson’s goodwill flight from every West Indian and
Pan-American country that the flyers had visited. It was thus no surprise when Claude A.
Barnett, with his ANP headquarters in Chicago, recruited Robinson to become the agency’s
correspondent – under the nom de plume Wilson James (Tucker 167) – in Ethiopia in 1935. In
this way, Barnett combined the allure of direct foreign reporting, Pan-African sentiments for
Ethiopia, and Robinson’s potential military clash with Italy’s vaunted air force.
As Lawrence D. Hogan, a historian of the ANP, claims, “the focus of foreign reporting
during the 1930s” in the black press “remained the same as it had been in the previous
214
decade.” Stories documenting and “tracing the historic ties of black Americans to the African
homeland, and those criticizing European colonialism” dominated the foreign-news sections
of black newspapers. What changed in the 1930s, explains Hogan, “was the greater attention
and resources brought to this coverage” (114). While the Courier sent Rogers to Ethiopia in
the fall of 1935, the ANP had already secured a Latin American correspondent by 1933.
Rudolph Dunbar had begun reporting for the ANP from London in 1934 and in 1935, the
agency had listed its own reporter in the Virgin Islands. By 1938, informs Hogan, the ANP
“had executive correspondents reporting from London, Paris, Copenhagen, Moscow,
Johannesburg, the West Indies, the Virgin Islands, and Cristobal in the Canal Zone” (121).
The ANP was thus responding to an increasing demand by the black readers in the U.S. for
foreign news from countries with populations of Africa-descended people. Its involvement in
Ethiopia through Robinson in 1935 then did not only showcase Barnett’s own Pan-Africanist
views, but also marked the first step in ANP’s increasingly African direction. As Hogan
explains, through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the agency would come “to concentrate more
and more on events and people from” Africa, and by the end of the 1950s, “some seventy-five
African papers were subscribing to the service” (235).
3.7.4 John C. Robinson’s Ethiopian Endeavors in the Black Press
There are few sources on the history of Ethiopian civilian and military aviation prior to 1935.
Reportedly, Tafari Makkonen – crowned as Haile Selassie in 1930 – had hired two French
pilots and purchased four French biplanes in 1929 (“Ethiopian Air Force – History”). The
four Potez 25 biplanes assisted Makkonen “in the decisive battle against a rival warlord in
early 1930.” Having witnessed the tactical and technological advantage that the planes could
bring in battle, claims Tucker, “the emperor became an enthusiastic proponent of air power’s
importance (102). Hubert Julian, serving under Makkonen at that time, confirmed the future
emperor’s utilization of air power to the black press upon his return to the U.S. in 1930.
215
As the nationalist Youth Ethiopian Movement gained importance after Selassie’s
coronation, the emperor sought to hire black professionals rather than employ white foreign
nationals, thereby ending the French monopoly on the small Ethiopian air force (Tucker 65).
Between 1930 and 1935, the number of planes in the fleet had risen to over 10 (Tucker 103,
“Ethiopian Air Force – History”). Along with French, Italian, German, and English planes,
the fleet included a lone American aircraft – the Beechcraft, which “could outperform – or
outrun – even the swiftest Italian combat fighter in case of pursuit” and thus became the
“Emperor’s aircraft” (Tucker 104). Because of the embargo imposed by the League of
Nations, Robinson could only secure additional aircraft from Hitler’s Germany – he received
three Junkers 52 aircraft in 1935, which would later become valuable for transporting material
(105-6). Such was the material situation of the Imperial Air Force when Robinson was named
its chief in late August 1935 as between his arrival in April and promotion in the late summer,
Robinson had played a leading role in “repairing, servicing, and improving his aircraft for
active service (136).
However, it quickly became obvious that Ethiopia was not ready for Italy’s Regia
Aeronautica. At first, the Courier advanced a theory that Benjamin and Joseph Martin, sons
of Dr. Martin, Ethiopia’s minister to London, may meet in air battle with Bruno and Vittorio
Mussolini (“Sons of Warring Fathers May Meet in Air Battles”), as the two Ethiopians were
en route to join the country’s air force. The story escalated two weeks later when the paper
reported that Martin’s sons “have challenged the two sons of Premier Mussolini to an air duel
in Ethiopia” (“Il Duce’s Sons Challenged”). The following week, the Courier carried a
photograph of Mussolini’s sons in a dejected pose, informing its readers that the Italians’
planes had been riddled with Ethiopian guns (“Their Planes Riddled”). In pursuing this story,
the black press was preparing its audience for the clash between the technologically
overpowering Italian air force and the technologically lagging, but increasingly patriotic and
216
enthusiastic air force of Ethiopia. The photograph showed that even Mussolini’s sons were
not invincible and that, perhaps, Robinson’s fleet could stop Italy’s invasion. But this vision
emphasized battles between individuals rather than Italy’s actual military strategy.
It was Robinson himself who quickly disabused the black press and its audience of
their naiveté. In “Robinson Tells All in the Bombing of Adowa” in the Defender and “Ethiops
Plan Battle from High Ravines” for the NYAN, he related that “four large bombing planes
arrived over [Addis Ababa and] caught the city asleep and unaware.” “I saw a squad of
soldiers standing in the streets dumbfounded, looking at the planes soaring above. They had
their swords raised in their hands,” described Robinson. Two planes, according to the report,
were “droning ominously, circling the apparently doomed city. When I left the city, it wasn’t
possible to number the dead.” The Courier’s vision of warring brothers staging duels to
decide the fate of Italy’s invasion – as well as Robinson’s own para-military training in
Chicago – did not prepare the black press’ readers for the shock of the way Giulio Douhet’s
doctrine, first presented in The Command of the Air in 1921, utilized Italy’s air force to
destroy civilian and military targets on the ground. For example, J.A. Rogers reported in
December 1935 that 10 Caproni airplanes came “sweeping out of the haze of an early dawn,
spreading death and destruction in their wake,” attacking a “defenseless town” (“Sick,
Wounded Burned Alive by Italian Bombs”). Italy was using its technological advantage in
aviation differently than expected – by mercilessly killing not only soldiers, but also civilians.
Despite Italy’s obvious technological advantage, however, Robinson was excelling as
Ethiopia’s air chief, and the black press took notice. Percival Leroy Prattis, one of the
Courier’s renowned reporters and a former journalist for the ANP, wrote a long raciallyuplifting
biographical story of Robinson for the Pittsburgh weekly and for the NYAN, which
“reads like fiction” and offered “lessons to inspire and hearten black boys in every State.”
Apart from celebrating Robinson, the article did not fail to mention that the aviator had
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decided to go to Ethiopia rather than wait whether Tuskegee would vote on opening an
aviation class in April 1935 (“Ethiopian Air Ace Outwits Italian Planes in Battle,” “Ethiopia’s
Black Condor”).53
This only confirms that Robinson had seen more opportunities for the
military advancement in black aviation on the front in Ethiopia than at an institute with a mere
theoretical military department.
Later in October 1935, the Courier and the Defender announced that Chicagoans were
raising funds for the “John Robinson Defense Fund for Ethiopia” (“Make Pledge to Raise
Funds for Haile Selassie,” “Name Ethiopia Aid Fund for Local Aviator”). One month later,
the two papers also carried a photograph of Robinson with H.R. Knickerbocker, an
International News Service Correspondent, and two French flyers, inspecting a map of the
war zone. The Defender noted that Robinson “has won the respect and warm friendship of the
Ethiopian people as well as the white newspaper men and foreign attaches stationed at Addis
Ababa” (“American Correspondent and Pilot,” “Col. John Robinson Checks Plan of War”).
Since the Ethiopian air force lacked offensive capabilities,54
one of Robinson’s duties
was, according to Tucker, reconnaissance flights. These “became the most effective sources
of intelligence gathering for the emperor to ascertain Italian intentions, concentrations, and to
relay orders to Ethiopian commanders on the front lines” (108). Robinson also flew Selassie
on inspections of his troops (“Takes Plane Ride to Inspect Troops”). And in December,
Robinson took the Courier’s Joel Augustus Rogers on one of such trips. Flying over the
southern war front, Rogers noted to his readers that his pilot was “William H. Robinson [sic],
Chicago youth and Tuskegee graduate, who is head of His Majesty’s air force,” and who
53
On the same page, the Courier published a photograph of three Ethiopian pilots.
54
A young aviator, Gus Coleman, opined in the Defender in early December 1935 that “should
Ethiopia manage to secure even a small air force, they could have the Italians at their mercy by
blowing up the single aviation base the Italians thought necessary to construct in view of Ethiopia’s
complete lack of air equipment” (“Dixie Youth Sees Future in Aviation”).
218
pointed out during the flight various locations and hidings spots of the Ethiopian army
(“Rogers at Front”).
One week later, Rogers reported that another one of Robinson’s flights led the pilot
into a battle with two Italian planes: “Col. William T. Robinson [sic] was returning here from
Addis Ababa with medicine for those wounded in the first air-raid of the Italians.” “Seeing a
bomber,” Rogers informed, “he attacked it with his machine gun spitting bullets. He was in a
position for the kill, it is alleged, when the distressed Italian plane was rescued by other ships.
Robinson, with his motors roaring, escaped into the rainclouds. His plane was slightly
damaged” (“Col. Robinson Stages Air Duel in Clouds with Enemy Planes”). Thus, despite
having been reportedly hired to teach mechanics and service Ethiopian planes, John Charles
Robinson became the first African American pilot to have fought in Africa for one of the
continent’s countries’ independence against a colonial power wielding superior technology.
And he did not fail.
3.7.5 Showing Off: John C. Robinson’s Technical Expertise on Display
As evidenced by the massive political support for the CPTP from 1938 onwards, the only way
to advance black aviation politically was to present it as a military necessity for the African
American community. That is what Robinson sought to do in Ethiopia years before the
campaign had even begun. In January 1936, the Courier reported that an order of six new
British airplanes, intended for Robinson’s colleagues from the Challenger association, had
been turned down by both the United States and Britain, as were passport applications for the
six Chicago flyers ready to join their leader in Ethiopia. Even though the US consul in Addis
Ababa expressed pride in Robinson’s work and stated that the US government was supportive
of the flyer, Robinson remained in Ethiopia on his own (“Col. Robinson Orders Six New
Planes”).
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Despite this setback, Robinson still featured in J.A. Rogers’ texts, providing expertise
on all things aeronautical. When Rogers wrote a text describing the panic in the Ethiopian
capital over a potential Italian air raid, Robinson’s expert opinion functioned as a calming
presence: “The capital is 8300 feet high and the bombers will have to climb at least another
8,000 feet to escape the anti-aircraft gun. This, Col. John C. Robinson assures me, will be
extremely difficult for the heavy bombing planes,” concluded Rogers his article (“Rogers
Paints Vivid Word Picture”).
To present Robinson to the Courier’s readers, to showcase the flyer’s technical and
mechanical prowess, and to outline his Pan-African sentiments even further, Rogers
interviewed the Chicagoan in early January. In the interview, Robinson thanked Rogers for
assuring him that “I am not fighting alone and that although I am the only American, black or
white fighting for Ethiopia, that all the people of my race in America are behind us 100 per
cent in our struggle.” “I am glad,” explained Robinson, “also to know that they realize that
Ethiopia is fighting not only for herself, but also for black men in every part of the world and
that Americans, especially black Americans, are willing to do anything to help us to carry on
and to win.” Once again, Robinson’s dedication, humility, and profound feelings of PanAfricanism
were contrasted with Hubert Julian, who, according to Rogers, “is just the
opposite” of Robinson, who, despite having broken his arm in four places had still heeded the
call of Ethiopia (“J.A. Rogers Gets Exclusive Interview with Col. Robinson”).
Robinson was later reported by Rogers to have even drunk hot water from his airplane
to survive during one of his flights in the Ethiopian wilderness (“Rugged Ethiopian Hills to
Halt Italy”) and to having been assigned to pilot Selassie’s brand new British four-seater
(“Emperor Gets Special Plane”). In March, Robinson asked through Rogers for more medical
aid from the Red Cross (“Colonel Robinsons Asks Race to Aid Ethiopia”).
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While the Courier had Rogers, the Defender was relying in some of its reporting on its
“Operative/Operator 22” – a correspondent, whose identity the paper would not divulge, but
whose photograph accompanied each of his reports. The texts sent out by the mysterious
journalist were, however, mostly yellow journalism; uncorroborated stories. In March 1936,
for example, the Defender’s reporter claimed that the Ethiopian air corps “consists of 150
pursuit planes and 40 bombers of the latest types. There are now 300 native pilots who have
had at least six months of intensive training. There are 25 dare-devil stunt flyers who have
been in the air corps service for more than a year” (“From Operative 22’s Mail”). Apart from
the six-month training period – since Robinson had been present in Ethiopia since April of the
previous year – the rest of the information reported was fabricated. The Defender had
reported another piece of sensationalist news in October 1935, when it claimed that “Five
hundred Ethiopian students are now studying aviation in various institutes of technology in
Japan.” “The belief is prevalent,” continued the report, “that as soon as they have been
licensed as pilots […] sufficient number of planes will be furnished them, and they will return
to Ethiopia […] to resume the war with Italy.” The Black Dragon Society55
was allegedly
interceding with the Japanese government on behalf of Ethiopia (“Train 500 Ethiopian Pilots
in Japan”). The Defender was thus still using yellow journalism and sensationalism in its
coverage of the Ethiopian crisis. However, it is necessary to point out that, perhaps having
been inspired by Robinson’s successes in aerial warfare, some of the paper’s most
sensationalist news concerned Ethiopian, or black aviation.
After the January 1936 interview with Robinson, the reports on the aviator published
in the spring issues of the Courier by Rogers and others began increasingly to emphasize
Robinson’s versatile mechanical, technological, and flying skills; his technical and
technological ingenuity and creativity, along with his dedicated Pan-Africanism, so aptly
55
For more on this secret nationalist organization, see Frank Jacob’s Japanism, Pan-Asianism and
Terrorism: A Short History of the Amur Society (The Black Dragons) 1901-1945 (2014).
221
formulated in the interview with Rogers. In “Ethiopia Making Own Airplanes and Gas
Masks,” Robinson was reported to have been “experimenting with Ethiopian raw materials
and automobile parts [and] last week the first plane was completed.” The text also noted that
Robinson had a history of building airplanes from scratch and that he had built for the
Ethiopians a “war machine which acts perfectly in tests.” One week later, Robinson’s piloting
skills were compared with those of British flyers in Ethiopia’s service. They, unlike the
Chicagoan, had repeatedly crashed planes on important missions because “no matter how
capable and what their record elsewhere, [they] are not so efficient in Ethiopia where they
must fly under radically different conditions” (“Robinson May Return to U.S.,” “Ethiopia
Airman Returning Home”). Because of the services Robinson had been performing for the
Ethiopian army, he was selected “to lead a squadron of special bombing planes in an assault
on certain mountains which are to be blasted in the campaign of Ethiopia to halt the advance
of the Italians on Addis Ababa” (“Leading Mountain Attack”). According to Tucker, the
mission probably never took place, but Robinson was later cited for bravery (182).
The climax of the coverage of Robinson’s achievements in Ethiopia came in early
February, when Rogers wrote a lengthy essay on the country’s beauty and the pilot’s prowess
and reputation. Although the piece provided much space for Rogers’ own commentary, a
considerable portion of it revolved around Robinson, who was, for the last time in the
Ethiopian coverage, given the opportunity to voice his views. Rogers described Robinson as
knowledgeable of the Ethiopian terrain, although the pilot admitted to Rogers that “flying was
tough as h—l in this land for me at first.” According to Rogers, “Robinson has been selected
as a special target by the Italians. They are seeking revenge for the agitation against them by
the people of Robinson’s race in America.” A few days before, for example, sixteen Italian
bombers had attacked a spot where Robinson had just landed; and the Italians knew every
time he left the capital, explained Rogers (“Rogers Takes Death Ride with Robinson”).
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The flyer also demonstrated his expertise at length in the text, when he discussed
Ethiopian army’s camouflage tactics as well as Italians’ cowardice. “You won’t find many
Italians risking their skin. […] They select a certain spot then they go up from nine to ten
thousand feet and loose their bombs, taking their chances at hitting something,” explained
Robinson. In his conclusion, Rogers had only words of praise for the Chicagoan: “He is an
ideal if ever there was one. […] He loves his race. […] To give up a job of $550 a month with
the Curtiss-Wright company; to leave his flourishing garage business in Chicago and come to
risk his life for Ethiopia, where he earns less than in America is as fine an example of heroic
devotion as one can think of” (“Rogers Takes Death Ride with Robinson”). Rogers would
later describe Robinson as “one of the world’s heroes” (“Rogers Pays Tribute to Colonel
Robinson”) and include him in his bestseller publication The Real Facts About Ethiopia.
Two reasons make Rogers’ piece crucial for what has been described in this
dissertation as black press’s aviation campaign. First, the Courier’s reporter employed the
same tone, tropes, and message in his concluding remarks on Robinson as that which had
been utilized by the black press ever since Bessie Coleman’s emergence in 1921/22. Rogers
depicted Robinson as a crusader, a hero of his race, who promoted black aviation in order to
advance his race. Moreover, the context of the Ethiopian crisis added a Pan-African and
military dimension to the existing goodwill message of aviation – Robinson was a PanAfrican
martyr, willing to give up his life in fighting a colonial, technologically superior
enemy. Secondly, it was the technological and military expertise that Robinson displayed
across Rogers’ texts in the Courier that demonstrated not only Robinson’s lack of fear of
Italy’s vaunted technology, but his understanding of its underlying logic.
In pointing out and connecting Italian soldiers’ lack of bravery along with Douhet’s
doctrine of civilian bombing, Robinson exposed the trope – highlighted for example in
Garvey’s Negro World’s coverage of colonial aviation – of cowardice, cruelty, and
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dehumanization through remote control of technology that seemed to be inherent to the ways
in which colonial powers had been using their technological advantage against native
populations in Africa and elsewhere. Robinson’s opinions, expressed in Rogers’ in-flight
essay, thus also indirectly highlighted the dehumanizing strategy facilitated by aviation that
white Americans in Tulsa employed toward their black compatriots when they attacked them
not face to face, but remotely from the air; unsuspecting and defenseless. At the same time, it
was Robinson’s flying, technological, mechanical, and military expertise which further
demonstrated that, if properly trained and equipped, Africa-descended people could and
would bridge the existing racial technological gap and push back against any given colonial
power. Robinson’s underlying goodwill message of black aviation was thus decidedly PanAfrican,
internationalist, and military.
3.7.6 A Hero’s Welcome
The Courier and the NYAN announced in early May that the aviator was on his way back to
the country but would stop in London to deliver messages from Selassie to Dr. Martin, the
consul (“Col. Robinson, Ethiopian Air Ace, Returning,” “Ethiopia Airman Returning
Home”). On May 23, the Defender and the NYAN devoted their front pages almost entirely to
Robinson’s arrival in New York. Featured were two photographs of the flyer in “his regular
aviator’s leather jacket. On the left side was the insignia of the Emperor’s Conquering Lion of
Judah embossed in gold. He wore a slip over sweater with the wings of a plane embossed in
gold lettering and the Emperor’s crown.” Displaying thus his allegiance to Ethiopia, Robinson
reiterated in an interview with a Defender reporter that “it was not so much the military skill
of the Italians” rather than in-fighting that troubled Ethiopia. In this way, Robinson once
again dismissed and recontextualized the idea that Ethiopians or any other black nation should
fear the presumed technological advantages associated with colonial powers. Despite defying
Italy’s technological superiority, Robinson admitted to having been “severely gassed” several
224
times, having had his collar bone broken, and having been shot twice “while in combat with
the Italians.” According to the Defender’s article, Robinson had taken part in twelve “actual
flying battles and in one he narrowly missed shooting down the plane of Mussolini’s son.” He
had amassed 728 flying hours in Ethiopia, tallying 1,328 hours over his twelve-year career
(“Defender Scribe Greets Robinson,” “Ethiopia War Ace Captures Harlem”).
With the detailed descriptions of Robinson’s wounds and flying experience while
defending Ethiopia against Italy’s colonialism, the Defender as well as the NYAN continued
the Courier’s portrayal of the aviator as a crusader. Unlike Coleman, Powell, or Banning,
however, Robinson had become a crusader scarred by actual battle in faraway Africa, thereby
finally combining aviation with military experience and Pan-Africanism. As an article in the
NYAN aptly put it, Robinson” did not talk – he acted” (“Colonel Robinson in Harlem
Monday”). The image of Robinson, the Pan-African war ace, must have been imprinted in
black America’s mind, because the Defender and the NYAN reported that the police had to
battle seven hundred spectators in Harlem upon Robinson’s arrival (“Rioting Marks
Demonstration for War Ace”).
Five thousand people welcomed the aviator at Rockland Palace at an event organized
by the United Aid for Ethiopia, where a hymn “Ode to Ethiopia,” specifically composed for
the occasion, was sung to Robinson by Reverend William Lloyd Imes. The organization
awarded Robinson “a silver trophy surmounted with an airplane model having a bloodstone
base, symbolizing the blood he shed on Ethiopian soil” (“Robinson in Big Ovation in New
York,” “The Colonel Gets Victory Trophy,” “5,000 Pay Tribute to Robinson,” “Emperor and
Air Hero Are Honored in Song”). The trophy did not only solidify Robinson’s image in the
minds of many as the first actual Pan-African warrior hailing from the United States, but also
associated aviation with its military purpose; in covering the celebration, the NYAN called
Robinson “a modern Negro Achilles” (“Watchtower”). Even Roi Ottley, otherwise sarcastic
225
in tone, devoted most of his regular column “Hectic Harlem” to praising Robinson as carrying
“his honors well and modestly.”
Harlem’s welcome for Robinson, however, could not compare to Chicago’s, as the
Defender May 30 issue, filled with articles on and photographs of Robinson at various events,
demonstrates. Five thousand supporters awaited the flyer at the airport and twenty thousand
by the Grand Hotel, where Robinson gave a speech. The war hero was greeted with military
honors, too. Officers of the Eight Infantry Illinois National Guard, which Coleman had
celebrated at her exhibition in 1922, were present. So were members of the Military Order of
Guards, Boy Scouts of America, the commander of the George L. Giles Post American
Legion, and officers of the Challengers. Along with these, Chicago’s dignitaries were in
attendance, too: Robert S. Abbott, W.T. Brown, the “mayor” of Bronzeville, Julian H. Lewis,
president of the Chicago branch of the United Aid for Ethiopia, Oscar DePriest, Lieut. John
Scott of the Chicago police, and members of the Chicago Tuskegee club including Barnett.
Robinson was assigned his own policeman for protection as, reportedly, there had
already been six assassination attempts carried out against him. Junius Caesar Austin of the
Pilgrim Baptist Church was among those giving a welcome speech. Doris Murphy, Janet
Waterford, and Willa Brown took a picture with the Brown Condor for the Defender, too.
Dinners were had, interviews were given and speeches made. Abbott, for example,
commended Robinson thusly: “The virtue of Colonel Robinson’s success, while seeking to
enhance the military fortune of his black brothers in Ethiopia, was intensified by the fact that
before leaving America, Colonel Robinson had made ample preparation through diligent
scientific study to properly assume the obligation which awaited him” (“Twenty Thousand
Greet Brown Condor,” Socialites Greet Hero at Airport,” “Col. Robinson Exhibits His
Leadership,” “Aviatrices Welcome Col. John Robinson,” “Reveal Six Attempts to Kill
226
Condor,” “Col. Robinson Speaker at Du Saible,” “Editor Abbott in Tribute to Col.
Robinson”).
As Robinson’s unprecedented reception in Harlem and Chicago and his image
portrayed in the Defender indicate, the aviator had managed to make black aviation and its
military potential a nation-wide political issue. Even though monographs on Bronzeville,
Chicago’s Black Renaissance, or Chicago aviation have ignored Robinson and his group, the
aviator had turned Chicago air-minded. The image he projected was no longer that of an
unlucky crusader – a trope prevalent in previous black aviation coverage – but rather of a PanAfrican
warrior, unafraid of colonizer’s technological superiority, because his own abilities
and skills matched it. He had the support of the Defender, one of the most popular black
newspapers in the country, as well as of Reverend Austin, a strong advocate of PanAfricanism
and black inter- and trans-nationalism. Robinson’s group had a para-military
status and its leader had amassed well over a thousand flying hours, more than half of them on
the battlefields of Ethiopia. Here had emerged a leader, the Defender seemed to be saying in
its coverage of Robinson’s arrival, who could militarize black aviation. From Robinson’s
return from Ethiopia onwards, the press coverage of black aviation would no longer use the
crusader trope. It would increasingly emphasize the need for potential black aviators to seize
educational opportunities and it would transform aviation, especially military training in
aviation, into a political issue. If Forsythe and Anderson’s goodwill flight had utilized
aviation as a means of fostering interracial relationship as a civil-rights issue, Robinson’s
military duty in Ethiopia made black aviation decidedly political.
3.8 I’m Flying to Memphis: John C. Robinson’s Untold Mission
Still, in the spring of 1937, John C. Robinson laid claim to being a New Negro leader with
one more mission which captured African Americans’ attention, but has gone entirely
unnoticed in existing monographs on black aviation history. While the Courier relied heavily
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on Powell and Schuyler’s efforts to promote aviation on its pages, the Defender in 1937
invested directly into John C. Robinson’s career, devising a new level of symbiosis between
the black press and black aviators; the paper would later shift allegiance to Cornelius Coffey
and Willa Beatrice Brown to lobby for the inclusion of African Americans in the CPTP.
While Tucker’s and Simmons’ biographies of Robinson, as well as Scott and Womack’s
monograph on black aviation and the Courier, do note that Robinson spent much of 1937
touring the country and campaigning for aviation and his school, the combined efforts of the
Defender and Robinson in the early spring of 1937 have so far gone unrecorded. The archive
of the Defender’s articles on Robinson, however, indicates that the Defender was positioning
itself to become the black press’ leader in the aviation campaign by supporting the only
African American war hero airman in the country and a model New Negro.
Robinson’s new mission emerged in early 1937 – Memphis was under water. As
Patrick O’Daniel notes, “Tens of thousands of desperate refugees rushed to Memphis fleeing
floodwater in January and February of 1937. […] This massive superflood broke all previous
records, even those set in 1927. By mid-January it had devastated communities throughout the
Ohio Valley, and then it moved into the rain-drenched Mississippi Valley.” Suddenly,
“overwhelmed Memphians not only had to accommodate the survivors of this disaster but
also had to save their city from a flood crest greater than any before in the United States”
(10). The Chicago Defender, distrustful of the Red Cross yet eager to help the black
Southerners who had been the paper’s loyal readers for more than two decades and had
relatives in Chicago, paired with the Memphis Community Welfare League and promised to
deliver food and other necessities to the area by train and plane (“Clothes, Shoes and Bedding
Sent by Chicagoans”).
On February 6, the paper announced on its front page that Colonel John Robinson
would fly the Defender’s relief to Memphis. A photograph of Robinson in his pilot’s jacket
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with Ethiopian air force insignia was printed next to the announcement, which explained that
Robinson was bringing “war-time experience and ability to aid.” While he was looking for a
proper plane for the purpose of his mission, it was planned that he would make two trips a
week from the paper’s relief station to the various camps in the flooded areas (“Col. John
Robinson to Fly Relief Aid”). Two weeks later, the paper printed a large photograph of
Robinson standing in full gear in front of a plane labeled “Chicago Defender Flood Relief.”
His war experience and close ties to Ethiopia and its emperor were again highlighted through
the accompanying caption, effectively portraying the aviator as a savior figure. Aviation was
one of the few means of reaching the flood-stricken areas around Memphis and there was no
one better equipped than the Defender’s pilot to complete this dangerous mission (“Chicago
Defender Flood Relief Plane”).56
Initially, however, Robinson’s plane suffered setbacks due to weather conditions and
subsequent technical problems on the plane. Robinson was forced to land in Bloomington,
Ill., and wait for spare parts. Owing to his reputation, however, the aviator was determined “to
complete his mission of mercy to Memphis, Tenn., or die in the attempt” (“Col. Robinson
Downed by Bad Weather”). Unlike Julian, who had promised similar determination but never
delivered on it, Robinson eventually completed his mission in early March– and the Defender
advertised it using language and tropes reminiscent of the paper’s coverage of the flyer’s
return from Ethiopia. “Unseen hands, Friday just as evening was singing its swan song and
the murk of the night was submerging the somber glow of a blood-red sun, rolled back the
gathering clouds for just one minute,” wrote Dan Burley, the Defender’s correspondent in
Memphis. “That one minute, ladies and gentlemen, was enough. It let the Brown Condor of
Ethiopia, the personal air escort of his Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie, King of Kings,
Conquering Lion of Judah, Select of God and Goodwill Ambassador of the Chicago
56
The Courier informed on Robinson’s mission later in February in “Air Ace Flies to Memphis.”
229
Defender, Col. John Robinson, to slip through.” The city knew that “he would not fail [to
arrive], since he didn’t fail Selassie,” explained Burley (“Brown Condor Lands Plane in
Memphis”).
Robinson’s arrival had been mostly ignored by white Memphians, explains O’Daniel
(77). And, since Robinson was supposed to arrive in Memphis two weeks before, only four
people were awaiting him at the Memphis airport. According to Burley, the local white
newspapers and radio shows had been mocking Robinson’s efforts for weeks, regarding “the
flight as typical of Race enterprise” and expecting “some burlesque type of aviator – probably
some aged fellow, bent, rusty, speaking some sort of ununderstandable lingo, crawling out of
the cabin” (“Brown Condor Lands Plane in Memphis”). But Robinson’s arrival, successful
landing, and visage recontextualized the mocking trope of inept African Americans, and
apparently endeared him to the white reporters awaiting him and the word quickly spread
around Beale Street that the promised black savior had arrived.
“The Chicago Defender became a symbol of progress,” claimed Burley, because the
successful flight meant much to the city’s black populace (“Brown Condor Lands Plane in
Memphis”). Robinson was even greeted by Robert Reed Church, Jr., Memphis’ most
influential African American politician (“Bob Church Greets Flyer”). He spoke at the local
radio station WNBR (“Memphis Officially Welcomes Col. John C. Robinson”) and took
photographs with the city’s black businessmen and professionals (“Memphians Throng to
Pilot”). He visited and gave speeches at the LeMoyne College and Porter School to hundreds
of black students, telling them stories from Ethiopia and about flying (“1100 Memphis
Students Hear Noted Flyer”). Throughout the coverage of these events, Robinson’s war
experience in Ethiopia was highlighted repeatedly.
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The Defender thus added a new piece to Robinson’s existing aura of the race’s savior
and a race leader – not only had he been willing to fight Italian technological dominance in
Ethiopia and prove black aviation’s worth, but he also braved the calamitous weather and
white Memphians’ prejudice to deliver much-needed relief aid to Memphis. Black aviation
was, owing to Robinson’s skills and the black press’ activities, connecting communities and
making them notice the growing field. The Defender summarized Robinson’s trip briefly in
April (“Aviation”), but, more importantly, provided space for the aviator to write his own
story of the “goodwill flight,” as the paper called it on several occasions. In “Robinson’s Own
Story of Epic Flight,” the pilot deferred any self-glorification and simply described the
technical difficulties and dangerous weather conditions that had hampered his flight.
Robinson’s emphasis on solving these problems and his expertise in engine and flight
mechanics, however, served as a reminder that black America had skilled black aviators who
had bridged the racial technological gap, who were teaching those willing to learn how to
excel in a technological field, and who did not hesitate to risk their lives providing a helping
hand to communities in need.
3.9 The Writing in the Sky
By the end of 1937, the black press had thus established itself as the most vocal and
influential advocate for black aviation. In cooperation with various organizations and
individuals, it had managed to create a nationwide campaign celebrating and promoting
pioneering black aviators. The black press also presented to its readers, in a barrage of
articles, editorials, columns, and photos, the racial uplift tropes which characterized its
coverage of black aviation: technical and mechanical education, job opportunities in the field
of aviation, the crusading spirit and goodwill leadership of the flying New Negroes
transcending borders and race, as well as the military dimension of aviation so vital for the
231
survival of Haiti, various African countries, and even of African Americans given the racewar
invoking tragedy in Tulsa.
In the process, black newspapers also introduced an entire generation of skilled New
Negro race leaders and role models, who sought to represent and recontextualize the
representation of the race in the field of aviation and, as a result, disabuse Americans – black
and white – of the stereotypical notion that people of color were technically and
technologically inept, backward, and therefore uncivilized, as Charles Lindbergh and others
before him so famously posited. By 1937, black America had raised an entire generation of
successful black aviators. William J. Powell had been teaching flying and aeronautics as well
running an aviation magazine in California and Arizona for almost a decade. Robinson and
his group, comprised of many female aviators, had made Chicago’s South Side air minded –
some of the students would turn up at Tuskegee to train for the CPTP in the 1940s. John W.
Greene had been advancing black aviation in Boston and Washington, D.C., Dr. Porter A.
Davis had been dazzling Kansas City with his flying trips for over ten years. Leon Paris,
Albert E. Forsythe, and Alfred Charles Anderson had demonstrated that black aviators could
fly abroad and spread the gospel of technical and mechanical education, economic
opportunities and the military dimension of aviation as a means of subverting long-standing
stereotypes and proving Africa-descended people’s humanity and belonging to the civilized
world. In other words, black aviators had by 1937 emerged as race role models and leaders
whose objective had always been to represent black America as technically apt and ingenious.
Given the era in which they advanced black aviation – Jim Crow as well as the Great
Depression – and their endeavors’ starting point, black aviators established themselves as
active participants in and contributors to the Harlem Renaissance’s internationalism, struggles
for various civil rights, and were depicted as those whom black America could call in time of
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need. They set the ground and lobbied for the emergence of the Tuskegee Airmen in the late
1930s and first half of the 1940s.
Thus, when George S. Schuyler, perhaps black aviation’s most vocal promoter among
black journalists during the Harlem Renaissance era, released the first installment of The
Black Internationale in the Courier in late 1936, black aviation had already become a
commonly debated and popular topic in the black press and the communities it informed,
molded, represented, and gave voice to. Schuyler’s novellas – The Black Internationale, The
Black Empire, and Revolt in Ethiopia – reflect this development; they address essentially all
issues and engaged with tropes involved and depicted in the goodwill aviation campaign so
heavily featured in black newspapers. Even though the novellas deal with a myriad of other
issues as existing scholarship has shown, the texts also feature, celebrate, and propagate to a
large degree – and in a fantastical vision – the phenomenon of black aviation and black
aviators as New Negro race leaders and role models. Militant, assertive, technically as well as
technologically-skilled, and inter- and transnationally-minded, Schuyler’s black aviators
represent a vanguard of progress and civilization among Africa-descended peoples as
Schuyler imagines them seeking to establish a black empire of the air above Africa’s skies.
233
4. BLACK EMPIRE OF THE AIR: READING AVIATION IN GEORGE S.
SCHUYLER’S SERIAL FICTION
4.1 Introduction
George S. Schuyler’s The Black Internationale and The Black Empire, serialized between
1936 and 1938 in the Courier under Schuyler’s pseudonym of Samuel I. Brooks and
collectively published in 1991 as Black Empire, have been read as pulp fiction mixing
elements of science fiction and hard-boiled narration as well as characters to tell the story of
Carl Slater, a Harlem-based journalist, and Dr. Henry Belsidus, a mysterious physician
planning to violently reclaim Africa. In The Black Internationale, Belsidus carries out a largescale
invasion of Africa and subsequent mass murder of all white colonizers as he amasses a
large educated and technologically-advanced army of trained aviators, soldiers, engineers,
mechanics, doctors, and pastors of color to, once and for all, stop and deter white colonial
powers from touching the African continent. In The Black Empire, Belsidus subsequently
focuses on defending and strengthening the new empire, on controlling its skies. Schuyler’s
Revolt in Ethiopia serialized between 1938 and 1939 under the pseudonym of Rachel Call –
and discussed in detail in section 4.7 – also deals with violent anti-colonialism. Dick Welland,
an African American, aids Ettara, an Ethiopian princess, on a quest to secure a mythical
treasure and to purchase weapons for Ethiopia’s guerilla warfare against Italian occupants.
The duo of novellas comprising Black Empire has received considerable critical
attention. Even though, in the 1991 edition of the texts published by the Northeastern
University Press, Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen observe that Schuyler’s serial fiction
“might not fit traditional definitions of belles lettres, it constitutes an extraordinary literary
achievement and supplies an important key to a fuller understanding of [the author’s] creative
versatility” (260). The texts offer “readings as widely divergent as Pan-Africanist, radical, and
fascist,” argues Yogita Goyal in “Black Nationalist Hokum” (26). Pavla Veselá, for example,
234
reads the texts in “Neither Black Nor White” as blending of the genres of “thriller,
melodrama, romance, war fiction, science fiction, and even the Soviet realist novel” (278).57
Some scholars, for example John Cullen Gruesser in Black on Black, have deemed Black
Empire, and Revolt by extension, a parody of fascism in general (111), while others, such as
Etsuko Taketani in “Colored Empires in the 1930s” contextualize the novellas within Japan’s
imperial ambitions in particular (138). Others have criticized Schuyler for engaging in
“ideological aesthetic of black fascism” since Dr. Belsidus’ African conquest represents a
“fascist political endeavor.” In fact, in creating Belsidus, claims Mark Christian Thompson in
“Black Fascisms,” Schuyler seems to be asking the question “what if there had been a ‘black
Mussolini’” (85).58
Finally, Kalí Tal, in “‘That Just Kills Me:’ Black Militant Near-Future
Fiction,” perceives Black Empire as an Afrofuturist “escapist fantasy combined with
underlying cultural critique, designed for a public dissatisfied with their lived reality” (80).
Schuyler’s mixing of genres as well as his incorporation of topical issues, such as the
Italo-Ethiopian war and rising support for militant black internationalism, have been used by
scholars to explain the serials’ unprecedented popularity. Black Empire and later Revolt did
certainly go “over mighty big” with the Courier’s readers, according to W.G. Nunn, the
paper’s managing editor. Black Empire constituted “one of the best serials we have ever run
[and] should be the answer to a circulation man’s prayers,” wrote Nunn to Schuyler in early
1937 (quoted in Hill and Rasmussen 268). Given the Courier’s rising circulation numbers in
1937, when it reached 250,000 primary readers, Schuyler’s novellas were not only popular,
but also reached a large segment of the African American population since newspapers spread
and circulated throughout communities, perhaps increasing the actual readership as much as
57
Veselá explains that Belsidus’ emphasis on economic development, genetic miracles, centralized
cultural and social policy, control of the masses, and the overall master -plot all resemble Soviet
utopianism (282).
58
As a result of his pro-Ethiopian columns and violent serialize novellas, Schuyler was watched by
the FBI. For more, see William J. Maxwell’s F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders
Framed African American Literature
235
five-fold. For comparison, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of
Harlem Renaissance’s iconic novels, sold 5,000 copies between 1937 and 1945 (Lester 6).
Even Schuyler himself was surprised by his novellas’ success. In an April 1937 letter
to Percival Prattis, he explains that he had “been greatly amused by the public enthusiasm for
[my novella], which is hokum and hack work of the purest vein. I deliberately set out to
crowd as much race chauvinism and sheer improbability into it as my fertile imagination
could conjure. The result vindicates my low opinion of the human race” (quoted in Hill and
Rasmussen 260). Such denunciation of his own texts, however, cannot be taken at face value
to label the novellas satire or parody only, as a number of scholars have done. As Hill and
Rasmussen demonstrate in their afterword to the 1991 edition and the introduction to the 1996
edition of Revolt in Ethiopia, Schuyler wrote between 1935 and 1939 many texts supportive
of black internationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Ethiopia alongside his scathing criticisms of
racial essentialism and nationalism. Black Empire is thus “far more complex” than meets the
eye, claim Hill and Rasmussen, because the novellas serve as “a historical document” which
“reflect[s] the turbulence of the crisis-ridden [1930s]” and is rooted “in a strong sense of
contemporary social issues” (261-3).
For example, a few months after publishing the last installment of The Black Empire,
Schuyler penned an exhaustive essay for The Crisis on the plight of people of color under
colonial and imperial rule. “The Rise of the Black Internationale” echoes the plot of his
successful novellas, where technological advancements drive Dr. Belsidus’ anti-colonial
revenge: “[T]hese 75 years have seen the steady decline in the power and prestige of people
of color the world over, thanks to the improvement in European firearms, the amazing
technological advance of the West and the shattering of distance and isolation by modern
transportation and communication,” explains Schuyler. “[M]ost important of all, these years
have seen the resultant rise of the White Internationale and the gradual rise of the Black
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Internationale in opposition” (255). Despite Schuyler’s skeptical attitude towards his works,
his non-fiction writing published simultaneously with his serialized fiction, and discussed
below, suggests that the novellas represent a complex, albeit somewhat satirical, expression of
and insight into Schuyler’s political and cultural persuasion.
Schuyler wrote forty five serials for the Courier during the 1930s under his own name
and various pseudonyms – unlike other Harlem Renaissance authors, though, Schuyler wrote
“almost exclusively [for] black [readers]” (Hill and Rasmussen 265-70).59
Although his 1932
novel, Black No More, was published and heavily promoted by a white agent and publisher,
Schuyler railed during the 1920s and the 1930s against the toxic influence white patronage
exerted over black arts and literature. For example, in “Advice to Budding Literati” in the
January 1926 issue of The Messenger, he criticized white patronage sustaining Harlem’s
talents for its demands on black writing to be “bizarre, fantastical and outlandish, with a
suggestion of the jungle, the plantation or the slum. Otherwise, it will not be Negro literature,
and hence not acceptable” and financially supported (quoted in Hill and Rasmussen 300).
In “The Negro-Art Hokum,” Schuyler again refused such essentialism to be ascribed
to African American literature. Instead, he preferred for black literature to function as
propaganda. “[H]e believed that the best kind of art produced by or about blacks should
promote the black struggle for economic and political equality,” explains Schuyler’s
biographer, Jeffery Brown Ferguson (456). That is why in “Art and Propaganda” from 1926,
Schuyler espoused “propaganda from the underdog—the oppressed class” and, in January
1936, after a year filled with race riots, he rejoiced in one of his columns that “the so-called
59
According to Hill and Rasmussen, Schuyler used the pseudonym Samuel I. Brooks, which gave
him an alter ego to use whenever he did not wish to be identified, as early as 1928 (264).
Interestingly, according to the research conducted for this dissertation, Schuyler also used this
pseudonym to author a series of editorials for the Courier between 1939 and 1941, in which he
comments, among other things, on James H. Peck’s successes and criticizes, on numerous occasions,
the fact that the Tuskegee airmen have not yet been allowed to fight in Africa and Europe during
WWII.
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Negro Renaissance [and] the Cult of the Negro is past. The Sambo Era has gone. The Coon
Age is no more” (“Views and Reviews”).
Written strictly for a black audience, mixing various genres and current topics, and
reflecting Schuyler’s complex views on cultural, social, and political issues, Black Empire
and Revolt constitute Schuyler’s propagandist art by and about blacks at its extreme. One of
the reasons for the texts’ popularity is that the novellas involve a plethora of fantastical and
exaggerated elements, while also ultimately depicting people of color’s struggle for economic
and political rights. This is perhaps best seen when the texts are read in connection with – and
as an extension and promotion of – black aviation and its campaign in the black press. For,
the novellas are not mere “escapist fantasy” as Tal claims, but rather almost propagandistic
texts using transvaluation and recontextualization as they imagine and present black
America’s potential for advancement, revenge, and reclamation of the ancestral homeland if
only it had enough money at its disposal – a crucial element of black aviation’s coverage in
the black press – and a capable leader at the helm to develop its talented black aviators and
other technical professions.
The first installment of The Black Internationale appeared on the Courier’s pages on
November 21, 1936, with advertisements, probably written by Schuyler himself, appearing a
week earlier. Although aviation first emerges in the serial on January 16, 1937, after eight
chapters, it barely leaves the story from that point on. In fact, aviation drives, frames, and
makes possible almost all action in the novellas, taking the spotlight especially in the The
Black Empire. This is true for the later Revolt in Ethiopia as well. Crucially, aviation,
embodied by the character of Belsidus’ head of air force, Patricia Givens, entered the novella
during a period when Schuyler produced perhaps his most eloquent defenses of and
promotional texts about black aviation. Scholars have attributed Givens’ appearance on the
scene to W.G. Nunn’s advice to Schuyler to “inject the woman angle” into the text one week
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before Givens’ entrance (Hill and Rasmussen 268). However, they have glossed over the
confluence of Schuyler’s pro-aviation texts with Givens’ introduction as the head of the Black
Internationale’s air force which enables Belsidus to conquer and then defend Africa
throughout the following fifty three chapters of the two serials. In other words, scholarly
emphasis on Schuyler’s treatment of gender in the text has obfuscated the fact that Patricia
Givens represents the focal promotional aspect of Schuyler’s novellas and the central driving
force of and technology behind Belsidus’ revenge plans: black aviation.
In “New Job Frontiers for Negro Youth,” published in The Crisis in November 1936,
the same month as the first installment of The Black Internationale, Schuyler outlines in more
detail than before his vision for the technical advancement of black America. He observes that
there are almost five million American youngsters “unemployed, not in school and seeking
work,” with African Americans “worse off because of the many lines of work from which
[they are] excluded.” “Only charlatans pretend to see,” claims Schuyler, “a time when this
young vast army will be employed privately.” “What is [the young Negroes’] future?,” asks
Schuyler, “what sort of work can they get? For what sort of careers shall they prepare in this
rapidly changing world?” (328). Science and technology are the solution, asserts Schuyler;
both in real life and in his novellas where Dr. Belsidus assembles and finances an entire army
of skilled technicians. With traditional teaching and preaching professions no longer
economically attractive, and medical professions overcrowded, explains Schuyler, African
Americans should turn to aviation mechanics, social work, and any type of engineering as this
is the “age of technics and the key man is the technical scientist” (328-9). Although he does
not highlight aviation as a field of opportunity for black pilots in this particular text,
Schuyler’s overall assessment of technical fields as key to the race’s advancement previews
Dr. Belsidus’ ideology predicated on black technical creativity, ingenuity, and hard work.
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Aviation drives the novellas, but scientific innovation on the part of black technicians and
scientists complements aviation throughout the texts as well.
In December 1936, Schuyler added to his vision the essential role of black aviation for
any potential advancement for people of color. The American Mercury, a magazine in which
Schuyler and many other Harlem Renaissance authors had often published, ran an essay in
July 1936 by Kenneth Brown Collings, titled “America Will Never Fly.” In it, Collings, a
Marine pilot and a reporter from war-torn Ethiopia or later occupied Czechoslovakia, notes
that the number of pilots who can and are willing to fly for the Army or the Navy is extremely
low. This situation is exacerbated even further, claims Collings, by the fact that “Negroes
cannot fly – even the Bureau of Air Commerce admits that” (292). Although Collings in a
later text acknowledges that John C. Robinson represents an exception to this rule, the
discrepancy in the ratio between black population and the number of black pilots cannot “be
attributed to anything other than lack of ability” (“Mr. Collings Replies”).
Schuyler sent an eloquent and elegant rebuttal to Collings’ essay to the December
1936 issue of the magazine. In his letter, Schuyler presents a brief history of early black
aviation, mentioning Eugene Bullard, Bessie Coleman, and Robinson who “eluded the entire
Italian air force.” He summarizes the cross-country and international flights black aviators had
carried out, including that of Leon Paris, and provides examples of successful air circuses
held by aviators of color. In his outrage, Schuyler even goes so far as to posit that “there is a
conspiracy in America to keep the Negro out of aviation as well as a lot of other avenues of
endeavor.” Finally, he posits, “there isn’t anything [white Americans] can do that their
colored brothers cannot do. You just can’t keep Sambo down – even on the ground”
(“Negroes in the Air”).60
60
William J. Powell reacted to Colling’s essay in early 1937 as well.
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The use of the Sambo figure, a stereotypical depiction of people of color, punctuates
Schuyler’s rebuttal to Collings and his defense of black aviation. However, it also signifies on
his exhilaration over the alleged end of the Harlem Renaissance in his January 1936 column
mentioned above. The figure connects the two texts in symbolizing the end of one era –
literature by black authors tailored for white audiences – and announcing the beginning of
another. An era of literature by and about people of color, which transforms the technically
and technologically inept Sambo figure into a skilled and ingenuous black character. Given
his passionate defense of black aviation, it does not come as a surprise that Schuyler frames
the novellas, which he had begun to write at that very moment, in black aviation terms and
weaves black aviation’s goodwill message with an aggressively militarized aspect into his
texts.
Finally, a few weeks after Schuyler introduces Patricia Givens in the novellas, he
devotes his entire column for the Courier in late January 1937 to the importance of black
aviation. “The machine that flies today successfully challenges the battleship, the tank, the
submarine, and cavalry. [Planes sink] merchantmen and warships at will. [Aviation] has
revolutionized warfare as much as gunpowder,” observes Schuyler aptly. Time and geography
no longer matter, explains the columnist, as “commercial airlines now girdle the habitable
globe [and distances] formerly considered formidable are now negotiated [within a] few hours
or days.” Moreover, aviation offers job opportunities – as black aviation’s goodwill message
posited from its inception – since “great factories in all parts of the world hum with the
activity of turning out thousands of these artificial birds that can fly farther and carry greater
loads than any bird ever imagined.” Indeed, jobs for “a new kind of technical expert […] are
plentiful,” claims Schuyler confidently (“Views and Reviews”).
In the rest of his column, Schuyler then recounts the glorious history of early black
aviation, calling the achievements of black aviators such as Coleman, Robinson, Powell and
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others “short of miraculous […] considering the opposition to Negroes entering aviation or
getting any instruction in it at all.” Noting that Powell’s school and workshop in California
has recently build an entire plane from the ground up, Schuyler announces that “here is a new
field Negroes are creating for themselves.” He urges his audience to take up aviation and get
training because “there are never enough HIGHLY TRAINED workers in ANY field.”
Finally, observing that “twenty years ago there were no colored radio engineers, municipal
judges, tax commissioners, conductors of subway trains, air conditioning engineers, or
salesman for great corporations,” Schuyler claims that all that is needed is support of the
community for black aviation’s further advancement, “With the solid backing of a few
thousand determined colored people, 100 trained Negro aviators and mechanics might get a
unit in the Army Air Corps or secure work in airplane factories.” Predicting a coming war,
Schuyler then closes his column with an ominous question: “Who knows how great the
demand for skilled mechanics and pilots may be in 1940?” (“Views and Reviews”).
The Black Empire novellas answer Schuyler’s question. They imagine and depict the
kind of work a well-trained army of black scientists, aviators, and mechanics could potentially
perform in an armed conflict. Schuyler integrates his visions for a technically-trained black
America and an advanced black air force led by Givens, a Bessie Coleman-like character, into
his texts. In essence, Dr. Belsidus transposes black aviation’s goodwill message, its tropes and
themes, into his plans: technical education and training, job opportunities in the field,
aviation’s potential to cross boundaries and connect peoples of color across the globe, as well
as its increasingly crucial role in warfare, all represent the building blocks on which Belsidus’
establishes his black empire. Throughout the two novellas, the doctor strives to gain and
assert control over Africa’s skies to establish a black empire of the air and thus fulfill William
J. Powell’s wish at the end of his 1934 autobiography to see the skies filled with black wings.
In Revolt in Ethiopia, too, princess Ettara pursues the objective of re-gaining control over the
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Ethiopian empire’s sky. Overall then, Schuyler portrays, celebrates, and propagates black
aviation as a means of subverting the stereotype of a technically and technologically inept
Sambo, of recontextualizing and envisioning the potential of the field which black aviators
have built by themselves despite Jim Crow, and of writing into being a modern, leading New
Negro civilization predicated on cutting-edge technology and ruthless utilization of air
warfare.
4.2 Educating the Black Internationale’s Army and Putting it to Work
The Black Internationale’s opening chapter is filled with action. Carl Slater, the novella’s
narrator, meets Dr. Belsidus and witnesses him murder a white woman; he is then kidnapped
and begins to record Dr. Belsidus’ master plan for the decolonization and reclamation of
Africa. From the outset, Belsidus outlines that his campaign will be murderous and
technology-driven. “With brains, courage and wealth even the most fantastic scheme can
become reality,” explains Belsidus to Carl, highlighting the role that black scientific and
technical ingenuity will play in his scheme. “My ideal and objective is very frankly to cast
down the Caucasians and elevate the colored people in their places,” proclaims Belsidus,
explaining his transvaluation of segregation as a positive phenomenon which he will use to
his advantage to build a new, mechanized civilization of color. When Carl expresses doubts,
saying that “white people have all the power, all the industry,” the doctor unveils that it will
be precisely black science which will be used to crush the alleged white technological
superiority: “We have brains, the best brains in the Negro race. We have science of which the
white man has not dreamed in our possession” (11), for example aviation. Schuyler thus
introduces Dr. Belsidus as a charismatic and cold-blooded leader and Carl as audience, whose
incredulity allows for Belsidus to expound on his designs.
In one of the dialogues in the novella’s first chapters, Belsidus explains to Carl the
structure upon which white supremacy – and his plan to bring it down – rests: technical and
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scientific education. “All the means of education and information,” lectures Belsidus, “from
nursery to college, from newspaper to book, are mobilized to perpetuate white supremacy; to
enslave and degrade the darker peoples” (14). In a dialogue with delegates to the Black
Internationale from Sierra Leone, for example, Belsidus observes that the country’s publishers
and journalists, businessmen and traders, physicians, teachers, engineers, chemists, architects,
and technicians are all white (34-35). Since Belsidus needs untainted black brains to execute
his plans, he only recruits “young Negroes [who are] intellectuals, scientists, engineers. They
are mentally the equal of the whites. They possess superior energy, superior vitality, they
have superior [and] more intense, hatred and resentment; that fuel which operates the
juggernaut of conquest.” With their help, and “new weapons of science,” Belsidus plans to
“out-think and out-scheme the white people” (15).
Through many of his monologues and lectures, Belsidus thus highlights the fact that
black liberation in the United States and Africa cannot succeed without reforming black
men’s education. Schuyler portrays Belsidus, like himself, as painfully cognizant of the fact
that black scientists, engineers or aviators – much like antebellum skilled artisans such as
Denmark Vesey or Nat Turner – are the leaders that any black liberation and destruction of
white supremacy, especially in education, cannot do without. Moreover, Belsidus intends to
and does employ black youth for whom he foresees future in the numerous technical fields
available. Although Schuyler could not envisage in his aforementioned essay for The Crisis “a
time when this young vast army will be employed privately,” he imagines precisely such a
scenario through Dr. Belsidus.
Overall then, if Belsidus’ plan to rid Africa of white colonizers and America of white
supremacy is to succeed, black science and technology rooted in non-white education must
lead the way “because everything in our civilization is predicated upon industry and
commerce” (36). That is also why Belsidus equips his allies with cutting-edge methods and
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materials to “teach the colored world how to read and write” in English, French, Dutch,
Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as to “train technicians” (36-40). Moreover, at the first
congress, all delegates to the Black Internationale are tasked with immediately selecting “one
young man and one young woman who have finished secondary schools with honors and
send[ing] them to America immediately for technical education,” and 10 young women with
finished grammar school who will be sent to American trade schools (36). With money from
illegal activities and slain white women, Belsidus is thus able to pursue his own segregated
educational initiative.
Consequently, throughout the two novellas, Carl learns in seemingly every chapter of
an invention or scientific discovery by Belsidus’ well-educated ‘brains.’ The texts are filled
with proof that Belsidus’ reliance on an educational initiative is working. In chapter 10 of The
Black Internationale, for example, Carl discovers legions of scientists and engineers at
Belsidus-owned cement mills, liquid chemical farms, steam and electric plants (46-50). Upon
his successful liberation of Africa, Belsidus’ men immediately install and erect the same
facilities as well as build new roads and independent Temples of Love to propagate a PanAfrican
religion all over Africa.
Most importantly, however, Carl discovers in Chapter 10 that Belsidus boasts of a
large all-black air force with its own hangars, airports, and planes – a true army of pilots and
aviation mechanics. Belsidus reasons that without a well-trained air force, he cannot
“successfully attack a great mechanical civilization with great mills, mines, factories, fleets,
and above all the thousands and thousands of skilled technicians necessary for the conduct of
modern warfare as well as the perpetuation of machine civilization.” Aware of John C.
Robinson’s futile mission in Ethiopia against the Regia Aeronautica and Abd-el Krim’s
bloody guerilla warfare against the air forces of France and Spain in Morocco in the early
1920s, Belsidus warns that “Abdel Krim, Haile Selassie and numerous other chieftains from
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Fuzzy Wuzzy to Cetawayo […] threw themselves against the machines of white civilization
and failed” (36). Belsidus’ preparations and emphasis on readiness in terms of training,
materials, and weapons read like a reaction to Haile Selassie’s fatal realization shortly before
Italy attacked Ethiopia that “there are no factories to produce war materials [and] we did not
have enough money to make purchases abroad. We asked for loans [but] we did not find
anyone who would lend to Us” (quoted in Tucker 120). Belsidus’ obsession with readiness,
proper technical training and education, as well as self-sufficiency thus reflect not only his
skeptical views on the mainstream education provided to people of color, but also his
skepticism towards the international community helping his cause. His ideology also seems to
be heavily inspired by previous experiences of nations of color with white colonial powers’
technical supremacy – or the ever-present racial technological gap at the center of black press’
coverage of black aviation.
Apart from rigorous training, Belsidus also intends to rid his aviators, mechanics,
scientists, and technicians “of that deeply ingrained inferiority complex, especially those who
have been most exposed to the white man’s influence” (36). Carl is thus shocked when he
first encounters Patricia Givens, the head of Belsidus’ air force, and personally experiences
her supreme confidence. A week before Schuyler publishes his strongest endorsement of
black aviation for the Courier in late January 1937, where he celebrates, among others’
William J. Powell’s students’ ability to construct a plane from scratch, Carl and the readers
are taken to Westchester County, where Belsidus operates a mysterious facility. “This is our
air school. […] The hangars and workshops are away over there,” announces Givens to Slater
(42). As Patricia shows Carl around the premises, he notes that he has “never seen a better
ordered place.” He observes a facility, reminiscent of Powell’s workshop, where “more than a
score of young colored men and women were working over engines, doping wings and
otherwise engaged in the making and repairing of aircraft” (43).
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The hangars hold twenty planes – some of them “built for high speed but several were
huge transport planes capable of long journeys or carrying huge payloads.” Above the
hangars, Carl is stunned to watch “two of the small speedy ships […] performing the most
hair-raising stunts.” Meanwhile, Patricia beams with confidence, telling Carl that “the time
will come when we won’t have nearly enough [planes]. We finish one every ten days or so.
It’s excellent training for our young mechanics and pilots. I have to keep them busy, you
know?” (43). As the head of Belsidus’ air force who had studied aviation in France for three
years like Bessie Coleman, Patricia explains to Carl, while piloting, that “it is the skilled
technician, the scientist, who wins modern wars,” thus paraphrasing Schuyler’s “New Job
Frontiers.” “[A]nd we are mobilizing the black scientists of the world. Our professors, our
orators, our politicians have failed us. Our technicians will not” (46).
As Schuyler asserts in his column from late January 1937, black aviation is a field
which aviators and mechanics of color have created for themselves. Patricia’s optimism for
and belief in the leading role of technology and aviation in Belsidus’ plans echo Schuyler’s
text. Consequently, from the moment when Carl and the readers are introduced to Patricia and
the cutting-edge aviation facility in uptown New York, black aviation assumes a central role
in the novella’s plot. Patricia takes Carl on short trips to other institutions belonging to the
Black Internationale. They fly as far as Texas, where the facilities are all equipped with
private airfields. She introduces him to hydroponic farming, the organization’s steam and
electric plant, sun engine, and other revolutionary inventions which are “way past white
science already” (50). At the end of the tour, having flown Carl across the country numerous
times and having shown him all the black scientists’ achievements, Patricia triumphantly
smiles at Carl and asks him, “Now do you doubt that we can win?” (54).
Still, the reason for Patricia’s triumphant optimism does not lie merely in her
confidence in her own piloting and leadership skills or the technical ingenuity of her educated
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and trained colleagues – it also lies in the entire organization’s self-sufficiency. Much like
black aviators, led by Powell and Robinson – but without a crusading campaign in the black
press to raise money for their efforts – the Black Internationale creates its own opportunities,
its own fields of expertise, and produces its own leaders. It accepts and transvalues
segregation as a fact of life and flourishes despite as well as because of it. In terms of
aviation, ninety days prior to Belsidus dispatching his armed forces to Africa, the Black
Internationale’s leader excitedly reports to his highest officers that “our airport and airplane
factory in Westchester County has trained five hundred colored pilots, men and women, and
manufactured one hundred pursuit planes and fifty bombing planes since we started the work”
(86). The organization has purchased fifteen thousand acres in South Texas, where it has
erected “six huge airplane hangars.” The entire place is to be “used later as an airport” for
Belsidus’ “expeditionary force of five thousand men,” who are to be transported mainly by
planes and freighters (87). Now that the organization has independently developed its army
and air force and has established self-sufficiency in terms of materials, food, energy, and
monetary sources, Belsidus is ready to “leave here in ninety days for West Africa” (87).
The first twenty chapters of The Black Internationale lay out the education and
training phase of Belsidus’ plan. Once the leader launches his invasion of Africa, Schuyler
depicts how technical and mechanical education can be employed in black liberation. Black
Internationale’s invasion takes place without “the enemy [having any] inkling of what we are
doing.” “Because they do not appreciate the magnitude of our work,” explains Belsidus to
Carl, mocking Kenneth Brown Colling’s dismissal of black America’s efforts in aviation,
“they are unable to cope with it” (88). No outsiders pay attention as “several rows of great
bombing planes draw up with propellers whirring” and are loaded with men, gasoline, and oil.
“With fifty bombers a day,” explains one of Belsidus’ operatives, the organization sends “five
hundred men a day from [Westchester to Texas]. Within ten days our entire force will be
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mobilized. It’s good experience for the aviators. We’ve got a bunch of relief pilots at the other
end. They bring these planes back tomorrow” (89). Along with freighters carrying cement, the
planes and their pilots and mechanics play a crucial role in transportation and logistics.
Aviation is thus initially shown to have a practical purpose in the invasion.
Since Belsidus’ scheme is also inter- and trans-national, aviation also plays an
essential role in the leader’s communication with Black Internationale’s cells in other parts of
the world. Aviation, to paraphrase Schuyler’s column from January 1937, renders borders,
distances, and time differences unimportant. Carl captures this function of aviation with a
metaphor: “It was seven o’clock when we reached our airport. A huge black and gold
transport plane stood in the field near the quarters. It glistened in the rising sun like some
huge prehistoric bird with wings spread, pulling a worm from the earth” (95). Modern
technology and civilization are here combined with prehistory as Belsidus takes African
Americans back to their motherland – back in time as well as toward a bright new future.
On board of the majestic mechanical bird, Belsidus, taking up Schuyler’s claim that
there is a conspiracy to prevent African Americans from learning to fly and perform other
highly-skilled tasks, announces that “so long as the Negro did not make the machinery of
modern civilization, so long as there were inner secrets to which he was not privy, just so long
was the Negro doomed to remain a slave of the white man” (96). Slavery, a remnant of the
past, is now over, however. Since Belsidus’ army has acquired knowledge and wealth, it can
enact its revenge, “the greatest venture black men have embarked upon in centuries” (92-6).
Thus, on board of the prehistoric bird, Belsidus, Patricia, and Carl spend a half-week flying
across vast areas. They visit former colonies with Africa-descended inhabitants such as
Havana, Port-au-Prince “where Dr. Belsidus talked quietly with a slender black man for
upwards of an hour,” then Jamaica, Port of Spain, Georgetown, British Guiana, and Brazil’s
Recife. “On the morning of the fourth day,” after having essentially completed Forsythe and
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Anderson’s pan-American flight from 1934 which never made it as far as South America,
“Pat sent the giant plane down the runway and leaped off to Africa” (95-7). She sends black
aviation onto another adventure; breaks boundaries and leaps back in time and into the future.
The way Belsidus employs his air force and air fleet within the United States and on
his hop to Africa serves only as training; it can be considered a part of Belsidus’ educational
initiative. Once in Africa, however, the doctor truly puts his air force to work. Two days after
Liberia falls to the Black Internationale, the entire “air force was parked on the Monrovia
airfield while hundreds of men toiled to erect the temporary hangars” (109). Within a month,
“airfields to the number of nineteen were scattered over the republic” (113) to ensure quick
transportation, to secure control over the Liberian sky, and to prepare for the next round of
invasion. The air force again helps with logistics: “By flying cement in large quantities to the
various districts, the concrete troughs for the chemical farms had been quickly made and
some were already in operation” (115). Under Patricia’s direction, the air force transports and
sets up radio towers in different parts of the country. In The Black Empire, the air force even
delivers material and mechanics for setting up further radio towers across the continent within
two days, with Patricia complaining that “[the material] would have been delivered in one
day” if it had not been for the laziness of some workers (162).
Finally, as the full-scale invasion of Africa out of Monrovia is in final preparations,
Carl observes “over to my right the new airfield, with its concrete runways, control tower and
vast expanse cleared in a week by 2,000 workers, was in full operation. Some of the trucks
loaded with cement and tools were delivering their loads to big bombing planes, which
promptly took off to all parts of the Republic.” Patricia parachutes cement, gasoline, and
equipment all over the country every day. And feels exhausted, yet also privileged: “I love it,
Carl. Oh, what a privilege to be doing what we are doing. Think what it will mean!” (115-6).
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Aviation thus helps set up and accelerate all essential operations for the takeover of,
first, Liberia and later the rest of Africa. Aviation functions as a building block – and delivers
the necessary building blocks – of the Black Internationale’s infrastructure as the late chapters
of the first novella read like an advertisement for technical and mechanical education which
will lead to finding employment in aviation, construction, logistics, chemistry, and other
fields requiring skills. Schuyler repeatedly embraced technical and mechanical work in his
columns and essays for the Courier and The Crisis throughout the Harlem Renaissance era,
and he transposes it to his extremely popular novellas. Aviation, however, is time and again
highlighted in his non-fiction texts as one of the leading and indispensable fields in the
increasingly modernizing and mechanized world. His novellas subsequently elevate black
aviation into the most crucial cog in Black Internationale’s wheel which secures not only the
smooth construction of a black empire, but which will also later assure that the empire’s
military survives and imposes its will against colonial powers.
4.3 Revenge and Fury Raining from the Sky
“An air force […] should not exist for defense but for offense. Such a force should not waste
time upon the outbreak of hostilities trying to find the enemy air force in an effort to destroy it
but should make immediately for the enemy’s industrial centers, transportation junctions,
airfields and docks and destroy them,” summarizes Schuyler Giulio Douhet’s doctrine of air
warfare in his review of The Command of the Air in March 1943. Originally written and
published in 1921 in Italy, Douhet’s text was well-known and often read in U.S. military
circles during the 1930s (Harahan, Kohn iii). It was officially released in the United States in
late 1942 to support the Allied Forces’ Italian campaign during World War II and was even
recommended in the New York Times as an ideal Christmas gift (“A Christmas Package of
Wit and Fun”). Schuyler praises Douhet’s ruthless blueprint for air warfare in his review,
explaining that if Japan had only followed the Italian’s singular vision, it could have easily
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destroyed and taken over not only Hawaii, but the entire West Coast after its attack on Pearl
Harbor (“Looks at Books”).
Schuyler most probably did not have access to the Army’s mimeographed version of
Douhet’s text, but Belsidus’ merciless utilization of Patricia’s air force in his invasion and
later aggressive protection of Africa is strongly reminiscent of Douhet’s teachings. This
seems to be a result of Italy following Douhet’s doctrine of ruthless air bombing throughout
its colonial campaigns in East Africa, especially in Ethiopia where John C. Robinson
experienced Italian air power first hand and related it to the black press’ audience in his
interviews with J.A. Rogers. Black papers reported, for example, on the bombing of Adowa, a
revenge, according to Vittorio Mussolini, “for the heroic death of our soldiers, who forty
years ago fell victim to overwhelming odds” (quoted in Tucker 124). In Adowa, an
unimportant village filled with civilians and a Red Cross hospital, the Regia Aeronautica
“unleashed two hard-hitting air strikes that dropped bombs. […] An ugly omen of events to
come, the Italians bombed a civilian population with little concern for consequences – early
indications that Italy’s war would be a genocidal and racial conflict waged as much against
Ethiopia’s civilians as its soldiers,” writes Phillip Thomas Tucker (126). As a result, the
Italian air force became known as “baby killers” (127).
A report by the U.S. Air Corps analyzing the role of aviation in the war later stated
that Italy “dropped over 2,000 tons of bombs and fired over 300,000 rounds of ammunition.
[…] The extensive use of aircraft and mechanized forces […] made it possible to advance
with a rapidity never attained even on European battlefields. […] Italian planes harassed
Ethiopian supply lines […] and helped break the morale of the enemy infantry [as well as] the
heart of the people of the country” (quoted in Tucker 181). The Regia Aeronautica, much like
Belsidus’ air force in the novellas, wiped out everything that stood in its way.
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Although Mark Christian Thompson correctly notices that Schuyler’s novellas
represent a “violent, revolutionary, and ultimately literary vengeance for Italian aggression in
Ethiopia” (Black Fascisms 85-6), his analysis focuses mostly on comparing Belsidus to
Mussolini. Thompson omits the eerie way in which Belsidus’ air force replicates Italian
tactics and takes them to a new extreme as the novellas showcase black technical ingenuity in
and ability to innovate existing air warfare equipment and strategy. Belsidus only implies
aviation’s power and efficiency in his early speeches about modern warfare and the fact that
his organization’s weapons have now surpassed those of the white man. Ultimately, however,
the Black Internationale’s air force serves as an explicit demonstration of the organization’s
military might – as well as a fictional depiction of what a well-trained fleet of black aviators
could achieve if they followed Douhet’s teachings and advanced it to a level imagined by
Schuyler in his review of Douhet’s text. If aviation is portrayed mainly as a useful and
practical tool and means of transportation in the first portion of The Black Internationale, it
becomes an indispensable weapon in the rest of the novella and particularly in its sequel, The
Black Empire. The invasion of Africa, the subsequent creation of a black empire, and its
survival are framed in aviation as Schuyler places air warfare in the forefront of all action.
In Chapter 29 of the first novella, Carl excitedly reports to the readers that a cotton
mill is “turning out cloth in thousands of bales,” chemical vegetable farms are feeding the
Liberian natives better “than ever before in history,” sun-powered factories are turning out
guns, bullets, grenades, and shells – but there simply are not enough “in the way of airplanes
and munitions in time for the great push” (122-3). Despite the organization’s scientific and
industrial achievements, Belsidus is aware that without a strong air force, his invasion will
fail. Thus, he sends word for the “immediate purchase of fifty bombing planes” and, within
weeks, he is ready to initiate the complete takeover of Africa. In spite of “the heavy tropical
rain […] falling in torrents [and] almost making the airfield a lake,” the Black Internationale
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air force stands “on that airfield in serried rows of glistening wings and bodies,” ready for
take-off. Meanwhile, Belsidus shows to Carl a large map of Africa on which “every important
African town was marked in electric lights set to turn green if in our hands and red if
remaining in the hands of the whites” (123). As Belsidus and Carl watch the action unfold, “to
500 Temples of Love went the word to exterminate all white people and their black allies. As
fast as sound can travel, the message of murder sped” (124).
Schuyler stages one spectacular scene of revenge carried out by Patricia’s powerful
fleet after another, showcasing the power that armies can wield by utilizing a modern air
force. “The rain suddenly stopped. Shortly afterwards the roar of a hundred airplane motors
split the darkness,” describes Carl, breathless. “One by one the bombers and pursuit ships
took off. In 15 minutes they were all winging their way to various destinations within a radius
of a thousand miles” (125). Shortly, “laconic but no less encouraging messages” begin to
come in: the French military infrastructure in Senegal and Ivory Coast is aflame, the
government institutions in Sierra Leone have been bombed, and “whites [are] fleeing
massacre in Kenya.” Green lights “jumped out all over the huge map” and reports “continued
to pour in.” Patricia’s air force leads the charge in action or provides support where
incendiary bombs have been used to start revolutions. Locals, supplied with “revolvers,
ammunition and long sharp knives” assure that “the slaughter was proceeding with clocklike
precision while the investments of Europeans went up in smoke” (126). Meanwhile, Black
Internationale’s agents wreak havoc in European countries to send them fighting one another.
Still, explains Carl, aviation plays the most pivotal role in the violent takeover:
“Belsidus did not believe that [the locals and the organization’s agents] could make the sort of
shocking reprisal he wanted. This was where Pat and her air force came in” (128). “When the
zero hour arrived, 100 planes took off under Pat’s command, loaded with high explosive and
incendiary bombs,” quickly bombing the Gold Coast, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone,
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and western Ethiopia. “These operations were completed without accident or interruption
before daylight,” narrates Carl, and “long before dawn a dozen towns and cities between
Morocco and the Cameroons were in flames” (128-9). Reports come in with details about
Patricia’s successful mission, each of them stating the inevitable: “All whites killed” (129).
Schuyler here demonstrates how air warfare has transformed the ways in which wars are now
led – Belsidus and Carl sit safely at the headquarters while the air force murders civilians and
soldiers from a safe distance. Belsidus’ revenge is brutal in its own right, but Schuyler’s
emphasis on aviation’s role in it serves as a powerful reminder of aviation’s increasing
importance as well as the relative easiness with which armies – such as the Italian one in
Ethiopia – can now swiftly attack and sow death anywhere.
Schuyler devotes entire paragraphs to the destruction of individual colonies. In the
Belgian Congo, for example, the natives destroy, in a few hours, “what the Belgians had
laboriously and cruelly erected in almost fifty years of colonial exploitation,” while in South
Africa, the Zulus and “oppressed tribesmen” set Cape Town aflame (129-30). Most space,
however, is devoted to Ethiopia. Patricia is guided into Ethiopian territory, Djibuti, and Italian
Somaliland with the help of “signal fires lit by the Ethiopians in the hills.” Once there, her
squadron “bombed every Italian barracks and supply station. […] Those incendiary bombs
wreaked havoc. Those that we didn’t kill in their beds, the Ethiopians did. With the arms and
ammunition they’ve got, the Italians will never reconquer them,” rejoices Belsidus (132).
The Black Internationale’s military, including its mighty air force, carries out
Belsidus’ plan in complete secrecy. Their stealth indicates two things. First, Patricia’s
squadrons replicate Italy’s success in Ethiopia since, in 1935, Mussolini attacked without
having declared war on Ethiopia. “After completing all their preparations, they crossed the
border by aeroplane,” writes Haile Selassie, “without informing either us or the League of
Nations of their decision to begin the war” (quoted in Tucker 124). Belsidus does not trust the
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white-led institutions of the existing international order after what the League allowed Italy to
perpetrate in East Africa, which is why his air force avenges Ethiopia with an unannounced
and ruthless strike á la Italy. Second, the seeming secrecy of the Black Internationale’s
successful conquest of Africa belies the disbelief with which European colonial powers react
to the situation. “Europe’s numerous thickly populated cities were blown to bits as swarms of
opposing airplanes dropped their deadly wares. Tanks rumbled to meet tanks and the thunder
of big guns made night and day horrible. […] By nightfall every European country was
involved,” explains Carl (133). Preoccupied with war on their continent, European
governments cannot fathom that any African nation, let alone an international black front,
could be behind these swift attacks employing modern weaponry. Most importantly, as
Belsidus’s agents make Italy believe that “British planes from Aden had raided their colonies,
spreading fire and death,” no one suspects an all-black air force to have carried out such a
successful mission. The belief that people of color cannot fly is alive and well and Belsidus
uses – transvalues – it to his advantage.
As The Black Internationale closes, “a great roar of motors overhead told us that Pat
and her planes had returned. A heavy rain was falling, making the landing field soggy and
slippery, but one by one the great ships came down and taxied to their hangars” (137).
Belsidus’ mission, carried out by the powerful air force, local insurgents, and agents in
Europe has “made all Africa once more the possession of black men. The Near East was
seething and watchful India was prepared to strike once more for freedom” (133). In Europe,
“pitiless and persistent air attacks reduced the civilian populations further into bestial fear and
terror” (138). Belsidus, tired yet jubilant, announces to the Black Internationale delegates
from all parts of the world – who have been “brought […] by our airplanes [to] Kakata,
Liberia, […] the capital of the new Empire of Africa” (139) – that “Africa does not need and
does not want the white man. Africa will not have the white man.” Instead, “we will have our
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own culture,” clamors Belsidus, “our own religion, our own education, our own army, navy
and air fleet. […] Together we can build […] an empire of black men and women working
toward a cooperative civilization unexcelled in this world. […] Brains and organization
triumphed once. They shall do it again” (140-2).
The first novella’s finale signals the end of Belsidus’s conquest of Africa and a
successful vengeance on European colonial powers’ plundering of the continent. Given the
novella’s success and the fact that Schuyler was compelled to write a sequel, the “serials
[must have] provided a sense of epic revenge,” claim Hill and Rasmussen, especially in view
of the “tremendous sense of violation and outrage that the Italo-Ethiopian war unleashed
among blacks worldwide, including the frustration of those who had attempted to volunteer to
fight in Ethiopia but were prevented from doing so by the U.S. and other western
governments” (281). The last thirteen chapters of the first novella, for example, function as a
long list of announcements of the atrocities perpetrated against white colonizers and their
local aides, as well as of descriptions of a brutal, fratricidal war taking place in Europe. For
those hurt by Ethiopia’s surrender in December 1936, but hopeful for its continuous guerilla
warfare, the ending of The Black Internationale must have brought a sense of exhilaration and
an understandable desire to read what Belsidus would do next.
Revenge, however, appears in the first novella even before Patricia’s air force is ever
used over African skies. In Chapter 16, Belsidus interrupts preparations for his invasion and
orders the head aviator to avenge a lynching in Mississippi, where a man was lynched despite
being “absolutely innocent of the rape with which he was charged” (67). “The South and
those who rule it understand only one thing: force. That country lives and dies by violence.
Therefore we shall repay violence with violence, burning with burning, death with death,”
explains Belsidus to Patricia and Carl, with his eyes glowing “ominously, almost fanatically”
(68). Patricia quickly flies to Mississippi – displaying early in the novel her prowess, the
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practical use of aviation, and its capability to cross vast spaces – where Carl first drops
leaflets explaining to the inhabitants their grave sin for which they are being punished. Signed
“The Sons of Christ,” the leaflets are to shift blame for the revenge onto a group of Catholics
– this is reminiscent of Schuyler’s 1932 novel, Black No More, where the main character,
Max Disher, also distributes fictional leaflets to cause infighting. Once Black Internationale’s
posters are dropped, Carl releases thermite bombs and sets the town of Newton on fire:
“Streams of blinding fire ran in all directions, igniting everything in their path […] Flames
swept everywhere. The town became a raging inferno” (70).
This revenge of a lynching seems to fit the pattern described by Hill and Rasmussen
that the two novellas possess “a radical vindicationist air” which gives them “a structural and
ideological coherence” (279). There were 34 lynchings in the United States between 1935 and
1937 (“Famous Trials”), that is during a time when African Americans, especially in the
South, had to tone down their support for Ethiopia as national and local newspapers sided
with Italy (Tucker 124). One can thus read Belsidus’ swift and unexpected act of revenge –
given his preoccupation with preparing for his mission – as a reaction to these lynchings. Or,
in fact, as a response to any and all lynchings: the image of a black aviator dropping bombs in
retaliation for the notorious act must have caused exhilaration in Schuyler’s audience no
matter what.
However, in the context of Schuyler’s aviation framework for the novellas, this
revenge can also be read as a symbolic retribution for Tulsa race riot of 1921, the very reason
why the black press and black aviators campaigned so heavily for the development of aviation
as a matter of survival for black America. Sparked by an alleged sexual assault of a 17-yearold
white girl by an African American boy, the Tulsa race riot led to the destruction of an
entire section of the city and, more importantly, introduced air warfare and merciless bombing
onto the American soil and into the African American psyche. Given how well-versed
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Schuyler was in early black aviation history, Garveyist race-war rhetoric, and the history of
the black press, it is possible to see how Patricia’s brief mission in aerial warfare in
Mississippi symbolizes a revenge for the scarring events in Tulsa.
Despite this episodic revenge which features aviation and previews Belsidus’ future
utilization of air warfare, most scholars have focused on the overall atmosphere of revenge
and race war pervading Black Empire. For Yogita Goyal, the two novellas depict “black
nationalism as a global tyranny, an empire that is as vicious and evil as the one it replaces,
powered not by dreams of freedom but by fantasies of revenge.” As an ideologue of such
nationalism, Dr. Belsidus then “functions in a way wholly counter to the anti-colonial
platform of pan-Africanism” (22). Or, as Alexander M. Bain posits, Belsidus shows what
“organized internationalism could not look like” (944). On the other hand, claims Tal, the
novellas simply express Schuyler’s pessimism “about the possibility of achieving justice and
equality ‘within the system’” (67). This would explain Belsidus’ distrust of institutions set up
by white Americans and other Westerners, such as the education system or the League of
Nations. Overall, some scholars criticize Schuyler for cynicism towards race relations and for
his exploitation of race chauvinism in the texts, while others have tried to contextualize the
novellas in a framework of violent resistance against oppression and colonialism.
Some scholars have also been looking for specific sources of Schuyler’s inspiration
for the violent revenge depicted in the novellas. For example, in a groundbreaking
interpretation of Black Empire and some of Schuyler’s journalistic work, Etsuko Taketani
explains that Schuyler’s novellas participate in the larger cultural and intellectual project of
the “Black Pacific,” which provides an interpretative matrix for the novella’s use of revenge
and race war. Schuyler’s texts from the mid-1930s deal with the race war theme, claims
Taketani, since it emerged “as a reciprocal fantasy of the black and fascist Italian presses, the
product of the broad and violent fascination with a ‘colored empire’ triggered by the rumored
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alliance of Ethiopia and Japan” (“Colored Empires in the 1930s”142). The black press wrote
repeatedly about the possibility of the two empires of color joining in an anti-colonial war
against Italy, and Schuyler even wrote a series of unpublished essays for the Courier titled
“Japan and the Negro” in 1937/8 which teased out the contours of such an alliance (140). In
Japan, texts envisioning an alliance between Japan and black America had existed for some
time as well. Kojiro Sato, a retired army officer, had for example written a book called A
Fantasy of the Japanese-United States War in 1921, in which ten million African Americans,
led by Marcus Garvey, “rise in revolt against the United States with arms and ammunition
supplied by Japan via [a] great airship” (The Black Pacific Narrative 72). Taketani thus
presents compelling evidence for black America’s fascination with Japan to have served as
inspiration for Belsidus’ vengeful race war.
Some scholars have also read Black Empire alongside Martin R. Delany’s Blake or the
Huts of America (1859-61), Sutton E. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio (1899), Pauline Hopkins’
Of One Blood (1903) or DuBois’s Dark Princess (1928) to contextualize Schuyler’s use of
black inter- and transnationalism, race war, revenge, and liberation tropes. Little scholarly
attention, however, has been paid to Dusé Mohamed Ali’s novella Ere Roosevelt Came: A
Record of the Adventures of the Man in the Cloak, serialized in the Lagos Comet between
February 24 and October 13, 1934. Born in Egypt in 1866, Ali, Marcus Garvey’s mentor
during his London work for the African Times and Orient Review between 1912 and 1914,
worked as Garvey’s UNIA’s foreign secretary and regular contributor to Garvey’s Negro
World in the early 1920s in New York. After his break with the UNIA, Ali moved to Detroit,
where he worked with pan-Islamic groups, and then to Lagos, Nigeria, where he edited the
Comet (Lubin 70-74, Adi and Sherwood 1-5). In the mid-1930s, Ali criticized Italy and the
League of Nations for their treatment of Ethiopia in Schuyler’s Courier (“Says England Will
Lose India”). And his Lagos-based paper was even advertised by the Courier in 1936 by
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Schuyler’s friend and colleague, Percival L. Prattis (“Questions and Answers”). It is unclear
how much Schuyler knew about Ali’s views and the novella, but, given his close study of all
things Garveyite and his interest in international affairs, it may be safe to assume that
Schuyler was at least partially aware of Ali’s work in Nigeria and even of his novella.
Curiously, claims Alex Lubin in Geographies of Liberation: The Making of Afro-Arab
Political Imaginary, Ali eschews pan-Islamism in his novella and focuses instead on “the
struggle of black Americans to represent the United States” (74). Like Schuyler, Ali disavows
black nationalist leadership – with his text parodying Garvey and DuBois – and instead turns
to “African American airmen as the saviors [of] an impending international race war” (74). In
the novella, Emperor Blood, the leader of a white supremacist group mobilizes against the
Afro-Asian world “on behalf of the ‘Nordic Empire,’” only to ally himself with Russia and
Japan, whose forces are, however, destroyed by an all-black air squadron. Ali embraces the
black airmen as “ideal citizens in the United States” who are, in the end, granted a full
citizenship and integration for their valuable service rendered to the country (75), ends Lubin
his analysis of black aviators’ presence in Ali’s text.
Still, there is more to black aviation in the novella than Lubin reveals as Ali
effectively recreates a thinly-veiled Garveyite fantasy of establishing an all-black air force in
the aftermath of the Tulsa race riot. The ALL BLACK AIR LINE begins in the text as a group
of “fifty University men, formed […] into a prospective flying corps” and trained at a flying
field in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The black press broadcasts information about the organization and,
shortly, there are three hundred applicants “pour[ing] in from all parts of the United States,”
with money being successfully collected for modern planes and equipment as well. Learning
of the enterprise, Emperor Blood initially regards it “a sensational joke,” but eventually fears
that the aviators “might assist unemployed Negro rioters or take reprisals from the air on his
lynching parties” (Chapter XXI).
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Like Schuyler, Ali writes air battle scenes into his text. In Chapter XXIII, Blood’s
Invisible State forces attack the black-owned airfields and hangars in Oklahoma, Georgia, and
Louisiana only to be “shot down or driven off” by the well-prepared African Americans.
Three chapters later, the black squadron receives more planes, paid for “liberally” by black
American communities across the country, and is dispatched to the Alaskan peninsula to
protect the nation against a Russian invasion. Working on this mission “by employing their
hands and minds” gives the black aviators “an entirely new outlook [and] a new concept of
their duty to the State” as they begin to command “the respect and admiration of all
patriotically inclined Americans.” In Chapter XXVII, after long preparations, the enthusiastic
all-black air force is depicted in a spectacular battle against the Russians, “practically
wip[ing] out the demoralized Soviet air-men” with “incendiary bombs and machine gun fire.”
The black press celebrates the air force’s heroism and success, California declares a state
holiday to honor the squadron, and the newly elected integrationist president outlaws
segregation and passes legislation which assures racial equality in the country forever.
In essence, Ali, writing in 1934, does not only fantasize in his text about a more
effective version of Garvey’s Black Eagle Flying Corps, discussed in section 2.1 of this
dissertation, but he also makes the dreams of black journalists and black aviators – working
on the black aviation campaign – come true in a fictional form. In Ali’s novella, black
aviation serves as a deterrent against lynching and race riots. Emperor Blood watches in
horror in the novella’s final chapters as black aviators thwart his plans by raining revenge and
fury from the air upon the Invisible State’s white supremacist forces. Furthermore, black
aviation’s success inspires African Americans in the text to pursue technically-skilled
employment and to embrace aviation as the leading technology which helps present black
America to the rest of the world as civilized and technologically-advanced. Black aviators
earn the respect of their fellow countrymen – which ultimately results in the acceptance of
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black Americans as rightful citizens of the United States. Black aviators represent the race so
well in Ali’s novella that they convince white America of their humanity, worth, and
ingenuity, the very objective at the heart of the black aviation campaign.
Schuyler’s Black Empire provides a much more complex depiction of black aviation
and of revenge carried out by an all-black air force. While Ali’s novella – predominantly
focused on the political machinations of Emperor Blood and black nationalist leaders – offers
glimpses of how black aviators could avenge centuries of racial oppression, Schuyler’s texts
envision an entire global campaign involving the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Ali’s novella
with a surprising black aviation element therefore may help explain what inspired Schuyler to
frame Belsidus’ revenge in aviation term, but it is argued here that reading aviation and the
black aviation campaign in more detail in Black Empire contributes even further to the
existing critical conversation on revenge and race war in Schuyler’s novellas.
As Chapters 2 and 3 in this dissertation have shown, a race-war scenario had been
hotly debated in the black press well before the Italo-Ethiopian conflict triggered an
unprecedented wave of empathy for Ethiopia and rage against Italy among African Americans
and people of color worldwide. In fact, it seems that Italy’s attack merely enhanced an already
existing issue which had always included a strong air warfare element – especially after Tulsa
and the gradual emergence of successful black aviators, including John C. Robinson, the head
of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force. Schuyler had been one of black aviation’s most vocal
proponents during the Harlem Renaissance era and it should therefore come as no surprise
that he not only invokes the race-war scenario in his novellas, but also that black aviation
plays a pivotal role in the fictional, fantastical narrative of revenge raining down from the
skies.
While Mark C. Thompson asserts that Schuyler’s novellas came to existence because,
“unable to write columns containing factual accounts of African American valor on the
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battlefields of Ethiopia, Schuyler manifests in fantasy what African Americans have been
barred from doing” (“God of War” 186), it seems that Schuyler wrote Black Empire precisely
because he had been observing with keen interest the development of black aviation. And he
especially followed the engagement of one of black aviation’s major representatives, John C.
Robinson, in Ethiopia against Italy’s vaunted air force. Schuyler fantasizes in a July 1935
column that “as an old soldier, I would certainly like to participate in [the Ethiopian]
adventure and press a machine-gun trigger on the Italian hordes as they soiled over the
Ethiopian terrain. It is one of the few wars in which I could participate with enthusiasm.”
However, all he “can do [is] to meet the exactions of the landlord, the butcher, the
groceryman [and] the other parasites that feed on me” (“Views and Reviews”). Eighteen
months later, though, when Robinson has emerged as virtually the only African American
soldier who fought in Ethiopia and has become a war hero in the black press, Schuyler’s
fantasy materializes in a duo of violent, hard-boiled novellas with an overt aviation
framework. Thus, as much as black America’s fascination with Ethiopia’s potential alliance
with Japan may have informed Schuyler’s depiction of a race war, the fact that an avowedly
Pan-Africanist black aviator participated in an actual race war in revered Ethiopia must have
inspired Schuyler to a large degree as well.
To the black press, Robinson represented a racial uplift and war hero. The Defender
informed its readers at the end of Robinson’s mission in Ethiopia in May 1936 that the
Chicagoan had been “cited several times for bravery. He was in twelve actual flying battles
and in one he narrowly missed shooting down the plane of Mussolini’s son” (quoted in
Tucker 179). Despite little actual military training and lack of modern equipment, Robinson
managed to hold his own against the Regia Aeronautica, black newspapers asserted. Given
his unprecedented heroics, however, black America must have wondered what would have
happened if only Robinson’s plan, initiated at the beginning of his tenure in Ethiopia, to form
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an all-black air force composed of his colleagues from the Military Order of Guards had
materialized.
Although Selassie refused to bomb the Italians from planes since it would have been
“contrary to all Ethiopian ideas of gallantry in battles” (Tucker 135), the emperor had from
early on intended for Robinson to assemble an all-black air force, without French or British
pilots. Selassie and Robinson hoped that young Ethiopian student-pilots would learn from “a
nucleus of experienced African Americans” from Robinson’s Chicago group. The Courier
reported on this objective of Robinson’s in early January 1936, explaining that the aviator was
attempting to bring six of his colleagues to Ethiopia, but the U.S. government prevented them
from departing (“Col. Robinson Orders Six New Planes”). In mid-January, the paper even ran
two large photographs on its cover page – one of J.A. Rogers with a uniformed Robinson,
“who fought off two Italian planes when Adowa was bombed,” and the second of Willa
Beatrice Brown, one of Robinson’s most successful students. Captioned “Wants to Fight
Italian Bombers,” the photographs of Brown presented to the paper’s audience a female
aviator “horrified by the attacks of Italian aviators on undefended Ethiopian cities and towns”
and willing to “answer [Robinson’s] call to Ethiopia.”
In advertising two Pan-Africanist black aviators fighting or willing to fight for
Ethiopia on its cover page, the Courier, Schuyler’s home newspaper, teased the possibility of
Robinson forming an all-black, African American-led air squadron to fight Italy. It fueled the
existing popular race-war scenarios expressed by Schuyler in his columns and by black
aviators and supportive journalists, as well as the paper’s readers, during the aviation
campaign. In fact, Courier’s circulation increased more than threefold owing to its passionate
reporting on the Ethiopian crisis – and as a result of Schuyler’s novellas’ popularity.
Moreover, the paper also created and promoted a fantasy of an African American female
aviator, who “makes you enjoy spending your money at one of Wallgreen’s drug stores”
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(“Wants to Fight Italian Bombers”) during her everyday job as a cashier, leading a squadron
of Ethiopian airplanes in an aerial attack to avenge Italian atrocities. Hill and Rasmussen
therefore correctly posit that Brown may have inspired Schuyler to write Patricia Givens into
his novellas (284); however, they ignore John C. Robinson and his connection to Brown, his
stature in the black press and its aviation campaign, as well as his omnipresence in the
newspaper coverage of the Italo-Ethiopian war. Yet, it must be pointed out here that Patricia’s
character carries out in Black Empire the very revenge against Italy that Brown was not given
a chance to participate in and Robinson could not fully accomplish. In other words,
Schuyler’s novellas depict Patricia’s air force as successfully finishing Robinson’s mission to
form an all-black air force and to defeat Italy – with a vengeance. The imagery, language, and
characters associated with revenge and race war in Schuyler’s novellas are thus formulated in
aviation terms, having been inspired by real events and real black aviators.
Education, technological and scientific advancement, violence and revenge – all these
essential themes and tropes depicted in Black Empire are always already framed in aviation
terms. The revenge and race-war aspects of the texts – as shocking and difficult to
comprehend as they may be – seem to symbolically exorcise the demons of black aviation
history. Patricia’s mission in Mississippi avenges a horrific lynching, while serving as literary
retribution for the Tulsa race riot in 1921. The specter of the racial technological gap and air
warfare which sparked the black aviation campaign in the black press and haunted black
aviators, leaders, and journalists throughout the 1920s and the 1930s is dealt with swiftly and
cruelly in Schuyler’s novellas as Patricia and Carl bomb a Southern town without remorse.
Furthermore, Schuyler transposes into his texts the fantasy of a race war involving an allblack
air force. Inspired by the aviation campaign which presented John C. Robinson as a
war hero and a race leader who attempted to face a technically-superior colonial power by
assembling a squadron of skilled African American aviators, including an attractive, Pan-
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Africanist woman who led a double life as a cashier and an aviator wishing to avenge Italian
savagery in Ethiopia, Schuyler composes novellas where aviation is the means by which
Ethiopia is avenged and Robinson’s mission successfully completed. In a sense, Black Empire
thus serves as a coping mechanism for the anxieties and frustration omnipresent throughout
the black aviation campaign.
4.4 Control of the Air: Armed Liberation, Decolonization, and Survival
Still, revenge in the context of a race war is only one side of the air warfare coin in The Black
Internationale and The Black Empire. Retribution features heavily particularly in the former
text, but aviation as a means of violent liberation, decolonization, and subsequent fight for
survival is a prominent, if not dominant characteristic of the latter serial. Scholarship
concerning Schuyler’s texts, however, has mostly addressed the politics of Belsidus’ empire
after the revolution has been completed. Goyal, for example, asserts that Belsidus behaves not
as “a liberator but a colonizer” who denies or ignores African “autonomy and selfdetermination
[and] manipulates native chiefs” (26). For him, diaspora represents “military
conquest” and his project stands for “nationalism gone berserk, with little redemptive value”
(24-5) Indeed, Belsidus establishes a provisional dictatorship because “Negroes are not yet
used to freedom” and because his leadership will assure that Africa remains “completely safe
from white attacks” (Schuyler 141). According to Alexander M. Bain, this vision then
“streamlines a continent into a monoculture [and a] modernized, neo-liberal African
superstate” (947-52). However, such assessments seem rash, given how little
postrevolutionary politics the novellas involve.
Scholars often support their reading with the first two chapters of The Black Empire,
in which the surgeon general expounds on the empire’s fascist use of eugenics to “eliminate
the unfit” (148). However, as Kalí Tal aptly points out, “the authors of black militant novels
of armed resistance to and overthrow of white supremacy [including Schuyler] almost never
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attempt to describe postrevolutionary society and often abandon their protagonists before, in
the middle of, or immediately after the battle” (70). Thus, even though The Black Empire does
provide numerous brief glimpses of Belsidus’ views on society-building and state politics, the
novella’s focal point is the newly-established empire’s fight for survival and complete
liberation. Throughout the sequel, the empire finds itself in perpetual crisis and revolution,
and Schuyler thus depicts the most extreme of situations in an armed struggle for liberation.
Violence and action again fill the pages of The Black Empire. As Taketani correctly
explains, however, “nonviolence is no alternative [for Belsidus] to the structural violence of
colonialism.” In this sense, Taketani observes, Schuyler’s novellas express views preceding
Frantz Fanon’s seminal text “On Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), particularly
the notion that “anticolonialism is no less anticolonial for being violent” (Taketani 142).
According to Fanon, armed liberation or decolonization is always already brutal:
National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or
Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression,
decolonization is always a violent event. At whatever level we study it […]
decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another.
[…] Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an
agenda for total disorder. But it cannot be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand,
a natural cataclysm, or a gentlemen’s agreement. […] In its bare reality,
decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives [because] to destroy
the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist’s sector, burying
it deep within the earth. (1-6)
Fanon’s aggressively poetic definition of violent decolonization perfectly captures how
Belsidus sees his liberation struggle and the way Schuyler portrays it. Substitution of species
takes place on two different levels in Black Empire since Belsidus does not only violently
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transform the politics, geography, and minds of colonized Africa and its inhabitants, but he
also initially converts skilled but unwanted, proud but degraded African Americans into New
Negro fighters who, with aviation leading the charge, wreak havoc on white colonizers.
Aviation is depicted as the one technology which allows for this transformation, the
substitution of one species for another, to happen. Patricia’s air force facilitates and heads the
process of violent liberation, while embodying the very essence of the transformed New
Negroes.
In “This is the Voice of Algeria” (1959), Fanon highlights the role of technology in
liberation and decolonization. Mapping the use of the radio during Algeria’s anti-colonial
struggle during the 1950s, Fanon explains that by purchasing a radio receiver and listening to
the Voice of Free Algeria, the Algerians obtained “the only means of entering into
communication with the Revolution, of living with it.” “Almost magically,” asserts the
Martinique-born psychiatrist, “the technical instrument of the radio receiver lost its identity as
an enemy object. The radio set was no longer a part of the occupier’s arsenal of cultural
oppression.” Suddenly, “having a radio meant paying one’s taxes to the nation, buying the
right of entry into the struggle of an assembled people” (8). In other words, the Algerians
adopted their colonizers’ technology – although traditions had previously forbidden it – and
transformed it into a unifying instrument in the decolonization movement.
Fanon’s treatises on violence and the use of technology in decolonization open a
reading of Schuyler’s novellas as depicting an always already violent fight for liberation,
which relies heavily on adoption as well as creative and ingenious transformation of the
enemy’s technology – aviation – into a weapon of resistance, liberation, and survival.
Appropriating technology and mastering it to liberate a colonized or oppressed people’s
minds and actual everyday existence lies at the heart of Belsidus’ project. At the same time, it
also lay at the root of black aviators’ attempts to make black America air-minded through
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education, air events, a campaign in the black press, and overall representation in the field. In
placing aviation in the forefront of his novellas, Schuyler amplifies black aviators’ goodwill
message with a fictional depiction of armed liberation via aviation. What Leon Desire Paris’
flight to Haiti during the U.S. occupation symbolically promised but ultimately could not
deliver and what Robinson’s heroic but futile mission in Ethiopia teased in black newspapers
and the popular imagination, Schuyler completes in his violent celebration of air warfare. In
particular, The Black Empire takes the readers through an aviation adventure where Patricia
and Carl carry out missions to protect the empire, assure its survival against technologicallysuperior
colonial powers, and, once and for all, liberate Africa. In short, The Black Empire
revolves almost exclusively around the control and liberation of the air above Africa as it
serves its propagandistic purpose of celebrating and promoting black aviation.
The very first pages of the sequel novella prepare the readers for the frantic struggle
for survival which will occupy Belsidus’ mind throughout the text. “The European nations
[…] were now locked in a fight to the death which our agents had instigated. But how long
would that war last? And when it was over, would the victors ignore Africa?,” wonders Carl.
And “if they attacked, how could we hope to hold off their mighty battle fleets and their
swarms of airplanes? Our technical staff was driving ahead feverishly to prepare for the
inevitable struggle, but our progress was maddeningly slow,” complains Carl, worried, to the
readers (146). Carl and Patricia leave for their honeymoon, hoping that the war raging in
Europe will give them some respite. Within days, however, Belsidus summons all delegates to
Kakata and announces that “Europe has started its war to recapture Africa.” Attacking with
powerful air forces, Belsidus reports, “the Italians bombed and took Tripoli an hour ago. A
French air squadron has flown over Tunis demanding surrender and we may expect the
British to strike at any time.” Indeed, “We had done our best,” acknowledges the leader of the
Black Empire, “but we hadn’t had time to prepare properly. The whites knew this, I supposed,
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which was why they were attacking now, before we became strong” (165-8). Within the first
six chapters, the empire faces impending doom as European countries’ thirst for African
resources and colonial labor overpowers their grievances and they attack Africa from the air.
This sets up the novella as a fight for liberation taking place mostly in Africa’s skies.
While The Black Internationale outlines the makings of an all-black military and a
revolution predicated on people of color catching up with and surpassing white science, the
plot of the sequel relies mostly, if not solely on technical innovations to air warfare with the
objective of gaining command of the air. General McNeel reports to Belsidus that “we have
less than 500 planes. And any one of the airplane carriers of England, France, Italy or
Germany carries that many. […] We have a million rifles, ample stores of small arms
ammunition and thousands of machine guns. […] But frankly, Chief, it couldn’t last long in
the face of such opposition as we have now.” The Black Empire’s army is able to “bomb
battleships, troopships, and landing parties, but we can only do it as long as we have control
of the air” (170). Patricia, dejected, cannot but agree with McNeel’s assessment.
Initially, in his reaction to McNeel’s report and Patricia’s skepticism, Belsidus
seemingly dismisses aviation as a decisive feature of modern warfare, stating that “air bombs
do not win wars. Look at the examples of Madrid and Shanghai. They continued to be held
even after repeated heavy attacks from the air” (169). Then, however, Belsidus introduces his
first innovation to aerial warfare: employing his stratosphere planes in combination with
chemical warfare. The revolutionary stratosphere planes are revealed at the end of the first
novella as machines capable of flying at the speed of 400 miles an hour (136). Yet, they are
never employed in the invasion. In her new mission in the sequel text, however, Patricia is to
utilize all fifteen of them. Her air force is to carry scores of cages filled with “a strange and
deadly army” of rats infested with cholera, spotted typhus, bubonic plague, and other deadly
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illnesses and to drop them over major European cities to paralyze the colonial powers
threatening Black Empire’s existence (169-72).
If the first novella offers several brief scenes from the cockpit, the sequel overflows
with them as the text follows Patricia’s new mission first-hand. Schuyler devotes two whole
chapters to depicting the wonders of flying in a stratosphere plane. Carl marvels at the planes’
speed, claiming that “although I had been in many planes, I had never seen any climb so
rapidly and at such a steep angle. […] At 20,000 feet we were far above the clouds in a
lonely, spaceless world accompanied only by our fourteen companions now in perfect ‘V’
formation” (174). Carl’s narration is filled with awe and sentimentality, too: “On we went,
literally flashing through the air now, ten miles above the earth. The sun had disappeared; it
was almost black dark […] but the first brilliant stars were appearing out of the void above”
(174-5).
After airplanes are refueled, serviced, and parachutes are distributed in a swift and
smooth operation (176-8), Carl, once again in the air, admires Patricia’s piloting skills: “This
was blind flying with a vengeance. We seemed to be soaring aloft into nothingness. I looked
at Pat, so cool and calm at the controls, and I felt more proud of her than ever” (178). Even as
his characters fly to exterminate entire populations with chemical warfare, Schuyler imbues
his text with moments of aviation beauty and celebrates the technology with displays of
aviation’s capability to transport the novella’s plot and characters across immense distances.
The world shrinks and Africa unites owing to aviation as Patricia’s fleet, including “Africans,
black Europeans, Latin Americans, and Caribbeans, [but] dominated by African Americans”
(Veselá 279), symbolizes black unity.
The long flight from Liberia to Europe ends with Patricia dropping cages with infested
rats over London while Carl waxes poetic, “London from the air! A spectacle not easily
forgotten: a faery tracery of light against a background of black velvet. The metropolis, the
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brain, the heart and soul of the world’s greatest empire!” (179). His awe of aviation and its
ability to transport him to London is abruptly interrupted, however, as he parachutes down to
the British capital to assist in a special Black Empire mission to murder fifteen thousand of
Britain’s best technicians and engineers. At this point, the novella – over the span of seven
chapters – turns into a spy thriller. Once the mission is successfully accomplished, though,
aviation again takes center stage as autogiros extract Carl’s group – albeit with complications
– out of London. Patricia’s squadron picks Carl up, sets an entire section of London on fire
with quiet glass cylinder bombs, and sets off on its return trip to Morocco. Owing to Patricia’s
skillful piloting, the squadron manages to safely land in Fez only to realize with horror that
the entire French fleet is about to attack the airfield.
Schuyler here serves a breath-taking plot brimming with action and spectacular drama,
most of it involving Patricia’s air force. At once, the French attack as “Out of the north
swooped squadron after squadron of big French bombers at 2,000 feet. Above them raced a
cloud of fast little pursuit planes. Sirens screamed. Anti-aircraft guns crashed. […] The
airdrome collapsed like a house of cards, a great sheet of flame shooting out as gasoline tanks
exploded” (214-5). Once again, however, the Black Empire is revealed to possess another ace
– a technological innovation – up its sleeve. The airfield at Fez boasts an underground facility
which offers protection to Patricia’s plane: “As we sped along,” describes Carl, “a strip of
earth much wider than our plane opened up as if by command, revealing a wide ramp. Down
we went, deeper, deeper, ever deeper into the earth. The earth closed behind us.” Despite the
damage done by the French, the airfield is repaired and “in less than fifteen minutes there was
a straight runway down the field” (214). Patricia’s mission can thus continue, albeit only for a
while.
Despite the technical ingenuity and preparedness of the Black Empire staff at Fez, the
French attack confirms McNeel’s prediction that the empire may fail at liberating and
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decolonizing Africa – and may not even survive unless it re-gains control of the air. Patricia,
assessing the situation at Fez, soberly explains to Carl and General Sandu that “without
controlling the air […] we can’t control anything, and it will be only a matter of time before
we’ll be driven back into the jungle like pygmies.” Patricia thus equates aviation with
civilization. Sandu concurs, realizing that even the cutting-edge underground hiding place and
facilities “that will save us a lot of ships [..] won’t give us mastery of the air” (214). Schuyler
underscores the empire’s dire situation in the following chapter as its entirety depicts a
spectacular airplane fight between Patricia’s large plane and the French pursuit ships.
Attempting a maneuver similar to the one which helped Robinson narrowly escape two Italian
reconnaissance biplanes as he flew at full speed into a nearby high cloud bank (Tucker 163),
Patricia directs the “torpedo-like” stratosphere plane to climb high into the clouds. She
outraces the French pilots, but not the French bullets. As her plane is irreparably damaged,
Carl, Patricia, and the remainder of the crew parachute out, shooting at their pursuers. With
the ship “hurtling down in a mass of flames […] directly toward Pat and me,” Carl despairs
that their lives may soon be over. Schuyler here sets up a cliffhanger in which the fate of the
Black Empire literally hangs in the air. “There was no time to do anything. There was nothing
we could do,” narrates Carl, closing his eyes “in agonizing suspense” (217-20) as the chapter
closes.
After their stratosphere machine crashes, Patricia, with her “green helmet […]
drenched with blood from her head wound,” Carl, and the rest of the crew find themselves
stranded in a desert. “Suppose,” asks Carl at the end of another chapter, “that they didn’t find
us?” (221-3). Fortunately, owing to Patricia’s colleagues’ piloting and navigation skills, Carl
and company find out that they are 400 miles from Fez and still on a direct route to Kakata.
The group discovers a downed French plane, repairs it, and sets off on a perilous return flight
through the Moroccan skies “dominated by French planes” (229). On the way, the plane
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begins to leak gas too fast and the group crash in the jungle where they are captured by
cannibals who think they are French pilots of color. At the last moment, right before Carl and
company are served to the tribe, a Black Empire squadron rescues the group in breathtaking
fashion, dropping flares and gas bombs on the village.
In the end, the group are transported back to Kakata in “three big black and gold
transport planes” (237). Instead of cheers and exhilaration, however, the capital awaits
Patricia and Carl’s arrival in uncharacteristically dark atmosphere. “Where before at night the
capital had been brilliantly lighted, it was now in darkness except for an occasional
searchlight sweeping the African sky. […] There was a tenseness, an air of sinister
expectancy pervading everything,” paints Carl the gloomy picture. “Boom Boom from sky.
[…] Kill many peoples yesterday. […] Airplane come from ship by Monrovia. Maybe come
back pretty soon. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow,” explains the dinner maid to Carl
ominously, rolling her eyes “in terror” (237-8).
The first novella is full of cliffhangers, but Schuyler packs the sequel with so much
action, so many ups and downs for the main characters, Patricia and Carl, that the text
becomes a rollercoaster of emotions. All because the skies over Africa, cleared by Patricia’s
air force during the invasion, are now filled with opposition forces and mortal danger. “The
white air fleets dominate the skies above Northern Africa and our ships have had to stay on
the ground, or under the ground, for the past two or three days. The British, based on Aden,
have raided our centers in East Africa, and these raids will increase. We are still in control of
the air in central and western Africa, but this cannot apparently last long,” summarizes
Belsidus the dire situation to the dejected audience of his Supreme Council (240). “It certainly
didn’t look good for the Black Empire,” observes Carl skeptically, “with control of the air and
the sea, Europe would soon again control Africa. We had neither the arms nor the munitions
nor the men to hold back trained hordes of Europeans” (240). Without control of the air – as
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the novellas’ preceding chapters clearly show – Patricia’s air force and, in turn, the entire
empire stand helpless.
At this point in the sequel novella, Belsidus and the Black Empire find themselves in a
situation eerily similar to that of Robinson in Ethiopia. Despite the Chicagoan’s valiant efforts
to train young Ethiopian pilots, service outdated planes,61
and fly reconnaissance flights as
well as to transport the emperor and medical supplies across the vast and high Ethiopian
mountain ranges, the Imperial Air Force could never match Italy’s power in the air. While the
Ethiopians notched important victories on the ground, it was from the air that the Italians
gradually but ruthlessly overpowered them. The Italian air force, “numbering over three
hundred aircraft on the northern front and about one hundred aircraft on the southern front,
had the sky to itself [and] possessed almost total air superiority,” writes Tucker (130). Italy’s
well-trained pilots “continued to launch strategic bombing campaigns,” dropping mustard gas
on both Ethiopian soldiers as well as the civilian population and gassing Robinson three times
in the process. “By design, the terror bombing of the civilian populace was calculated to
destroy the Ethiopian will to resist,” says Tucker (151). Belsidus, despite frantic
manufacturing of weapons and educating and training an army and an air force, falls short, it
seems, of challenging the European colonial powers for sustainable control over Africa.
Kakata’s populace is hiding in terror of bombing and the European fleets have almost total
control over Africa’s skies.
Belsidus acknowledges the situation, but proposes a solution, involving, once again,
aviation and highlighting its importance for modern warfare. Schuyler seems to concede here,
realistically, that, like Robinson, Belsidus’ hastily assembled air force does not have the
manpower and machinery to face the European fleets squarely. Unlike Haile Selassie who
adhered to traditional and ultimately suicidal tactics, however, Schuyler’s diabolical leader
61
J.A. Rogers quoted Robinson as saying that Ethiopia’s planes were “so old that one deserved a
medal for flying them even in peace time” (“Rogers Pays Tribute to Colonel Robinson”).
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resorts to a brand new weapon devised by “Prof. Vincente Portabla, the tall, lean, awkward
black scholar who had once headed the department of physics at the University of Rio de
Janeiro” (239). Shortly after Belsidus reveals the new weapon of mass destruction to the
Council, the Europeans attack: “Now the sky seemed filled with hostile planes, scores of
them,” describes the situation Carl. “Great bombs fell and resoundingly burst. It looked like
the end of Kakata, the Black Empire and us” (242). Prof. Portabla, nevertheless, readies his
“infernal machine” (242), positioning it at the center of the Kakata airfield from which
Belsidus famously launched his invasion in the first novella. “We watched intently, hardly a
breath escaping us as we waited to see what this machine, which was not much larger than a
bombing plane or a Pullman car, would be able to do against the combined air fleets of the
British and French navy,” narrates Carl, holding the readers in suspense (243).
In invoking the image of a Pullman car, a machine connoting African Americans’
subservient standing within the United States’ democracy as well as the menial positions to
which skilled black Americans were relegated in the U.S. industry and services, Schuyler
highlights the fact that black scientists and technicians, as his columns argue, may be able to
redefine their race’s unequal position. His fantasy of a modern black civilization predicated
on cutting-edge technologies, innovation, and ingenuity imagines black bodies inventing,
operating, and servicing machines well beyond the train car where black Americans are
segregated, always already inferior, and servants to white patrons. Segregation in Schuyler’s
novellas actually lies in transvaluation or in how much forward black science and technology
can pull away from white civilization.
Schuyler paints this exact moment of reverse segregation in the scene where Carl and
the rest of the Council watch with “bated breath” as the “searchlights lit up the night sky,
revealing every [European] plane.” Portabla’s Pullman-car-like machine “pointed upward
toward the onrushing planes [and] waved slowly back and forth like an iridescent finger.”
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“Suddenly,” narrates Carl, “an incredibly amazing thing happened [as] one by one the
propellers of the swarm of planes fell silent, and one by one the great ships plunged like
flaming plummets to the earth, crashing resoundingly. […] Squadron after squadron crashed
to the earth.” And Portabla does not stop at destroying only the attacking planes. As
“remaining planes […] turned to flee back to the coast from whence they had come […] one
by one the fleeing bombers and pursuit planes fell like stricken flies. Soon the southern sky
was empty of everything except the moon and stars” (243-4). The air is clear of Europeans.
Having witnessed the amazing result, General McNeel immediately observes that “this
is a life saver, all right. […] It gives us air control again, and with air control we can hold off
invasion for a long time” (244). But the machine offers more than mere defensive options –
its capabilities forebode a brutal end for the colonizers’ conquest. It functions as an “atom
smasher, a huge cyclotron, which generates an atomic or proton beam which can disintegrate
any metal,” explains Portabla excitedly to McNeel. It can also stop “the propellers of
machines and [render] batteries and connections useless” (245). When the Council members
inspect a giant fallen bomber at the airfield, they realize that “it was almost unrecognizable. It
had been scorched and melted like a slag, its parts fused together as if it had been dipped into
a volcano filled with molten lava.” Upon closer inspection, the group finds that “all over the
countryside were scattered these blobs of slag which had once been death-destroying bombers
piloted by white men who believed themselves all-conquering” (245). Portabla’s machine
thus erases Europe’s technological superiority and imbues Belsidus’ project with renewed
confidence as reports come in stating that “of the 300 planes participating in the raid, only
twelve had escaped” (245). Schuyler here depicts, once again, a spectacular scene of air
warfare destruction which bodes well for the Black Empire as it regains control of the air.
Schuyler devotes a chapter to describing in detail how Portabla’s machines “sent their
devastating proton rays seaward,” destroying “the great combined navy that had threatened
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the very existence of the Black Empire” (249). The final two chapters, however, again revolve
around aviation. In the penultimate installment, Belsidus sends Patricia’s “entire air fleet,
preceded by stratosphere planes […] for Fez to clear the North African air of enemies” (250).
Then he decides on the final step that ends the war – he mounts the cyclotrons onto the
stratosphere planes, combining his innovation in aviation with a cutting-edge killing machine
to revolutionize air warfare. “[T]he black and golden ships flew in early and swarms of
mechanics began preparing the bombers and stratosphere planes for the new equipment.
Pursuit planes stood ready for protection,” describes Carl the scene (252). Patricia remains
unable to fly due to her head injury, but she still directs “the preparation of the Black Empire
Air Corps for the final battle and select[s] the pilots for the planes.” After seven days of
frantic activity, “the huge squadron took off in the early morning mist, surrounded by a
swarm of pursuit planes. A fleet of big bombers followed later in the day, each loaded with a
huge incendiary and contact bombs.” And throughout that day, Patricia monitors her air force,
“getting reports and issuing instructions” (253).
In the last chapter, Carl leaves Patricia behind in Kakata in order to witness and
narrate the victory of the Black Empire air fleets first-hand. As with the end of The Black
Internationale, the final target of Belsidus’ attack is Mussolini’s air force. Carl does not spare
any details in describing the vengeful destruction of Italy’s forces as “the buildings, planes,
machinery [in Benghazi] disintegrated into a million pieces. […] In a few moments the place
was a shambles, a field of bloody desolation. Not an Italian plane remained” (255). Italy,
however, attempts a counterattack: “The sky was soon blackened by the great fleet, twice as
numerous as that which had bombed Kakata.” As before, the proton rays drop the oncoming
planes like flies until “the earth was covered with grounded ships.” Patricia’s pursuit pilots
strafe “the helpless grounded planes with incendiary bullets and small thermite bombs. […]
Relentlessly, the little black and gold ships passed back and forth over the helpless Italian
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planes, reducing them and their pilots to cinders. And what happened at Benghazi was
repeated at Tunis, Tripoli and Alexandria” (256). Italian forces are wiped out.
After three days of utter destruction of the remaining European armies, “three days in
which the world marveled at the rise of a new world power, in which black people
everywhere rejoiced, [and] in which delegates in their colorful uniforms arrived by plane”
from all over the world, Belsidus, relieved, finally celebrates “the liberation of Africa and the
emancipation of the black race.” Now, he claims, “we who were once the lowest are […] the
highest. We who were once despised and slandered are now honored and feared. We who
were said to have no future except to hew and haul for the white race have created a future
more glorious than the white man ever imagined.” With black scientists, technicians, and
aviators proving their ingenuity and prowess, Belsidus can declare that “We used every
instrument in our power to achieve success [and now] you have a great empire created out of
black brains and strength” (257). Since decolonization has been achieved and the empire
controls the air above and the sea routes around Africa, Belsidus unveils his vision for the
future – a future based on freedom and devoid of conquest. “You must not […] try to enslave
others [and] you must banish race hatred from your hearts,” implores Belsidus and promises
to build a civilization as glorious as that of Egypt, Ethiopia, Benin, Timbuctoo, Songhoy, and
Morocco. “Go forth, my comrades,” completes Belsidus his message, “and imbue your
followers with the determination to remain forever free” (256-8).
Indeed, it is really only when African skies have been cleared of European fleets and
the Black Empire air force reigns supreme that Belsidus allows himself to speak of the
continent’s bright future. This only underscores the fact that hardly anything happens or is
achieved in the two novellas, particularly in The Black Empire, without black aviation being
directly or indirectly involved. Promotional of black aviation as the texts are, they employ the
technology as a vehicle for almost any action and movement forward in the plot. Aviation
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functions as a vehicle for the invasion, violent decolonization, and vicious fight for survival
which form the novellas’ backbone. Belsidus’ educated and well-trained army of engineers,
scientists, technicians, pilots, and mechanics is shown to out-think and out-work the allegedly
superior European civilization. Patricia’s air force ensures that inventions, weapons, and
materials are swiftly and reliably transported across vast spaces, defying time which ticks
against Belsidus’ revolution.
Finally, aviation functions as a vehicle in developing characters as well: Carl
gradually evolves from a skeptical observer into an excited participant in Patricia’s air force
missions, driven both by love for the aviatrix as well as by passion for aviation’s immense
potential for liberation. In short, all aspects of Belsidus’ plans involve aviation in some
variation. Ultimately, it is aviation which literally delivers victory and liberation – both
physically and in spirit, serving as inspiration and confidence-boost – to people of color
worldwide. In the end, Schuyler depicts aviation throughout the novellas as a multi-purpose,
universal technical field which decides wars and helps build empires. With the assistance of
an all-black air force, Belsidus gains the ability to protect and advance the Black Empire on
the ground and in the air.
It must also be noted that the omnipresence of black aviation in the novellas sheds
light on Schuyler’s depiction of African Americans and people of color in general, as
civilized and modern. Though low-brow, hard-boiled, and propaganda-like to the level of
ridicule, the immensely popular novellas propose a way of presenting people of color’s
humanity and belonging to American and global civilization, the ultimate objective of the
Harlem Renaissance ideologues and authors. By transposing the civil and human rights
struggles of black Americans onto the African continent, Schuyler recreates in fiction Alain
Locke’s wish for black America to lead other Africa-diasporic peoples into a new, modern,
and dynamic era – in touch with the twentieth-century civilization. Schuyler’s scientists,
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technicians, and aviators are depicted as modern, New Negro role models capable of
destroying and surpassing white civilization and its racial restrictions; as race leaders who
build a brand new empire which does not enslave, but works “toward a cooperative
civilization unexcelled in the world” (142). In this way, Schuyler’s novellas subvert the longstanding
stereotype of people of color being viewed as technologically inept and they
participate in an ongoing discussion in African American literature on depicting technology as
a means of liberation.
4.5 Black Empire in the Context of Frederick Douglass’ and Booker T.
Washington’s Treatments of Technology
Schuyler’s novellas reflect and address an issue which goes back to the 18th
and 19th
centuries: the representation of African Americans vis-à-vis technology, science, and
inventions. As this section shows, Schuyler in his novellas engages with and responds to
earlier texts by black American authors – Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington –
who discuss the role of technology in the African American experience and the part it plays in
the liberation of people of color from slavery and oppression. Schuyler’s New Negro,
technologically and technically skilled characters, led by black aviators, represent a new
evolutionary step in the depiction of African Americans in black literature as human, skilled,
and civilized. Schuyler’s serials depict fantastical modern characters who expand on
Douglass’s realization in his slave narrative that literacy alongside technical and technological
skills pave the way to proving African American’s humanity to white America and to
acquiring the self-assurance to rebel against systems of oppression such as slavery. At the
same time, Schuyler’s novellas reject Washington’s stifling views on technical and
mechanical education as a way of keeping freed African Americans as rudimentary,
unambitious laborers in the Jim Crow South.
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As Bruce Sinclair explains in Technology and the African American Experience,
African Americans were from early on often stereotyped as “technically incompetent” in the
new American republic built upon and by “Yankee ingenuity [or] natural disposition for quick
and novel solutions to the practical problems of life” (2-4). As a result, slaves and freedmen
were effectively excluded from Americanness, defined as scientific and technological
ingenuity and exhibited, for example, in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. They were thus
also prevented from developing not only literacy in writing and reading, but also technical
literacies of practical and business life. By withholding access to technology – and technical
and mechanical education as well as employment – slaves could be, writes Carroll Pursell in
A Hammer in Their Hands: A Documentary History of Technology and the AfricanAmerican
Experience, characterized as “childlike” and “below real men” (xv). Especially
since “whiteness and technological capability” were seen as “fundamental elements of
[American] masculinity” (Sinclair 3). Indeed, the notion that “the truly masculine man” must
be “good with tools and, ideally, [own] them” (Pursell xiv) kept enslaved Africans in a
position of inferiority and outside the definitions of humanity and civilization. This also
relegated black women completely from any discussion about their potential technical and
technological skills and claim to Americanness.
However, the institution of slavery did, by its very nature, require African Americans
to use machinery and be involved in science on a daily basis. According to some estimates, by
the 18th
century, “10 percent of all black women were engaged in cloth production, while
upwards of half of all males were employed in blacksmithing, leather-working, cooperage,
and carpentry.” These occupations were considered elite, “as were such subsequent pursuits
as the management of steam engines, boilers, and other machinery.” Plantations were
“industrial enterprises that employed advanced technologies and depended upon a wide
variety of skills,” explains Robert Fogel (qtd in Sinclair 8). Crucially, the cheap and skilled
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labor that technically apt slaves provided resulted in a shift in occupational hierarchies on
plantations. According to Fogel, planters switched to slaves to manage their properties, which
brought about “some book learning” to slaves and, more importantly, “rewarded [the skilled
and influential slaves] with an extra measure of pride.” Unsurprisingly then, it was the skilled
craftsmen and artisans who “led most slave rebellions” (qtd in Sinclair 8) and who most often
escaped to the North (Pursell 21). Technology was therefore associated in African Americans’
minds with potential for liberation.
In early African American literature, slave narratives – functioning as historical
documents and self-fashioning (non-)fiction – often depict slaves’ daily encounters with and
usage of technology to counter the reality of technology being cynically employed “as the
means by which people of color throughout the United States – African, Native American,
Hispanic, and Asian – were […] subordinated to the grander purposes of American
civilization” (Sinclair 5). Slave narratives document and retell the potential of science and
technology to dehumanize slaves as dispensable tools, as well as to humanize them by
displaying their ingenuity and inventiveness. After all, pointing out slavery’s inhumanity and
expressing slaves’ humanity was the central objective of slave narratives. As Philip Gould
claims, the distinction between the slave as property and his humanity is “one of the central
motifs in black writing from the 1770s until the American civil war” (41-2).
One of the best-known ways of expressing slaves’ humanity in the slave narrative is
the retelling of the act of becoming literate, finding one’s own voice, and telling their life
story under slavery. In the Enlightenment era, writes Shirley Moody-Turner, “written literacy
and the capacity to produce literature were seen as representative of the cognitive ability to
reason and thus as a measurement of humanity, progress, and social status” (201). If the
slaves’ capacity to read and write determined humanity and characterized the slave narrative,
however, so did the capacity to operate machinery and become literate in science and
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technology. Literacy, in its multiple meanings, represented “the technology of reason,” claims
Gates (132).
In “The Economies of the Slave Narrative,” Gould explains that slave narratives
possess the ability of “recuperating African American humanity” through emulating the
Franklinian “American success story” (99), which is deeply embedded not only in the
capacity to eloquently represent oneself through writing but also in technological capabilities
and personal investment in scientific progress. Indeed, slave narratives by Frederick
Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and Elizabeth Keckley, as well as Booker T. Washington’s neoslave
narrative, share an “entrepreneurial figure whose hard work, calculation, and initiative
made [them] suitable […] as the new American hero.” Such African American characters
directly challenge the stereotypes of “shiftlessness and dishonesty” traditionally associated
with blackness (Gould 99). More importantly, they establish a connection between science
and technology and slave’s humanity as slave narrative authors find and highlight their
liberation through hard work and engagement with a craft that requires intelligence, highly
technical and technological skills, and inventiveness.
Slave narratives are thus inherently preoccupied with science and technology. If slaves
were considered non-human, without the capacity to reason and express themselves in
writing, then it follows that they could not possess the ability to operate, let alone invent,
design, or apply technology. Yet, slave narratives clearly show that slaves were often tasked
with acquiring technical skills and performing demanding technological work, thereby
unveiling fissures in the pro-slavery argument that slaves were naturally inhuman and
uncivilized. In fact, slave narratives expressed slaves’ humanity, among others, precisely as
capacity to operate machinery and perform highly skilled tasks. In The Confessions of Nat
Turner (1831), for example, Thomas R. Gray depicts Turner as an inquisitive child, who not
only spent any free time reading books, but also “making experiments in casting different
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things in moulds made of earth, in attempting to make paper, gunpowder, and many other
experiments, that although I could not perfect, yet convinced me of its practicability if I had
the means.” As a result, explains Turner to Gray, “the negroes in the neighborhood [grew
confident] in my superior judgment, that they would often carry me with them when they
were going on any roguery, to plan for them.” Turner’s narration provides a glimpse into how
the acquisition of technical skills and scientific knowledge would often bring about the
recognition of slaves’ own worth – and a consciousness that propelled them to push back
against the inhumanity of slavery and for freedom. Turner’s technical talents and ingenuity
also earn him a leadership position as his peers notice this consciousness of his own worth,
which is later channeled into one of the most notorious slave rebellions in U.S. history.
Humanity and leadership are highlighted when slaves display their technical prowess
in their narratives. In scenes where slaves discover their human consciousness and articulate
thought – which is usually interpreted as a result of access to and development of literacy –
technology and technical literacies are always present in the form of everyday labor
performed by slaves and they play a formative role in the process of humanizing the slave.
This is the case, for example, with Frederick Douglass’ Narrative (1845), in which the author
outlines the potential for technology, technical skills, and scientific knowledge to liberate
slaves intellectually and, as a result, physically.
Early in life, Douglas realizes that literacy is “the pathway from slavery to freedom”
(29). He observes his master, Mr. Auld, berating his wife for teaching Frederick to read and
write: “A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master – to do as he is told to do.
Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world [as] he would at once become
unmanageable” (29). Mr. Auld fears what Ronald T. Judy calls “the paramount dangers of
thinking” (100) – he warns his wife that learning transforms slaves into men, which
undermines the logic of slavery as ownership of animal-like property, rather than humans
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with intellect. Initially, learning dejects Douglass: “[it] had given me a view of my wretched
condition, without the remedy. […] It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that
tormented me [as] I often found myself regretting my own existence” (33). Nevertheless,
Douglass perseveres in learning the alphabet by not only reading, but also by observing
carpenters at the shipyard marking ship parts by letters, which he copies into his notebook.
Albeit rudimentary, the very process of initial learning thus introduces Douglass to the
practical role of technology in developing literacy, consciousness, and ultimately proving
one’s humanity. Literacy becomes, in multiple ways, Douglass’ technology of liberation.
When Douglass returns to the shipyard after having spent a year under Mr. Covey, the
environment again serves educational purposes for Douglass – but this time, the slave
improves on his technical, rather than literacy skills. Working among freedmen and white
workers, Douglass is initially employed to learn to calk, but ends up becoming a jack-of-alltrades
for seventy-five carpenters. He learns to recognize tools, work with timber, and
perform other more-or-less-technical tasks. Later, after a fight with some of the carpenters,
Douglass is transferred to another shipyard to calk, and becomes a self-made artisan: “[I] very
soon learned the art of using my mallet and irons. [Within] one year […] I was able to
command the highest wages given to the most experienced calkers” (64). Once he realizes
that his ever-improving artisanal skills and experience earn him higher wages, he strives for
more education, which, in turn, leads to more independence: “After learning how to calk, I
sought my own employment, made my own contracts, and collected the money which I
earned” (64).
While the famous fight scene with Covey represents, according to Paul Gilroy, a
symbolic transformation of Douglass from slave into man and reverses the Hegelian slavemaster
dialectic (156), it is, in fact, through the learning and acquisition of technical literacies
and skills at the shipyard that Douglass becomes his own master. Douglass recognizes his
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own technical ingenuity as he quickly learns some of the best-paid trades in the shipyards and
revives his desire to become a free man. It is on ships that Douglass labors to improve his
literacy and it is ships again two years later that provide him with additional tools – artisanal
skills and the ownership of his own set of actual tools – to become an independent,
technically and technologically skilled and literate man. Unlike the rudimental heavy slave
labor that makes “thoughtless” slaves (64), the highly-skilled work in the shipyards finally
opens Douglass’ eyes to the realization that, through mastery of technology, he can become
his own master with his own tools to liberation.
Douglass’s humanity and budding consciousness is thus not only written, but also
calked in his Narrative in the scenes where Douglass performs technically-skilled labor.
Reading the text through the prism of the importance of technology and science in liberating
slaves intellectually and physically then provides tools for interpreting and understanding
Douglass’s later statements on technology which highlight his preoccupation with the topic.
In 1848, for example, Douglass writes in a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe that “[African
Americans] must become mechanics – we must build, as well as live in houses – we must
make, as well as use furniture – we must construct bridges, as well as pass over them – before
we can properly live, or be respected by our fellow men” (qtd in Sinclair 7). In other words,
African Americans must become involved in what only in the early twentieth century became
known as ‘technology:’ both the tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing,
clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which people produce and
use them, as well as applied science and knowledge (Bain 860, MacKenzie vii). Three years
after the first edition of his Narrative, Douglass in his letter re-articulates the realization that
African American humanity is recognized by the white population through the former’s
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display of technical skills. Crucially, Douglass here also precedes Schuyler’s aspirations for
black men to become not mere laborers, but potentially mechanics, designers, and engineers.62
Later, in “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” (1852), Douglass recognizes,
however, that perhaps not even technical and technological prowess may prove black men’s
humanity. He observes that “while we are […] using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting
houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver
and gold; that, while we are reading, writing, and cyphering, acting as […] lawyers, doctors,
ministers […] we are called upon to prove that we are men!” Indeed, Douglass seems to be
saying, African Americans have proven enough of their humanity through ingenuity yet are
repeatedly asked to do more. Despite the dejected tone, though, a sense of pride, too, pervades
Douglass’s speech – while the white majority may not recognize African Americans’
humanity in spite of the obvious heavy and technically-skilled labor performed, the actual
everyday engagement of people of color with technology and scientific progress in all fields
remains essential to their maintenance of a sense of worth and human consciousness.
Douglass’s Narrative and speeches thus also confirm that slave labor involving highlytechnical
tasks enhances the artisan’s independence and, consequently, the desire to flee and
be free.
While bold visions for African American laborers in the rapidly-developing era of
19th-century industrialization seem to be an overlooked, yet omnipresent feature of Frederick
Douglass’s texts, they are a central and widely discussed element of Booker T. Washington’s
62
Douglass saw technology as freeing and humanizing in another area as well: photography. As John
Stauffer et al. explain in Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth
Century’s Most Photographed American, Douglass “defined himself as a free man and citizen as
much through his [photographic] portraits as his words.” Douglass sought to employ the technology
of photography as “abolitionists’ greatest weapon, for it gave the lie to slavery as a benevolent
institution and exposed it as a dehumanizing horror.” In other words, photography – like slave
narratives – “bore witness to African Americans’ essential humanity, while also countering the
racist caricatures that proliferated throughout the North” (xi).
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writings, which envision a robust program of industrial education for African Americans in
the postbellum South. Published in 1901, six years after Douglass’s death, Washington’s Up
from Slavery and his later texts offer, according to Deborah McDowell, “correctives or
replacements for Douglass’s life and works and for the antebellum slave narrative in general”
(155). Unlike a traditional antebellum slave narrative like Douglass’s, Washington’s text
“avoided the genre’s straightforward rehearsal of slavery’s wrongs, producing a counternarrative
which seemed aglow with optimism” (156). For, unlike Douglass, Washington was
a “gradualist and separatist, believing that change would best occur in a black utopia in a
faraway place” (Bieze 136); this came to be known as the Tuskegee Normal School for
Colored Teachers, established in 1881.
Despite their divergent approaches to the depictions of slavery and its legacies, both
Douglass and Washington are preoccupied in their texts with the role of technology in African
American lives and future. Washington’s visions for black laborers, however, are not
aspirational like Douglass’s, but stifling. Gradually, his utopian school of industrial education,
Tuskegee, turns into a dystopian place where African Americans’ aspirations to find
employment in technical fields wither since Washington sees black men as mechanics,
agricultural laborers, and bricklayers, whose progress and civil rights should come only after
generations have proven their humanity in terms of economic worth to the white population.
In Washington’s words, if black men succeed in their respective industries, they “could lay
the foundations upon which [their] children and grandchildren could grow to higher and more
important things in life” (104).
Up from Slavery represents a work of racial uplift, in which Washington expounds the
virtues of labor. In agreement with Douglass, Washington confirms that slaves performed
technical labor during slavery: “[While] the slave owner and his sons had mastered no special
industry […] the slaves, in many cases, had mastered some handicraft, and none were
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ashamed, and few unwilling, to labour” (12). Similarly, in his notorious “Atlanta Exposition
Speech,” Washington acknowledges to his white audience that it was the African Americans
who “tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought
forth treasures from the bowels of the earth” (112). It is this kind of labor, however, that
African Americans should in Washington’s opinion keep performing to be recognized as
human – and aspire to little more.
Industrial education is, according to Washington, the best way to prove black men’s
worth to the world. Early in his youth, Washington determines that he has to “secure an
education at any cost” (22), but also comes to later realize that his education would not follow
“the craze for Greek and Latin learning [which was believed to] make one a very superior
human being” (42). Instead, Washington “had a strong feeling that what our people most
needed was to get a foundation in education, industry, and property” (48). That is why he
enrolls at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, where he observes that students are
“constantly making the effort through the industries to help [themselves], and that very effort
was of immense value in character-building” (45-6). Labor, if performed well and with
diligence, claims Washington, has the innate value of realizing and bringing out one’s worth,
his very humanity.” Like Douglass, Washington sees labor as liberating: “At Hampton […] I
learned to love labour, not alone for its financial value, but for labour’s own sake and for the
independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world wants done
brings.” It is at Hampton that Washington experiences his “first taste of what it meant to live a
life of unselfishness, [his] first knowledge of the fact that the happiest individuals are those
who do the most to make others useful and happy” (39).
Selflessness, utility of black labor, and reliance on the outside world to provide the
framework for interpreting black men’s worth through their labor’s usefulness are essential
premises of Washington’s philosophy which underlie his industrial program gleaned at
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Hampton and later expanded at Tuskegee. While Douglass envisions black technical and
technological labor as a stepping-stone toward recognition of people of color’s humanity and
means of gaining mobility, however, Washington interprets it as stationary. He urges African
Americans to remain in the South and be useful to the white population’s needs. While
Douglass’s technical education, directly connected to his work on ships and at the shipyard, is
a necessary condition for mobility, Washington negates mobility by encouraging the
industrially-educated African Americans to anchor themselves in “agriculture, mechanics, in
commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” African Americans “may overlook
the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in
mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour
and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life. […] It is at the bottom of life we
must begin” (112), exhorts Washington his students. Commonality, not Douglassian
exceptionality and potential for leadership, drives Washington’s industrial education.
Washington’s philosophy of industrial education as the anchor that prevents African
Americans from reaching to the future pervaded the Tuskegee curriculum. In their instruction,
explains Washington, the Tuskegee instructors did not want to “educate our students out of
sympathy with agricultural life, so that they would be attracted from the country to the cities,
and yield to the temptation of trying to live by their wits” (65). In Washington’s terminology,
higher learning and tapping into the potential of creative minds represents potential sin. That
is why Tuskegee provided its students with an education that would “cause them to return to
the plantation districts” (65). Although Washington promises to teach his students “how to
make the forces of nature – air, water, steam, electricity, horse-power – assist them” in work
(76), it is labor and utility for the white community, rather than ingenuity, inventiveness, and
creativity with technologies and science to enable African American mobility and show the
full potential of their humanity, which were emphasized at Tuskegee. Bricks, wagons, carts,
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and buggies are assembled at and supplied by Tuskegee to the neighboring white community,
boasts Washington (109); but nothing new is invented. Washington, like Douglass’s Mr.
Auld, only seeks the material and financial gain from black labor, not its development through
further education and encouragement to create. African Americans’ humanity does not seem
to have a place in Washington’s industrial education.
Indeed, Washington’s critics – W.E.B. DuBois primarily – noticed this gap. In The
Souls of Black Folk, published only two years after Up from Slavery, DuBois contrasts
Douglass’s “period of self-assertion and self-development,” the main objective of which was
the “assertion of the manhood rights of the Negro by himself,” with Washington’s “old
attitude of adjustment and submission” (22). Washington’s industrial education program,
states DuBois, “accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races” and represents an
“industrial slavery and civic death of black men” (23-25). DuBois, like Douglass, advocates
for black men to be “aroused and encouraged, by the initiative of the richer and wiser
environing group [to] a forward movement” to pursue higher education and to assert their
humanity rather than follow Washington, who “belittles the emasculating effects of caste
distinctions [in the South]” (26). Rather than Washingtonian submission, DuBois advocates
for people of color’s self-assertion.
There are numerous reasons for reading Washington’s Up from Slavery as a textual
version of an educational philosophy and program that stifle the development of African
American technological ingenuity and creativeness. At Tuskegee, Washington was expanding
on the Hampton program of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, whom he saw as “superhuman”
(30) and “the rarest, strongest, and most beautiful character” (39). As Donald Spivey
documents in Schooling for the New Slavery, Armstrong established a program at Hampton
which propagated labor as “the greatest moral force in civilization.” He believed that “the
training of the hand was at the same time a training of the mind and will,” and that industrial
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education would provide a corrective to black men’s “shiftless class” (19-20). Through
industrial education, Armstrong and his supporters also hoped to instill in the black
population “a habit of restraint,” rather than aspirations that would produce “noisy and
dangerous demagogues” (17). In short, industrial education functioned as a civilizing tool; a
means of controlling the black population.
In direct contradiction to Douglass’s and DuBois’s plans of self-assertion through
technological ingenuity and creativity, Armstrong argued that “what [white] men want [in
black men] is not talent, it is purpose: in other words, not the power to achieve, but the will of
labor” (Spivey 20). As if writing Washington’s “Atlanta Exposition Speech,” the general also
viewed black industrial labor as “indispensable to Southern prosperity” (21) and argued for
restraint in African Americans’ demand for civil rights and political representation: “Patience
is better than politics, and industry a shorter road to civil rights” (35). Finally, Armstrong
exposed the objective of industrial education at Hampton and later at Tuskegee in 1890, when
he stated that “the South educated the black man as a measure of self-protection” (35).
Overall, Washington’s plans to educate black men in industrial labor, modeled after
Armstrong’s racist world views, achieved little to advance Douglass’s vision of black men’s
humanity demonstrated through technically- and technologically-skilled labor. Although
black labor played a crucial role in building Southern railroads, mining coal in Tennessee,
working in iron and steel factories as well as in the cotton industry (Spivey 72-3), the
industrial education offered at Hampton and Tuskegee provided students with knowledge
“chiefly in accordance with the demands for labor” (55). The two institutes failed their
students in attaining knowledge beyond the rudimentary. “The carpenter is not taught enough
mathematics, the machinist enough physics, or the farmer enough chemistry for the purpose
of his particular work,” noted Tuskegee’s own head of academic curriculum in 1906 (quoted
in Spivey 56). Overall, Washington’s and other’s industrial education programs for black men
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in the South were producing mere working hands, not creative minds; bodies to be dispensed
with, not talents to be encouraged and developed. Washington’s aspirations for African
Americans were modeled after Armstrong’s understanding of black men as mere labor. That
is why there was little humanity and development of black technical capacities built into
Washington’s program.
Schuyler’s novellas reflect and participate in the discussion of technology as a means
of proving African Americans’ humanity and of liberation. They address the issue of people
of color being relegated from the categories of civility and modernity, and they focus on the
stereotype of people of color being perceived as technologically and technically inept.
Although the novellas are not autobiographical texts like slave narratives, Black Empire does
seem to represent a fictional articulation of Schuyler’s views on science and technology as a
means of black liberation and proof of humanity. The novellas show Schuyler’s
preoccupation with the topic; they fetishize black science, innovativeness, and technicallyskilled
labor, as well as their potential for proving black ingenuity. After all, as the novellas’
sub-titles indicate, Schuyler’s well-educated and trained artisans are assembled to send the
Black Genius Against the World and then, through their ingenuity and skills, to establish A
Great New Civilization in Modern Africa. Aviation plays, of course, an essential role in
Schuyler’s engagement with Douglass and Washington’s texts addressing these issues.
Schuyler’s deep interest in science and technology is little known – perhaps
overshadowed by scholars’ emphasis on his conservative politics – but, as Hill and
Rasmussen note, the journalist and novelist’s “fascination with scientific and technological
progress had been sparked at an early age and remained a lifelong preoccupation” (301).
Schuyler’s overall views on technology, science, and technical education can be summarized
as a combination of, response to, and expansion on Douglass’s and Washington’s
philosophies of racial uplift through acquiring skills and, in turn, skilled jobs. In 1931,
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Schuyler reminisced in a column that “I often shudder […] when I think of the thousands of
colored youngsters who each year are being turned out to face the world with little real
preparation and no opportunities. What a jar my youthful pride and aspirations received when
I applied for work at the very offices and factories owned by the men whose sons had been
my intimates” – there was no work to be had. “They were polite, even apologetic, but very,
very definite. No office, nor even decent factory work, was open to ‘colored’ – but I might
sweep out in the mornings, and oh yes, there was trucking” (quoted in Hill and Rasmussen
305). Instead of the menial jobs with little potential of promotion that Schuyler was offered,
his columns – and his novellas – promote skilled jobs which require education, technical and
technological aptitude, and which provide an improved position in society. His texts thus
offer and encourage aspirations.
Schuyler wants every able-bodied black man to seize any and every opportunity in the
technical and technological labor market. In a column in 1935, for example, he writes that
“science offers a wonderfully thrilling field for the young man and woman in this day and
time. […] It has always seemed to me that more Negroes should be active in the exact
sciences such as engineering, chemistry, physics, geology, etc.” (“Views and Reviews”).
Schuyler’s preoccupation with science and technology is driven by his curiosity about their
potential for people of color. His vision for African Americans is aspirational – unlike
Washington’s – in both tone and message as he encourages his audience to pursue dreams of
higher education and develop their talents. His philosophy is a complex mixture of idealism,
naiveté, and rationality in proposing that black scientists and technicians flood American
industries and overpower racism and discrimination by their human capacity to create, invent,
innovate, as well as labor. His novellas imagine what would happen if Jim Crow continuously
kept skilled African Americans out of technical schools and appropriate employment – the
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anger of the unemployed and rejected, yet educated and skilled scientists, technicians, and
aviators is what powers Belsidus’ revolution.
In “New Job Frontiers for Negro Youth,” Schuyler observes that “we may do without
teachers, preachers, doctors and dentists, but our civilization is bogged down without
electricians, engineers, chemists, metallurgists and their like.” Foreshadowing the leadership
role that Dr. Belsidus envisions for scientists and the technically-educated and skilled in his
plans for black liberation and takeover of Africa, Schuyler also opines that “it is desirable that
our future Negro leadership consists of scientists rather than teachers and preachers” (329). In
so promoting higher education in the sciences and technical fields, Schuyler expands not only
Douglass’ aspiration for technology to play a liberating role in people of color’s lives, but also
on DuBois’s claim from The Souls of Black Folk that “ultimate assimilation” of black men
into the American nation will come “through self-assertion, and no other terms” (25).
Schuyler, indeed, seems to be encouraging of exactly that self-assertion and leadership on the
part of technically-educated, highly-skilled, innovative, and creative people of color.
If Douglass’ and Washington’s texts present divergent ways for slaves or former
slaves to assume their place as full members of the American society, Schuyler’s novellas
fantasize about and depict a shocking scenario in which African Americans escape Jim Crow
and, owing to their superior education, knowledge, and skills, become a self-governing nation
which unites all people of color under the umbrella of technological progress as liberation.
Their humanity is proved in their spirited fight against the oppressive structures of Jim Crow
– education and the job market – and colonialism. Their transformation from second-class
citizens to full citizens and leaders of a Black Empire is, indeed, lined with violence and
destruction – however, as Fanon and, more importantly, Douglass’ famous fight with Mr.
Covey indicate, liberation cannot be undertaken without violence. While Washington’s
institutions teach the students to make forces of nature assist them in work, Schuyler’s
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characters tame and reshape forces of nature to make possible and expedite their liberation.
Belsidus’ aviators control the air and are able to swiftly attack any enemy. His futuristic
machines harvest energy from the sun, grow food faster, produce more durable materials
more efficiently, and have the capacity to turn the opposition’s allegedly superior weapons
into useless slags of metal.
Overall, as Amor Kohli puts it, “Black Empire respects the power of ‘the machines of
white civilization,’ but refuses to accept what they supposedly suggest about the legitimacy of
their creators’ position of supremacy” (170). Instead, Schuyler embraces “technocratic
messianism” (163) as his characters prefer to engage in technology rather than politics to
solve issues plaguing their lives. The novellas thus serve as promotional, aspirational texts of
racial uplift where technology is celebrated as a weapon of liberation for it is the skilled
scientists, artisans, and aviators who make Belsidus’ revolution – the overthrow of white
political, technological, and civilizational supremacy – happen. In this way, the novellas
signify on Turner’s narrative and Douglass’ texts as they envision the skilled class as leaders
of the fight for freedom, fight for proving people of color’s humanity and civility, and the
transformation of the oppressed into citizens of the most modern of nations.
While the novellas embrace Turner’s and Douglass’ legacies, Schuyler also renounces
Washington’s ideology. In the first novella, Belsidus sacks Monrovia, Liberia, and replaces
the former capital, established by the white-led American Colonization Society in 1824, with
a new metropolis, Kakata. Once there, he holds a conference “in one of the great palaver
kitchens erected for the 1928 conference assembled by former president C.D.B. King” (109).
This move is not a mere gesture of decolonization on Belsidus’ part. Rather, it is a symbolic
and literal removal – an outright rejection – of Booker T. Washington’s model of industrial
education. In 1928, in Kakata, the Liberian government held the first meeting of the Board of
Trustees of the proposed Booker T. Washington Agricultural and Industrial Institute, which
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selected a site in Kakata for the institute, opened in 1929 (Dunn 777). According to Spivey,
the Institute, directly modeled after Tuskegee and supported by Washington’s successor,
Robert R. Moton, became the first project in Africa built with the specific objective of
supporting “white-ruled world order through international black industrial education”
(Miseducation 7-14). Kakata had been selected because one of the industrial activities taught
to the natives at the Institute was to be “the exploiting of Liberian rubber” at a nearby
Firestone plantation (33), about which Schuyler writes in his Slaves Today, A Story of Liberia
(1931). The Institute thus helped utilize native labor, which was overseen by white labor force
(Schooling 123). Like Hampton and Tuskegee, the Liberian branch of black industrial
education served the purpose of maximizing the efficiency of black labor for the purposes of
colonial capitalism and overall control of the native population by the colonial-friendly
government. Thus, when Belsidus transforms the “wayside settlement [of Kakata] to the
capital of the new Empire of Africa” (139), Schuyler signals his symbolic divorce of black
American and African population from outdated and exploitative models of industrial
education.
By eschewing Washingtonian education and promoting technological and technical
skill-acquisition, Schuyler’s novellas also integrate black aviation’s goodwill message of
education and job opportunities for any skilled pilot, technician, and mechanic into its
fantastic future. For Schuyler places aviators, Patricia Givens in particular, in the most
important leadership position within the Black Internationale and Black Empire structure.
Patricia, the head of the air force, effectively acts as Belsidus’ right hand. The novellas depict
what Bain refers to as “emancipatory modernity” (954), where a female aviator exists as
Belsidus’ “true […] intellectual match” whose “energy is subsumed in Belsidus’ cause” (Tal
78). Although Tal argues that “it is to Carl Slater […] that Belsidus explains his plans,
provides his rationalizations, and waxes elaborate about his beliefs and philosophies” (79), it
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is, in fact, Patricia who interprets the leader’s orders, objectives, and intentions to Carl, the
mostly passive observer, and, in turn, to the readers. More importantly, it is the aviatrix who
executes these very orders. Patricia and her air force lead the way in all action taking place in
the texts. Aviation unites African tribes into an empire as Belsidus is able to communicate
with even extremely distant regions. Aviation bridges and connects most of what John A.
Williams calls the “set-ups” (quoted in Hill and Rasmussen xi) that form the structure of
Schuyler’s novellas – Patricia transports Carl between places, facilities, and battlefields,
leading most of the action herself. Therefore, it is Patricia who perhaps best captures the
essence of Schuyler’s fantasy of flying out of Jim Crow and Washington’s educational
structures which are holding African Americans back in the past and render them nonparticipants
in American civilization and progress. Instead, Patricia flies African Americans
to Africa, the skies of which the aviatrix controls and flies across in the most modern of
machines without abandon. Patricia, as an aviatrix and a leader, is Schuyler’s most modern
New Negro character with a transnationalist spirit.
Finally, aviation also features symbolically in the reverse Middle Passage Schuyler
writes into The Black Internationale. Belsidus must transport most building materials,
machinery, and soldiers across the Atlantic via planes and ships. He purchases six freighters
for his mission: the S.S. Bessie Coleman, S.S. Samory, S.S. Nat Turner, S.S. Fred Douglass,
S.S. Phyllis Wheatley, and S.S. Sojourner Truth, which are later joined by S.S. Kelly Miller
(92). The seven names mix together historical figures – a pioneer black aviatrix, a 19th
century
Guinean master-strategist who used modern warfare against French colonizers, a
leader of a slave rebellion, one of the most eminent black leaders and thinkers, a female
prodigy whose middle passage inspired her poetry, an advocate of African American
humanity and protector of black womanhood, and, finally, a ground-breaking black
mathematician. Both the names and the ships connect North America with the African
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continent, thereby creating a Pan-African fleet that brings black American scientists,
engineers, soldiers, leaders, and cutting-edge material possessions to Africa. Black human
cargo – the most crucial element of the Middle passage – with the most modern equipment
returns to Africa to retake the land and rid it of colonialism. And aviation is here referred to
symbolically through S.S. Bessie Coleman as it will be aviation – headed by a female aviatrix
who studied in France like Coleman – leading the way amongst the modern technologies
Belsidus utilizes in his project.
Schuyler’s Black Empire thus represents a radical version of Douglass’ aspirational
vision for African Americans to prove their humanity through acquiring technical and
technological skills – not just literacy. Schuyler’s New Negro scientists, technicians, and
aviators – fed up with the systemic oppressive structures of Jim Crow and tired of
Washington’s educational models of rudimentary industry – rebel under Belsidus’ leadership,
thereby emulating the 19th
-century slave artisans and craftsmen who led unsuccessful
rebellions against the peculiar institution. Schuyler thus imbues, mainly through aviation, the
trope of technology as a means of proving humanity and achieving freedom and liberty with a
radical framework in which technology in black hands is used for both liberation and revenge,
for both proving humanity and asserting membership in the twentieth-century civilization.
4.6 Love is in the Air
Aviation in Black Empire, however, does not feature merely as a decisive weapon in modern
warfare, a vehicle for avenging Italy’s devastation of Ethiopia from the air, a field which
allows Schuyler to depict people of color as assertive New Negroes and as participants in
modern science and technology; nor is aviation merely a means of crossing vast distances in
the novellas. It must be noted here that aviation also frames and drives the romance aspect of
the texts, particularly the relationship between Carl and Patricia. Schuyler contributes a new
element to the aviation campaign in the black press, which serious black aviators and
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journalists only implied in their texts: flying as a romantic endeavor. Aviation provides
intimacy in the narrow space of the cockpit. It fuels the dramatic action which inspires
heightened emotions and, in turn, brings characters together – Carl’s fascination with Patricia
grows and deepens during their various missions in the air. Most importantly, in coupling
Carl, a Harlem journalist, and Patricia, an aviatrix, Schuyler symbolically weds the black
press with black aviation – this is a union which his journalism supported and fostered
throughout the larger Harlem Renaissance era. Carl and Patricia’s relationship, created by
perhaps the most vocal black aviation advocate and written for and published in one of the
most vocal newspaper crusaders for black aviation, thus brings the black aviation campaign in
the black press full circle.
Indeed, Carl is stunned by Patricia’s beauty from their very first encounter. “[There]
sat the prettiest colored girl I’ve ever seen. She had the color of a pale Indian with the softness
of feature of the Negro, and wore with trim and easy grace a modish dark green business suit.
Perched on one side of her head was one of those cute modernistic hats.” Patricia’s face holds
Carl “spellbound.” “It was absolutely symmetrical, with lips not large but sensuously full,
rather high cheekbones, and large, wide-spaced eyes like limpid pools under the moonlight on
a tropic plain,” explains Carl in an excited tone. Most importantly, “her general expression
was one of unbelievable innocence and sweetness” (40), especially compared to Belsidus’
diabolical appearance. At first, however, Carl does not know what role Patricia plays in
Belsidus’ project; although she does wear a “green leather pilot’s cap and jacket” when they
meet again (42). When he learns that Patricia heads the Black Internationale air force, the
announcement “took my breath away,” confesses Carl (43). Shortly after the news, he admits
that he “was in love with this girl” (44); in love with her looks and modern stylishness, as
well as with her skills in the most modern of technical fields since he cannot “get over this
girl’s sureness, her nonchalance. She handled the autogiro as I would an automobile” (45).
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In Carl’s eyes, Patricia represents the brilliance of the group that Belsidus has
assembled. It is her piloting which takes him from one Black Internationale facility to another
and which makes him “lose […] skepticism about the possibilities of success” (44). Scene
after scene in the first novella, Carl reports to the readers on the aviatrix’s beauty and skills,
highlighting her confidence, characteristic of a New Negro: “I couldn’t help but admire the
expertness with which she piloted the plane. Would she be interested in love, I wondered –
this beauty who superintended an aircraft factory, piloted planes across country and talked of
conditioning the masses, world revolution and such things” (47). When Patricia suggests to
Carl that he call her “Pat,” Carl begins to wonder “about the future” – the future of Belsidus’
endeavor as well as the potential future with Patricia as the two issues become increasingly
interconnected. When Carl expresses his feelings to Patricia, the aviatrix refuses his advances,
saying “Sorry, Carl, but there isn’t much time for romance. There’s too much to be done, and
such a short time in which to do it. Romance can wait. Forget about it. There’s plenty of time
for that in the future” (56). However, attraction is palpable between the two from this point on
and Carl, for the time being, contends himself with “feasting my eyes upon her beauty as she
piloted the autogiro over the country with faultless precision” (55). He also kisses Pat after a
“shameless orgy” (66) in one of Belsidus’ Temples of Love.
Overall, the potential relationship between Carl and Patricia imbues Belsidus’ project
with an Eden-like promise of the modern and leading civilization of people of color spawning
a new generation once their mission is completed. In the Black Internationale, though,
Patricia does still hide her feelings towards Carl until the invasion is successfully carried out.
The journalist complains in a soliloquy that Patricia “was becoming more distant. […] And
yet it somehow felt that she should be mine [and] had I lived in another age, I could have
taken her without delay or ado.” Carl acknowledges that Patricia’s leadership as the head of
Belsidus’ air force is much too important for the project, though: “Now, because of her career,
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because of what she wanted to do for the race […] I was held off” (93-4). Still, aboard the
plane headed to Africa to initiate Black Internationale’s takeover of the continent, Patricia
tells Carl not to “give up hope.” Like the promise of a bright future in liberated Africa,
Patricia’s message “made me buoyant,” states Carl (94).
Belsidus’ plan for people of color’s future is closely interrelated with the relationship.
As Carl observes the preparations and later the advances of Belsidus’ engineers and soldiers,
he cannot keep quiet his passion for Patricia, who, through aviation, directs, represents, and
makes possible these marvelous changes happening in Africa. “Busy as I’ve been in this
tremendous undertaking,” Carl confesses to Patricia, “I’ve been terribly lonely for you. Just
starved.” In fact, “I’d be delighted to marry you this minute, Patricia Givens, if you’d have
me,” whispers Carl in her ear (116). The penultimate installment of the first novella ends with
a cliffhanger as Patricia, after having successfully completed her deadly mission and revenge
on Italy, enters Belsidus’ ‘situation room:’ “The door flew open and there was my Pat, face
smeared with grease, but smiling triumphantly, and as pretty as ever” (137). Subsequently,
with Africa decolonized, Patricia’s words to Carl close the first novella: “Yes, love.
Tomorrow we, like Africa, shall be united, after so long. United forever” (142).
Aviation, represented by Patricia, plays a central role as the leading technology in
Belsidus’ liberation of Africa. It also plays a romantic role as it is mainly owing to the Black
Internationale air force that Africa is united at the end of the text – a romantic ideal, a back-toAfrica
dream is thus achieved. Finally, aviation unites the two main characters, whose very
affinity is spurred and fueled by Patricia’s aviation skills and Carl’s admiration for them –
even the couple’s honeymoon is unsurprisingly aviation-themed as they hurtle “through the
cloudless sky on the happiest trip of our lives [in] one of the Black Internationale’s black and
gold pursuit planes” (146).
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The relationship symbolizes the love for aviation which Carl gradually begins to feel
owing to Patricia’s prowess. When he is not listening to Belsidus’ boastful speeches, Carl
spends most of his time in the tiny, yet intimate space of Patricia’s plane’s cockpit with the
attractive aviatrix sitting next to him, especially in the sequel novella. The depth of the
relationship between Carl and Patricia – between journalism and aviation – is thus further
expanded in The Black Empire. Carl, protective of his wife but also progressively enamored
with aviation, accompanies Patricia on and observes her during her various missions to
protect the Black Empire and regain control over African skies. “Chief,” asks Patricia
Belsidus as she is to set off on her chemical warfare mission, “I know it’s a silly request when
there is so much to be done and so few of us to direct it, but cannot Carl go along with me
[…] as a sort of observer [?]” (173). Belsidus concedes and now that the aviatrix is no longer
Carl’s love interest but a partner, the journalist may focus on reporting on the various aviation
endeavors depicted in the novella.
Since a large portion of the text is set in the air as bombers flood cities with infested
rats, stratosphere planes are shot down by French pursuit planes, and fleets stage battles in the
skies, Carl becomes a reporter of black aviation, the voice which captures the achievements
of black aviators, the danger of their missions, and – in a move reminiscent of the aviation
campaign of the black press – also the crusading spirit of Patricia, the revolutionary aviatrix,
and her air force. Schuyler no longer sexualizes Patricia as the object of Carl’s attraction in
the sequel text. It is aviation’s potential for and its role in liberation and decolonization which
become the new, attractive, and dynamic object of Carl’s breathless narration. With Patricia at
the controls, Carl reports on all the flying action taking place above decolonized Africa.
In The Black Empire, Carl tells the readers of Pat’s flying and navigating the
stratosphere planes through a pitch-black sky. He is proud of her at Fez when she averts
French pursuit planes and then he wonders if Patricia has “a charmed life” as “the windows
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around her had been struck several times [by bullets] but the gas tanks, oil lines and engines
were so far intact” during their battle above Morocco (218). Carl narrates how he and Patricia
subsequently parachute to death but end up surviving in the desert despite the aviatrix’s head
injury. Much like John C. Robinson, Patricia seems to rush into action and survive, covering
herself in glory. Her crash – unlike those of Bessie Coleman or Charles E. James – does not
deter the aviatrix on her mission. While she gives orders to her fleets from the safety of
Kakata, Carl joins Belsidus to witness the action in the air first-hand – he never stops
reporting on aviation and his wife; and their role in the bloody conflict.
At the end of the sequel novella, Patricia squeezes Carl’s hand and communicates her
emotions without a sound; there is nothing else to be said after all the breathtaking aviation
action and fight for survival. Africa is now free, united, and a new generation of confident,
assertive, and utterly modern New Negroes has risen. The marriage between Carl and Patricia
then foreshadows that this generation will reproduce and bring to the decolonized continent a
generation of free, unshackled people of color. In fact, the plot of the sequel novella – with its
dynamic, never-stopping action – serves as a temporary stop in the couple’s honeymoon.
Supposed to last an entire month and probably meant to encourage Carl and Patricia to
conceive a child which would symbolize the unity of Africa and African Americans, their
honeymoon is cut short because the Black Empire must first survive before it can move
forward and lay the ground for next generations to live free on the continent.
Patricia squeezing Carl’s hand may also be read as a sign of relief and as recognition
of black aviation’s achievements. Ever the proud and self-assured black aviatrix, Patricia
repeatedly expresses confidence about Belsidus’ project and her crusading willingness to die
in the process of completing her mission. She is aware of the crucial position that her air force
holds. As Carl guides the readers on Patricia’s mission – emulating the black press reporters
who ventured flights with pioneer black pilots so as to promote black aviation – aviation
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comes to occupy a central part in the events taking place in the novellas, thereby confirming
both the aviatrix’s confidence and her superior skills and ingenuity. Carl’s reporting promotes
black aviation as it is owing to his narrative that the readers may marvel at and appreciate the
spectacle that is Patricia as a modern, assertive woman and a New Negro aviatrix, a race
leader and a role model.
4.7 The Flying Ethiops in Revolt in Ethiopia
The genre of a black internationalist romance mixed with adventure and a strong dose of
aviation is also what characterizes George S. Schuyler’s third aviation-inspired novella,
Revolt in Ethiopia. Under Schuyler’s pseudonym of Rachell Call, the text was serialized
between July 1938 and January 1939, only a few months after The Black Empire had ended.
In 1996, the novella was published as part of Ethiopian Stories. In Revolt, an African
American heir to an oil fortune in Texas, Dick Welland, is traveling from Marseille to Cairo
and Alexandria aboard the S.S. Metallica where he meets an Ethiopian princess, Ettara, the
emperor’s niece. When the princess tells Dick that she is on a quest to secure a hidden
mythical treasure which would allow Ethiopia to purchase the most modern weaponry to fight
the Italian occupants, the American decides to help her escape from the boat where an
Ethiopian traitor, Ras Resta Gusa, and Italian spies are trying to kidnap and kill her.
Subsequently, Dick assists Ettara in flying to her homeland, securing the treasure, and
transporting it to Belgium, where it is exchanged for cash and, in turn, for weaponry. At the
end, Ettara agrees to marry Dick.
Aviation features heavily in the text. As with the previous duo of novellas, flying
frames and fuels most of the action and romance taking place. Aviation also allows for the
story to elapse within seventy two hours since – similarly to Black Empire – the main
characters cover vast distances across the African continent in a matter of hours. In short,
aviation keeps the novella’s action dynamic. Furthermore, at the heart of Ettara’s mission lies
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the desire to control Ethiopia’s air, because Ethiopians can never fully revolt and retake their
country – like Belsidus does with Africa and his all-black air force – without Ethiopian
aviators regaining command over the country’s skies. Precisely because the text depicts
Ethiopians flying and fighting in the air, Schuyler again presents his readers with the imagery
of people of color controlling and mastering the most modern of technologies, thus subverting
commonly-held stereotypes. Finally, aviation, as with Black Empire, unites Dick and Ettara –
it provides and symbolizes intimacy – and unites African Americans with Ethiopia in a shared
struggle against colonial and imperial oppression. The text thus adds another piece into the
mosaic of black characters utilizing aviation to decolonize and liberate Africa, demonstrating
their New Negro assertiveness, militancy, and transnational spirit.
By the time Revolt first appeared in the Courier and introduced the character of
Princess Ettara, Schuyler’s audience had grown accustomed to African princesses – indirectly
connected to aviation – featuring in the black press. In November 1935, Hubert Julian
returned from Addis Ababa to Harlem. Reports mocking the “Black Eagle” in the black press
highlighted the fact that one of Julian’s achievements during his sojourn in Ethiopia had been
the courting of Haile Selassie’s “one unwedded daughter, the princess Tschai.” When asked
whether the rumors about his potential marriage to the royal were true, the Trinidad-born
parachutist teased journalists with “You’ll see” (“Col. Julian Turns Back on Ethiopia,” “Julian
Quits Ethiopia”). Two years later, after a spell abroad during which Julian still filled headlines
in black papers, “the conqueror of the heavens, world traveler and soldier of fortune” returned
in December 1937 to New York – with an Egyptian princess by his side and the title of an
“equerry” to “Her Royal Highness Princess Almina Ali,” the daughter “of the late Prince
Hadji Ali,” a popular vaudeville artist (“Julian, with Monocle and Princess, Back in Harlem”).
Although black newspapers vigorously debated whether Almina was a true royal, it is safe to
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assume that Harlem was clearly used to the black aviation personality being associated in the
black press with African princesses.
Dick Welland’s character does fit Julian’s description in some respects. A world
traveler looking for adventure and female company everywhere he goes, Dick is well-versed
in aviation and its potential, but cannot fly himself. He can parachute, however, and plan
escapes and travels with the help of planes, which proves useful to Princess Ettara on her
quest. On the other hand, the drama which takes place on the S.S. Metallic during the opening
chapters – the assassination attempts on Ettara, and by extension on Dick – must have
reminded the readers of John C. Robinson’s journey home from Ethiopia during which Italian
spies tried to kill him six times. “The most significant attempt to kill him,” reported the
Defender upon Robinson’s return to the U.S., “was on the ship which brought the flyer to
Marseille, France. While on deck, Colonel Robinson was warned by an Egyptian that several
men were after him. Shortly afterwards three men started after him with a dagger, but the plot
was nipped by two sailors” (“Reveal Six Attempts to Kill Condor”). Overall, however, Dick
most seems to resemble Carl from Black Empire. Even though he does not function as the
narrator in this novella, Dick does follow, like Carl, a brave female character – whose
servants can fly and fight the Italians in the air – to Ethiopia despite his initial reticence and
skepticism, and functions as the somewhat oblivious observer and translator of the Ethiopian
adventure for the black American audience, embodied by his valet, Bill.
Unlike Carl, Dick does not work as a journalist, but his doubtfulness of Ettara’s
mission is reminiscent of Carl’s initial hesitation to support Belsidus and Patricia’s
revolutionary vision. Dick encounters Ettara as she is being bothered by Resta. They begin to
talk and Dick joins the princess for dinner. In the middle of the dining hall, however, they find
out that Ettara’s bodyguard, John, has been murdered – and Dick is thrown into the action that
is Ettara’s secret mission to liberate Ethiopia. The American claims that he is on a mere
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“pleasure trip” and is “not eager to get involved too deeply in anything […] dangerous.”
Ettara, however, pleads to his Pan-African spirit: “You don’t wish to see Ethiopia free? […]
You don’t wish to see the Italians beaten and driven out? You are unsympathetic with the
aspirations of black men?” (134). Dick, apparently a reader of the black press, opines: “I’m
sympathetic with the Ethiopians but frankly I can’t see how they can win, so why waste
time?” Echoing black press editorials, Dick thinks that “even when [the Ethiopians] had arms,
he recalled, they had been unable to stem the tide of invasion. […] It would require millions
of dollars,” which black newspapers argued that African Americans could not spare abroad,
and “it was utterly silly to think anything concrete could be done to expel the Fascists”
anyway (136). Lack of conviction of and a leisurely attitude to Ethiopia’s plight thus define
Dick at first.
Schuyler, too, initially held skeptical views towards any other than financial help for
Ethiopia on the part of black Americans – his fantasy of wanting to shoot the Italians with a
machine gun notwithstanding. In his weekly texts, he urged his readers to “start a stream of
currency toward New York [because] it would not only increase our self-esteem and
pleasantly surprise the Ethiopians, but it would tremendously enhance our prestige in the eyes
of the white world which usually expects us only to clown” (quoted in Hill 20). At the same
time, though, the columnist was always mindful of the gravity of and repercussions from
Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. “Make no mistake about it,” writes Schuyler in the winter of
1935, “if Ethiopia loses and is enslaved, the cause of white imperialism will be immeasurably
advanced and the cause of black liberation will be hopelessly retarded. The last of free Africa
MUST remain free” (quoted in Hill 21). Schuyler later explained to his readers that “the
defeat of Ethiopia and its consequent dismemberment will be a very damaging blow to the
prestige and aspirations of colored people everywhere” (21). In Dick Welland, Schuyler thus
fictionalizes his columns into a lead character – Dick, doubtful at first, eventually invests
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financially and engages actively in Ettara’s quest, realizing that, perhaps, helping Ethiopia is
not merely a national, but a black transnational issue.
As in Black Empire, it is the main female character symbolizing Africa or an African
nation, who convinces the male character to assist her on her journey. “I am on a mission now
that will make it possible for our eager millions to have arms in their hands and drive the
Italians to the sea,” explains Ettara to Dick excitedly. She appeals to his Americanness, “that
pioneering spirit that conquers, that spirit which has made our people in America the most
progressive Negroes in the world.” And reveals that she spent eight years in the U.S.,
studying at Howard University between 1927 and 1935 (135). As Hill correctly notes in his
foreword to Revolt, the princess recognizes Dick, an African American, as a “sort of cultural
vanguard in the African world;” in other words, a representative of Locke’s New Negro.
Ettara here argues to Dick and the readers, claims Hill, that “the privileged cultural position of
African-Americans should not blind them to the infinite adaptability of African culture” and
that black Americans’ progressiveness carries “political responsibility” for other peoples of
color (26). Ettara’s pleading thus expresses the most essential tenets of black transnationalism
and the American New Negro’s central role in it.
At the same time, the princess’ utterance reminds the readers of the role of black
aviation in the very notion of progress being associated with black America. Indeed, when the
princess mentions the progressive and conquering spirit of black Americans, it is difficult to
read aviation into it. However, given her sojourn in Washington, D.C., during the years of the
Harlem Renaissance as well as the period of black aviation’s gradual rise to a nationwide civil
rights, racial uplift, and black inter- and trans-nationalist phenomenon, aviation – and the
mastery of this technology by black pioneer aviators – is here implied as one of the reasons
why African Americans, in her eyes, represent the vanguard of progress.
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Two chapters later, Ettara’s scene of pleading with Dick to help her on her mission is
expanded with a dramatic aviation plot set-up. Emperor Menelik, who famously defeated the
Italians at Adowa in 1896, “believed,” explains Ettara to Dick, “that the day would come
when Ethiopia would again be attacked by Italy. He knew it would cost a vast sum of money
for Ethiopia to purchase the wherewithal of modern warfare. So he accumulated gold and
precious stones from every part of the empire until he possessed an enormous store of
wealth.” That is the origin of the mythical treasure the princess is after. Most importantly, this
treasure is hiding “in a secret place guarded by a thousand picked men, warlike priests of the
Coptic Church, high on an almost inaccessible peak” (143), says Ettara. The very location of
Menelik’s treasure – in a mountainous region known only to its ancient protectors –
predetermines how Dick, the alleged pioneer, will be able to access it: by air. Since the
treasure is located, as Ivy G. Wilson points out, “in the ancient center of human civilization”
(268), it seems telling that the utterly western technology of aviation – which, according to
Charles Lindbergh, defines modern civilizations and civilized people – should be the method
by which an African American, helping to and working together with Ethiopians, secures an
ancient treasure to equip Ethiopia with twentieth-century weaponry. In this way, the novella,
according to Hill, shows “the complementarity of modern science and so-called primitive
knowledge” (27). It also highlights aviation as a technology uniting peoples of color.
Along with his observer role, Dick essentially functions as an aviation visionary in
the novella. He wires for a seaplane to carry Ettara, Bill, and himself away from Gusa and the
Italians. Out of Alexandria, another expensive flight in a “big transport plane” takes the trio to
the Somalian-Ethiopian border. Schuyler intersperses the trip with technical details about
altitude and, more importantly, about time, to highlight how Dick’s ingenious plan to fly
Ettara to Ethiopia and back relies on the speed which only aviation can provide. “They passed
Cairo at a 200-mile clip; at 11.15 as they lunched they saw the great dam at Assouan, and
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Dick knew they had covered 500 miles. Khartoum flashed into view at 4.30,” narrates
Schuyler. After a pit stop, “at 5.00 sharp,” the plane gets on its away again. The speed with
which Dick’s group covers the vast African distances lulls the American into a false sense of
security: “we’ve outsmarted them, Ettara,” says Dick confidently. At that very moment,
however, “three military pursuit planes” catch up with Dick’s transport plane and “loafed on
its tail.” When Dick’s ship finally lands by “a large collection of huts,” the Italian pursuit
planes end up “on each side and in the rear.” “They were now on soil the Italians claimed,”
Schuyler sets up the cliffhanger. “Dick handed a high-powered rifle to the princess and
another to Bill. The crews of the Italian planes were already running toward them” (161-2).
And the group is about to fight for their lives.
A shooting scene follows in which Dick and Bill kill several of the aviators; the rest
is finished by “a surging mob of Ethiopians.” Its leader, Dedsjasmatch Yamrou recognizes the
princess and invites Ettara and her entourage to dinner, where they discuss the ongoing
guerilla war taking place in the Ethiopian mountains. During the discussion, Yamrou boasts
that his men “take much plenty Italian airplane. Three good one us get this day, eh? Can fix
up sometime but us get too small petrol” (162-5). As Dick listens to Yamrou speak, he thinks
“suddenly of a daring scheme” involving aviation. “I take it that every day counts. Every day
the Ethiopians have less and less arms and munitions. Every day the Italians go deeper into
the country and consolidate their gains. So we’re working against time,” prefaces Dick his
plan. “We’ve got to put guns in these people’s hands soon and get them added supplies of
munitions or they will never be able to win. […] I know it’s a long way [to the treasure at
Abra Destum], but why can’t we fly there and get it over with in an hour,” proposes Dick
(166). His familiarity with flying as a progressive and affluent black American allows him to
see aviation for what it is: “a gift from heaven,” to quote Lindberg, which may facilitate
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Ethiopia’s liberation. Dick realizes that his role is to be an aviation visionary, who utilizes this
particular technology to advance Ethiopia into the twentieth century.
One major obstacle stands in Dick’s way, however. “And who’s going to fly the
plane?,” asks Ettara. “I can’t fly, you can’t fly and there’s probably nobody here that can fly”
(167). “I fly,” announces Yamrou shyly. Dick is “amazed” but “gratified” as his disbelief
indicates what his view of Ethiopians, and probably Africans in general, has been. As a
journalist, Schuyler long railed against stereotypical depictions of people of color, including
Africans, hence his dismissal of the Harlem Renaissance artists’ frequent exoticization of
black cultures in their art. In a column from 1935, Schuyler observes that “far from being the
benighted, ignorant savage, a notch above the gorilla, which white folk love to depict, the
African today is quite alert and informed. More, he is rapidly becoming industrialized and is
now quite familiar with the white man’s tools. He is using them today. He will be
manufacturing them himself tomorrow” (“Views and Reviews”). The fact that Yamrou knows
how to fly a plane, since he “learn fly in Angland. I fly good,” only suggests – as in Black
Empire – that Ethiopians, and any people of color for that matter, may be “thoroughly
competent to wage ‘modern warfare’ if given ‘modern weapons’” (Hill 26).
The fact that the Ethiopian has mastered aviation allows Dick to make his plan even
more adventurous and modern. Even though Yamrou agrees to fly the trio to Abra Destum, he
warns Dick that “you die there if you land.” Dick, ever ingenious and a daredevil, replies that
“those Italians had parachutes. [...] Why can’t we use them? Then Dedjasmatch can fly over
the mountain and we can bail out with our guns and equipment. It will be a cinch” (167). Just
like that, Schuyler transforms the quest for an ancient treasure into a modern, adrenaline-filled
aviation adventure with stolen Italian planes piloted by Ethiopians dropping two African
Americans and an Ethiopian princess above inaccessible mountains to parachute down to a
sacred temple. Moreover, it is necessary to note that this neck-breaking speed is facilitated by
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the fact that Ettara’s helpers include an African American aviation visionary and a technically
and technologically-skilled Ethiopian aviator, who can carry out dangerous flying missions.
Aviation in black hands is a potent weapon, Schuyler seems to be suggesting here.
As in Black Empire, the novella involves detailed scenes of flight. However, while in
the duo of texts, Patricia flows from one modern Black Internationale facility to another,
Yamrou’s plane labors “manfully, with the heavy load, rising ever higher and higher over
miles of primeval forests.” Schuyler here pairs and contrasts the inaccessibility of Ethiopia’s
jungle and mountain ranges with the modern technology of aviation to highlight how only
planes are able to reach the previously unreachable. Which is precisely why Ethiopians need
their own planes to combat Italy’s insidious encroachment on everything the African nation
holds dear and to regain control over its own skies. When Yamrou “circled the summit [of
Abra Destum] and dropped several smoke bombs,” Schuyler stages a short parachute scene in
which the author’s fantastical future saviors of Ethiopia drop down from the skies onto the
mountain, onto “the backbone of creation” (171). Dick, looking “at the awful desolation
below him” dives overboard, pulling his cord and “waiting with curious calm for one hurtling
toward the earth. Then a great pull and his speed slackened. He breathed easy. The parachute
had opened” (170). As they reassemble, Dick, Ettara, and Bill can see “for scores of miles in
every direction. The mountain seemed to stand as king amid a kingdom of mountains” (171),
with the successful parachutists standing on its crown.
Despite the majestic and ancient beauty around him, Dick’s thoughts race back to
aviation. “No matter how much gold there was, Yamrou could fly it out in a couple of trips.
[…] We could get a run here of at least a thousand feet. Perhaps we can get out by plane!,”
Dick exclaims (171). But his scheming is interrupted by “a squadron of six bombing planes
[…] bearing down rapidly from the east. Their markings were Italian” (172). The Italians’
dominance in the skies catches up with the American’s plans once again. The invaders
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quickly descend and parachute onto the mountain, capturing Dick’s group. They search Ettara
violently and when Dick protests, they whip him: “Again and again, the heavy strip of leather
lashed Dick’s back until it seemed that each time would be the last he could possibly stand.
He was dizzy, numb with pain, aching in every muscle” (174). The scene, according to Ivy G.
Wilson, “links the Ethiopian opposition against Italian fascism as the twentieth-century
analogue of black resistance against the peculiar institution in the nineteenth” (269).
However, it also highlights the fact, pointed out by John C. Robinson in the Courier, that even
though Italians may be more technologically advanced than the traditionalist Ethiopia, they
are not more civilized no matter how powerful technology they may be able to wield.
The Italians display further uncivilized behavior when they attempt to rape Ettara, in
front of Dick. Schuyler here intervenes with another well-timed cliffhanger. As Ettara – and
symbolically Ethiopia – is about to be defiled by Italy, “her screams echo[ing] over the
mountainside and deep valleys beyond,” the protectors of Abra Destum shoot the Italian rapist
with rifles “equipped with Maxim silencers [and] telescopic sights” (176-9). The protectors
thus use the most modern equipment to protect the sacred ancient mountain, again
highlighting Schuyler’s mixing of the modern and the allegedly primitive. “Suddenly, as
[Ettara] was almost forced to the ground, the man straightened up with a look of surprise and
pain on his face, turned half way round. Blood gushed from his lips. Then his knees buckled
and he fell at her feet” (176), narrates Schuyler dramatically, suggesting that, in the end,
Italians will be forced to bow down to Ettara and Ethiopia, whose protectors prove time and
again in the text that they can defend the cradle of human civilization from white imperial
conquerors and mere pretenders of civilization.
Dick’s subsequent experience inside Abra Destum’s caves, where the Bishop Truli
Handem watches over “the true Ark of the Covenant brought from Jerusalem” (185), further
underscores the image of Ethiopia as the staple of civilization. Like Carl in Black Empire,
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Dick is the eyes and ears which capture and communicate to the readership the awe which
Ethiopia awakens in the African American. “Here was a Negro civilization older than any
other except India and China; a civilization that had flourished before Greece and Rome,
before Carthage, yes, before Egypt. […] Here it survived in spite of Mussolini, in spite of
perfidious England, in spite of Ethiopia’s desertion by the traitorous League of Nations,”
writes Schuyler, echoing the Courier’s reports on the Italo-Ethiopian war, J.A. Rogers’ texts,
and his own columns condemning the betrayal of Ethiopia by the international community.
Dick “wept unashamed,” making a resolution at that very moment that Ethiopia “must not
die; not if he could prevent it” (182). Reminiscent of Sutton E. Griggs’ Unfettered (1902) and
Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1903) where ancient African civilizations also hide and wait
underground to be discovered by an African American (Gruesser 117), the scene renews
Dick’s determination to aid Ethiopia, as Schuyler preached to his readers.
It also helps the lead character invent a new ingenious aviation plan. “It’s a king’s
ransom,” exclaims Dick when he sees the treasure Ettara has secured at Abra Destum. Indeed,
“It’s salvation for Ethiopia,” explains the princess, “with these jewels we can keep our men in
the field for years, if we can only get safely out of here.” Aviation comes to the group’s
rescue again. Dick finds out that “the nearest landing place for a plane is 25 miles from here
across a very difficult country,” with Italy’s “patrol planes [flying] over this area every day”
(188-9). As before, Dick’s group must therefore face the Italians’ control of the air but opts
for flying as the most expedient solution anyway since the escape route would normally take
three weeks by any other type of transportation. Dick’s reliance on aviation and Yamrou’s
piloting abilities thus expedite Ettara and Ethiopia’s mission “to get to civilization” (191).
Aviation here functions as material assistance since it allows Ettara to complete her mission
within seventy two hours. And it also helps symbolically on Ethiopia’s route to modernity
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since it will allow the princess to deliver modern, civilization-defining weaponry to her
homeland and to defend the oldest Christian civilization.
However, en route to the “secret airfield” (193), Dick, Ettara, and Bill are stopped by
Italian machine-guns, taken hostage, and transported to a nearby occupied village. The
Italians’ cruelty, masked as superiority in warfare and weapons, resurfaces when two white
Italian officers order a unit of Askaris, “black Italian soldiers from the coast colonies,” to
execute Ettara’s entourage of Ethiopian soldiers. “[A] volley rent the quiet canyon. The
Ethiopians toppled over in a grotesque heap” (200-1), writes Schuyler as the Italians’
cowardice is in the forefront here again. To pinpoint it even further, Dick, having experienced
a savage whipping from the Italians who were in Ethiopia on an alleged civilizing mission,
comments sarcastically on the scene: “I see civilization has finally reached Ethiopia” (201).
This is, of course, a statement about Italy rather than Ethiopia, as the occupants’ displays of
barbarity and savagery fill the novella’s plot and contrast Dick and Ettara’s heroic quest to
utilize modern weapons to protect humanity and civilization, rather than drive it into barbarity
as the Italians are doing.
Of course, Italy’s inhumanity is, in the end, avenged by aviation in Revolt since it
is this very technology which functions throughout Schuyler’s three novellas as the most
effective – actually and symbolically – means of decolonizing Africa. In black pilots’ hands
and owing to an African American’s progressive vision, aviation is transformed into a
necessary means to an end, rather than an end in itself. While Italy, both in the historical and
fictional war in Ethiopia, employed aviation purposely to sow fear into the locals’ hearts and
to decimate the nation’s army as well as its population, Schuyler’s aviators are often shown to
be using the technology only to defend themselves and their homeland. Even in Belsidus’
violent reclamation, Patricia’s air force does not play the role of an oppressor, but that of a
vigilante – albeit a ruthless one – which destroys mostly the colonizers’ military facilities.
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Schuyler depicts precisely this elaborate and careful utilization of aviation when Yamrou
attacks the Italian-occupied village to rescue Ettara, Dick, and Bill:
Like a sparrow, a lone plane was darting across the sky, high in the air, making for the
village. […] It was, they assumed, another plane from the Italian air base. […]
Suddenly there was a gust of smoke followed by a burst of flame and in a moment the
sound of an explosion reached them. […] Consternation swept the Italian ranks. […] It
was obvious that the little destroyer was not an Italian plane. Could it be Ethiopian?
[…] Down came the plane again in a dive straight at the village. Smoke and flames
were left in its wake and the approaching party could hear the explosion of the
incendiary bombs. […] The villagers had run off to one side. It was fortunate that they
did. Or perhaps it was by design. […] Panic-stricken, no one stopped to fire at the
oncomer. Back and forth went the plane, spreading death. Dick, Bill and the princess
stood absolutely still in the center of the road, an island in the sea of pandemonium.
(213-4).
Yamrou attacks the Italians with precision during the evening raid. He purposely avoids the
native villagers and targets an Italian bomber plane which brought Ras Resta Gusa and
Captain Fraschetti. He creates chaos, dispersing and killing the Italians, while letting his
“white-cloaked Ethiopian soldiers” (214) finish the rest. The Italians do not know how to
react to Yamrou’s aerial assault because they assume that the oncoming plane is Italian; they
also seem to strongly believe that a native could not possibly fly an attack plane so well. And
yet, Yamrou carefully aims at the Italians and does not harm a single Ethiopian during the
action, including Ettara and her African American entourage. Yamrou thus exhibits mastery
of aviation in general and air warfare in particular, which the allegedly civilization-bringing
Italians could not fathom in a person of color.
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Still, despite Yamrou’s brave rescue mission, Ettara’s quest is not yet complete. Once
the princess is saved, Yamrou relates to the group that the Ethiopians “were on their last legs
unless they could get more arms and ammunition, immediately.” Once again, Dick, the
adventurous African American, proposes a dangerous night aviation mission, arguing that
“we can get to Beni Shengui in a little over an hour, refuel and be on our way to Khartoum
and get there by morning. From there we can take a plane direct to Alexandria, and with luck
we should be in Marseilles by evening” (217). As before, Dick involves Yamrou, the native
aviator, to pilot on the perilous journey. As the end of Ettara’s mission and the novella nears,
Schuyler again fills the pages with detailed descriptions of flights and of Yamrou “speeding
toward freedom” (218). In Khartoum, after a flight over “the wild Ethiopian scenery,” Dick
orders a plane to Egypt. The airport agent tells him, “smiling condescendingly,” that it would
“cost a small fortune” to rent an entire plane for the small party. But Dick, exhibiting his
newly-acquired Pan-Africanist sentiments, replies that “the cost don’t bother us” (219),
thereby fulfilling Schuyler’s wish for African Americans to invest into Ethiopian future and
surprise patronizing whites with their active generosity.
Schuyler then transforms the novella’s penultimate installment into a promotional text
for aviation. While Ettara and Bill are sleeping onboard the large transport plane, Dick cannot
help but think back to what has taken place: “So much had happened in the 24 hours since
they had left the cozy subterranean quarters […] in the bowels of sacred Mount Abra Destum.
But a little over 48 hours had elapsed since they had taken off in the little plane piloted by
Yamrou for the flight from Beni Sengui to the mountain treasury.” “And just 72 hours had
gone,” realizes Dick with amazement, “since their chartered plane had left Alexandria […] on
the quest to the unknown.” Even more directly, Schuyler reveals to the readership through
Dick’s inner monologue how all this has been achieved: “Airplanes made such a difference.
The same journey by any other available transportation would have taken weeks and weeks.
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Now it was merely a matter of hours. Who knew where they would be a week hence” (221).
Even though all the flights cost Dick a lot of money, “the speed is worth it” (222), argues the
African American and celebrates his inventiveness.
When the party’s plane “set down on the Antwerp airfield and brought their eventful
journey to an end,” Dick again thinks to himself that “it had all been something of a dream,
that reign of suspicion and intrigue on the S.S. Metallic, that wild flight across the
Mediterranean, the nightmare in Ethiopia, the flight back and now together and safe here in
this staid city of merchants and jewelers” (225). But the large financial investment and
adventurous planning of aviation missions on Dick’s part bring results and prove aviation’s
central role in liberating Ethiopia as the ancient treasure allows Ettara to purchase field radio
sets, medical supplies, hundreds of thousands of rifles, five hundred machine guns, and “ten
bombing planes and twenty fighters” (226). Ethiopia shall thus be saved, and its sacred skies
protected and controlled by the Ethiopians. Schuyler asserts in the novella that airplanes,
indeed, make a difference in the face of colonialism and oppression. He showcases the ability
of the aviation technology to make possible and expedite dangerous but vital missions. He
contrasts the role black aviation can play in liberation and decolonization of Ethiopia with the
ruthlessly utilitarian employment of air warfare by the Italians in their allegedly civilizing
mission. Finally, through this contrast, Schuyler is able to highlight how mastery by people of
color of this modern, western, and allegedly civilization-defining technology allows the
subversion and redefinition of the stereotype of them being technically and technologically
inept, barbaric, and uncivilized.
As with Black Empire, aviation also accentuates and frames the romance aspect of the
novella. It is Dick’s adventurousness – reflected in his aviation schemes to retrieve Ethiopia’s
treasure as quickly as possible and, in turn, to deliver modern flying machines to the nation’s
fighters – which attracts Ettara. Dick, like Carl with Patricia, is enamored with the princess:
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“her strange exotic beauty captivated him. She was almost American, what with her American
education and stylish clothes; and yet there was something of another age about her,
something of the nameless wisdom of the oldest Christian country in the world, and
something, too, of the fanatical zeal for freedom” (145). Exotic and sexual, Ettara is presented
as a combination of black beauty with a passion for freedom-fighting, so similar to Patricia’s,
which awakens the Pan-Africanist and black trans-nationalist spirit in the leading male
character. It is always the woman in Schuyler’s three novellas who, symbolizing African
diaspora, unites peoples of color across the world to aid Africa or Ethiopia in the struggle
against colonization. Schuyler’s romantic plots are thus always already aviation-fueled
romances of black inter- and trans-nationalism.
Revolt provides plenty of examples of how romance – with the help of aviation –
crosses and erases borders, but also enhances decolonization. Like Patricia in Black Empire,
Ettara does not permit the attraction between Dick and her to “get out of the realm of the
platonic,” and focuses rather on her mission. “I know exactly how you feel,” explains the
princess to Dick, “and I like you a lot too, Dick, but there’s work to be done for Ethiopia. And
until that work is finished, I cannot think of anything else. […] Ethiopia must come first [and]
you must help me not to fail” (148). Ettara and Ethiopia thus need the African American, they
need his interest and ingenuity in the revolt and the future of the country, but Ettara will not
allow exploitation on Dick’s part. That is why his reward – the union of black America and
Africa, symbolized by their potential marriage – can come only after the mission is
successfully completed.
As Dick’s assistance proves increasingly beneficial, Ettara begins to call him “darling”
(180) midway through the novella. And as Dick learns that Ettara stands for more than beauty
– the beauty of Africa – he comes to appreciate her complex persona. “She was really an ace,
he mused” in a Carl-like fashion. “So few women were at once beautiful, smart, healthy and
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natural in their association with men. She was self-reliant, too” (199). Dick’s observations can
also be applied to his simultaneously growing appreciation for Ethiopia, as he realizes in his
growing Pan-Africanism that, like Ettara, Yamrou and the protectors of Abra Destum are just
as modern as any westerner, and yet more civilized.
These realizations lead Dick to the decision to marry Ettara as soon as “they got out of
this and back to Egypt” (199), which only explains further why the African American utilizes
aviation for expedience so much throughout the text. As they approach Cairo at the beginning
of the penultimate chapter, Dick wakes up and beholds “a brilliant sun […] drenching the Nile
Valley, its green fields and its pretty white villages with incandescent light. [F]ar beyond the
stately pyramids were the glistening towers of the ancient capital,” which Dick’s group is
approaching aboard the modern airplane. Inspired, Dick asks Ettara shortly, “So, now I
suppose you’ll say ‘yes’ when I ask you to marry.” The princess replies, amused, “just wait
until this job is over with, Mr. Welland” (223). But, the moment the mission is completed,
Ettara rushes to be married to Dick and to reunite black America with Ethiopia: “Why
tomorrow? Why not today? We ought to be able to get enough sleep between now and when
the license bureau opens this morning. Don’t you think so, darling?” The novella then ends
with an excited proclamation by Ettara that “I’m going to be an American, too” (227). While
Yogita Goyal has read Ettara’s exclamation as the containment of black “transnationalism
within the domestic realm of marriage” (32), it seems, rather, that Ettara aligns herself and her
country with black America because it stands for black aviation and progress. Black aviators
during Ettara’s sojourn in Washington, as well as Dick during the quest, all display the
potential of aviation in black hands for liberation and decolonization. They thus highlight the
fact that black America, through aviation, does really represent the vanguard of progress and
modernity.
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Overall then, Schuyler’s depiction of aviation in general, and black aviation in
particular, in Revolt once again highlights the importance of aviation for decolonization and
liberation. Chartered planes, piloted by British aviators, transport Dick, Ettara, and Bill to
occupied Ethiopia. Once they enter the Italy-claimed territory, however, these planes must
land and then immediately leave. Aviation thus seemingly loses its magic – it is as if only the
Italians operate in the skies above Ethiopia. That is why Yamrou’s aviation prowess surprises
Dick – while Ettara remains nonplussed, aware of her countrymen’s technical and
technological abilities if given the chance. Excited after having found out that the Ethiops can
fly and operate complex machinery, Dick then successfully and fully utilizes the brave native
pilot in his plans. Thus, even though colonial chartered planes carry the group as far as the
Somali border, it is then ultimately black aviation in stolen Italian planes in the Ethiopian
skies which functions as a vehicle for Dick’s plans to liberate Ethiopia. Dick’s hired aviators
– like those employed by Haile Selassie during Robinson’s tenure as the head of the Imperial
Air Force – prove disloyal as they flee the very moment Italian soldiers and pilots attack. A
single black aviator, however, proves courageous, devoted, and skilled as Yamrou flies Dick’s
group across the Italy-controlled skies and rescues them from torture and potential execution.
It is thus ultimately Yamrou and black aviation – spurred by Dick as the African American
visionary of aviation – which symbolize the Ethiops’ fighting spirit and modernity, and which
assures the success of Ettara’s mission to liberate the cradle of Christian civilization.
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CONCLUSION: THE SKY IS THE LIMIT
During the 1938-39 period, as the black press refocused its aviation campaign from simply
imploring the members of the race to become pilots to publicly demanding that the
government open fully-funded pilot programs with technical and mechanical courses at black
colleges, the three newspapers analyzed here published almost 400 texts and photographs on
aviation. Given the fact that they were weeklies, the numbers are staggering; but they are also
not surprising any more. Despite having been barred from many aviation schools around the
country, the black aviation community had by 1939 developed its own institutions, a network
of local instructors, and segregated airfields for training. Chicago, New York, and Los
Angeles – as well as Port au Prince and Addis Ababa, where Robinson again taught aviation
in the 1940s and the 50s – were black aviation hubs with decorated aviation pioneers
operating schools and airports as well as organizing regular air events. By early 1939, there
were 81 active licensed black pilots in the country – a sevenfold increase compared to 1932.
The number of black aviation students waiting to receive their license was probably
considerably higher, too, as the applications to segregated CPTP institutions during late 1939
and early 1940 suggest.
Most importantly, by 1939, as Schuyler’s final novella was exciting readers with its
fantastical tale of a black aviator helping liberate Ethiopia and its skies, aviation no longer
possessed the image of a white technological field; it had been transvalued and
recontextualized by the black press. The hundreds of articles, photographs, as well as dozens
of air events, long-distance and local flights, and the historic feats achieved by the pilots
discussed in this dissertation had turned black aviation into a nationwide phenomenon.
Having gone from depicting early black aviators as martyrs for a marginal cause to presenting
black pilots as technologically and technically up-to-date New Negroes and as members of a
highly-skilled community, the black press had transformed its aviation campaign into an
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unprecedented educational and political movement with admired race leaders and role
models. While detailed information in reports about flying machines and their equipment may
have been seen as oddities in the early stages of the aviation coverage, they were by 1939
widely discussed among the black populace which had gradually begun to attend black air
meetings and events.
Exploration of the Harlem Renaissance print culture presented in this dissertation
demonstrates that the era’s black press – represented here in the form of its three most widely
read papers, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the New York Amsterdam
News – was heavily invested in black aviation throughout the two decades. Black aviation
constituted one of the most robust racial-uplift and civil-rights causes advocated in black
newspapers during that time. The black press sought to support black aviation and its leading
figures in their attempts to represent the African American community in the field which
stood for modern America, its ingenuity and innovativeness, as well as its leadership among
machine civilizations. In this way, the aviation campaign paralleled in its ultimate objectives,
volume, and omnipresence the promotion of African American arts and literature known as
the Harlem Renaissance. Proving African Americans’ humanity, skills and prowess, as well
as civility, proving that New Negroes could serve as Locke’s vanguard of progress and
civilization among Africa-descended peoples, lay at the heart of both the Harlem Renaissance
and the black aviation campaign.
Black aviators were provided space in papers to promote their achievements, lament
about the lack of funding as well as about segregation, and were often depicted as technicallygifted
crusaders for a cause which their community would come to appreciate only in the
future. Throughout the years, the black press promoted a racially uplifting and internationallyminded
goodwill message of aviation, which emphasized technical and mechanical education
as well as future job opportunities in aviation if only African Americans could seize them. In
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this way, black aviation pioneers such as Bessie Coleman, Hubert Julian, Joel Foreman,
William J. Powell, James H. Banning, Charles E. James, James Holt Peck, Janet Waterford,
John W. Greene, Charles Alfred Anderson, Albert E. Forsythe, and John C. Robinson – along
with Cornelius Coffey and Willa Brown in the 1938-39 phase – were depicted as and had by
1939 become race leaders and New Negro models. Although they have not been read by
scholars as black aviation-inspired texts so far, George S. Schuyler’s novellas, written by
perhaps the most vocal advocate for black aviators and serialized in the newspaper most
supportive of black aviation, transpose these very same tropes and themes – as well as some
of the popular black flyers’ characteristics – into fantastical stories of a new civilization of
color, the Black Empire, and an ancient Christian nation, Ethiopia, led and protected by New
Negro aviators.
Indeed, Schuyler’s serialized novellas are by no means the only African American
texts dealing with flying. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), for example, weaves
flying into a complex matrix of symbols to depict Milkman’s escape and liberation from
oppression and personal issues as Morrison taps into the mythical story of Igbo Landing, a
tale of slaves ‘flying’ to freedom. W.E.B. DuBois’s Dark Princess (1928), which Schuyler
deemed “a masterful piece of work” in a letter to DuBois, also depicts flying – in a brief
fantastical scene – as an escapist, liberating activity. In the scene, the novel’s main character,
Matthew Towns, is being transported by a plane from Chicago to Richmond, Virginia, to
reconnect with Princess Kautilya who has conceived their child and now awaits Matthew to
return to become the rightful “Maharajah of Bwodpur and Maharajah” and the “Messenger
and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds” (311). During the flight – a literal and symbolic race
against time as Matthew must arrive in Virginia within hours to be crowned – Matthew
realizes that there is no prejudice, only freedom in the skies:
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They left the great smudge of the crowded city and swept out over flat fields and
sluggish rivers. Fires flew in the world beneath and dizzily marked Chicago. Fires
flew in the world above and marked high heaven. […] Matthew could hear the beating
and singing of wings rushing by in the night as though a thousand angels of evil were
battling against the dawn. […] His soul was afraid of this daring, heaven-challenging
thing. […] He was alone in the center of the universe [and] the place rocked gently
like a cradle [as] suddenly the whole thing became symbolic. He was riding Life
above the world. He was triumphant over Pain and Death. […] He spurned the
pettiness of earth beneath his feet. He tried to sing again the song of Emancipation [but
as] the living plane circled and spurned [and prepared to land] Matthew’s heart fell.
He grew sick and suddenly tired [as] the sorrows of earth seemed to rise and greet
him. He was no longer bird or superman. (303-5)
When the plane lands, Matthew must walk three miles to Richmond because a plane with a
black passenger is presumably not allowed to touch down in the former second capital and
permanent seat of the Confederacy. Matthew’s dejection from the flight’s abrupt ending is
further exacerbated when he boards a Jim Crow car, “up by the engine, small, crowded, and
dirty” (306). The airplane’s heaven-like, and, more importantly, liberating atmosphere is
suddenly replaced with the earthly, ominous reality of Jim Crow. DuBois establishes flying as
a spiritual experience as Matthew realizes that the skies are segregation free. He juxtaposes
the earthly dirt and despair of Chicago and the South with the heaven-like air that Matthew is
briefly embalmed in. DuBois’ is not a complex treatment of aviation like Schuyler’s, but the
scene does provide a fascinating glimpse into the technology’s potential for liberation as
Matthew enters a spiritual dimension which transcends time, distance, and the raciallydetermined
geography of the United States; only for him to come down from the skies to the
present time and its grounding reality of racial tensions and segregation.
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Ralph Ellison’s “Flying Home” (1944), a short story about Todd, a Tuskegee Airmen,
crashing his plane, portrays aviation not merely as a means of liberation, but also as a means
of representing African Americans as modern and worthy of flying for the United States Air
Force. Upon his accident, Todd is tended to by an old black sharecropper – and Ellison here
sets up dichotomy, which frames the text, of a young modern Northerner and a rural
Alabaman who “done heard about you boys but I haven’t never seen o’ you all” (154). “Caint
tell you how it felt to see somebody what look like me,” tells the anonymous “old Negro
man” to Todd excitedly. But the pilot has little appreciation for the man’s kind words as
Ellison explores, in a deeply discomforting study, the burden of race representation Todd
feels on his shoulders.
When Todd comes to after the crash, his first thoughts race to his plane; he “must get
the plane back to the [air]field before his officers were displeased” (148), for Todd’s “real
appreciation lay with his white officers; and with them he could never be sure” (152). Todd’s
uncertainty stems from the fact that, even though he repeatedly displays his flying prowess
and ingenuity, he is also aware that “you must have them [white people] judge you, knowing
that they never accept your mistakes as your own but hold it against your whole race – that
was humiliation. Yes, and humiliation was when you could never be simply yourself; when
you were always part of this old black ignorant man” (150). As in Dark Princess, the
liberating skies where one is free are juxtaposed with the reality of Jim Crown and longstanding
stereotypes.
Through Todd’s burden of representation Ellison sheds light and expands on DuBois’s
double consciousness, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,
of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”
(Souls 2). Todd feels “cut off from them [the older generation of African Americans] by age,
by understanding, by sensibility, by technology, and by his need to measure himself against
329
the mirror of other men’s appreciation” (Ellison 152). He feels as if the accident “knocked
[him] back a hundred years [since] with all I’ve learned, I’m dependent upon this ‘peasant’s’
sense of time and space” (151). And when the old man asks “how come you want to fly way
up there in the air,” Todd muses that flying is “the most meaningful act in the world…because
it makes me less like you” (153). At the same time, thinks the pilot, “this was the question all
Negroes asked, put with the same timid hopefulness and longing that always opened a greater
void within him than that he had felt beneath the plane the first time he had flown” (153-4).
Todd’s education and skills distance him from many African Americans, and yet still
place his worth directly in the hands of his white officers. Despite his prowess, Todd must
wait for the confirmation of his worth; he must wait to be allowed to fight for his country. At
the same time, he feels like he “could never make [the old man] understand” his burden. His
existence, signaling double consciousness, is that of despair and hope at the same time: “Can I
help it because they won’t let us actually fly? Maybe we are a bunch of buzzards feeding on a
dead horse, but we can hope to be eagles, can’t we? Can’t we?” (161). Ellison’s point that
Todd lives in “two worlds” (quoted in Lucy 257), between feelings of superiority and
inferiority, between proven prowess as well as humanity and omnipresent stereotypes, is
driven home in the story’s final moments when the pilot almost ends up in a psychiatric ward.
“This nigguh belongs in a straitjacket, too, boys. I knowed that the minnit Jeff’s kid said
something ‘bout a nigguh flyer,” proclaims the white owner of the field where Todd lies
injured and immobile. “You all know you caint let the nigguh git up that high without his
going crazy. The nigguh brain ain’t built right for high altitudes” (171). In the story’s
ambivalent ending, Todd, humiliated by the accident and the white owner’s racist explanation
for it, realizes that the old sharecropper is his “sole salvation in an insane world of outrage
and humiliation” (173); it is also the old man that Todd is ultimately trying to liberate,
represent, and make proud with his flying prowess.
330
Schuyler’s The Black Internationale, The Black Empire, and Revolt in Ethiopia
violently and straightforwardly reject the nuance of double consciousness and the feeling of
inferiority it implies. They put, to use Schuyler’s review of Powell’s autobiography, “the
Negro in aviation.” The three aviation-inspired novellas – published between late 1936 and
early 1939 – are products, extensions, and a fictionalized climax of the almost-two-decadelong
campaign for black aviation in the black press. They reflect the campaign’s themes and
tropes as they imagine an all-black machine civilization whose very existence is won,
defended, and maintained by an all-black air force, by its control of the skies. DuBois depicts
aviation as abstract, a means of existing in a dimension devoid of racism and segregation,
while Ellison explores the sense of isolation and disconnect Todd, a Tuskegee airman, feels
towards both his community and white America which refuses to acknowledge him for the
educated and skilled pilot that he is. The reality of Jim Crow, segregation, and omnipresent
stereotypes which define and interpret the texts’ protagonists’ existence is what the two
authors always revert to. Schuyler’s heroes and heroines, however, do not ask for
confirmation or permission. Rather, like the aviators Schuyler and other black journalists
discussed in his columns, they create their own opportunities without asking and assertively
define themselves as modern and civilized New Negroes.
Schuyler’s novellas exploit the public fascination with daredevil New Negro aviators –
especially John C. Robinson, William J. Powell, Bessie Coleman, and Willa Brown – and
tease popular imagination with depicting their protagonists, first, as measuring up to white
colonial aviators and, second, as surpassing them through ever-improving skills,
determination, and, most importantly, technical, technological, and scientific ingenuity and
inventiveness. Just like for the aforementioned black aviators, there seems to be no obstacle
too insurmountable for Schuyler’s heroes to find a solution for. Where Powell and Robinson
established schools or broke racial barriers to teach mixed classes at premier educational
331
institutions in real life, Belsidus’ pilots, technicians, and mechanics set up large and
efficiently-run all-black garages, hangars, workshops, and training fields to build an army.
Where Robinson manages to convince local institutions to accept his Challengers group as a
paramilitary aviation squadron within the Illinois National Guard, Patricia oversees the
building of the first ever all-black armed fleet. And where Robinson had to fight and protect
the Ethiopian empire on his own as political circumstances and personal reasons prevented
him from assembling an all-African American squadron flying under the banner of the
Imperial Ethiopian Air Force against the vaunted Regia Aeronautica, Schuyler’s texts imagine
a literary vengeance with fury raining from the skies as Patricia’s air force destroys Italian
colonial structures across its African territories. In Revolt, too, Dick, the brain, and Yamrou,
the skilled Ethiopian aviator, devise ways to overcome Italy’s dominance in the skies above
Ethiopia and succeed in delivering hope, weapons, and fighting planes to the oldest Christian
civilization, so revered by African Americans.
Schuyler’s novellas are romances of aviation and journalism, reflecting the
extraordinary symbiosis between black aviators and the black press during the Harlem
Renaissance era. They reflect Schuyler’s, the journalist and public intellectual’s, deeply held
beliefs in and about African Americans pursuing careers in technical, technological,
mechanical, and scientific fields as a way of making their mark and contributing to America’s
rapidly developing, modernizing mechanical civilization. Aviation, throughout his columns, is
repeatedly discussed as Schuyler’s favorite example of people of color – African Americans
and West Indians – participating and representing, as well as making their communities
proud, in the very field denoting America’s progress and ascendance as a leading aviation
country with its own empire of the air in Central and Latin America. The novellas then add
Ethiopians and an entire organized and militant front of characters of color, led by African
Americans, to depict aviators of color establishing their own empire of the air in Africa’s
332
skies, while Carl, a journalist, and Dick, an observer, narrate and relay the aviators’ fantastical
successes to the readers, most probably well-versed in the existing aviation campaign.
Black aviation in Schuyler’s novellas also makes possible a black trans-nationalist
dream, put forward by Alain Locke, Marcus Garvey, or DuBois during the Harlem
Renaissance, of black America and Africa uniting, as well as of African Americans serving
the vanguard role among people of color worldwide. Colonial airlines and airlanes are
destroyed by Belsidus’ army and air force; it is the Black Internationale-owned airports and
underground facilities which provide the infrastructure for unifying Africa through the air.
This is also captured in the 1991 edition of Black Empire in a map, created by UCLA’s Tim
Seymour, where planes dominate, survey, and defend the skies over the Black Empire
spanning the entire African continent. Dick and Ettara’s quest in Revolt also signals that
colonial airways are no use in liberating Ethiopia and connecting African Americans with
Ethiopians. It is through Yamrou’s flying skills that Dick’s group is able to complete its quest
of delivering weapons to Ethiopia and of joining African American and Ethiopian forces to
stand up against, and potentially defeat, colonial, technologically-advanced Italian armies on
their purportedly “civilizing” mission. Aviation in the texts brings people of color together.
Finally, Schuyler’s novellas also address, deal with, and offer a shocking solution to
the survival anxiety which black journalists and aviators expressed and felt from the very
beginning of the aviation campaign in the black press. Patricia’s fleet in Black Empire
avenges Tulsa, lynchings, colonial atrocities; and, in doing so, also bridges and eventually
closes the very racial technological gap that was at the root of African Americans’ survival
anxiety after Tulsa. When colonial air forces attack the Black Empire, its existence and
survival are at risk – a sense of doom pervades some of the final chapters of The Black
Empire and remind readers that Tulsa’s Greenwood, the “Black Wall Street,” an exemplary
thriving New Negro neighborhood, was also destroyed in an aerial attack, dashing the locals’
333
hopes of prosperity in the face of Jim Crow. However, black scientists’ ingenuity and black
aviators’ prowess combine under Patricia’s command to surpass “white science” and render
European technology, its omnipresent threat of annihilation, useless. In Revolt, Yamrou’s
precise flying and the Ethiopians’ mastery of modern technology and weapons also repeatedly
saves the day whenever Dick’s group seems to be cornered and is fighting for survival.
Overall, the novellas – much like the aviation campaign in the black press – argue that if
people of color, particularly African Americans, are given a chance to use and operate modern
machinery, technology, or weapons, they will master it; they will even be able to innovate it
and exceed the skills and knowledge of the allegedly “civilized” Western countries. They will
live up to and embody the philosophy of the New Negro by subverting and even violently
rejecting stereotypes of their technical, technological, and scientific ineptitude.
In “The Rise of the Black Internationale,” written for The Crisis shortly after the end
of Black Empire, while the initial installments of Revolt were being published in the Courier,
and while black papers were reporting on African American aviators preparing a nationwide
organization, Schuyler ominously predicts – in a tone far more militant than Alain Locke’s –
that “the New Negro is here. Perhaps no more courageous than the Old Negro […] but better
informed, privy to his past, understanding of the present, unafraid of the future. No longer
blindly worshipful of his rulers, he yet has learned to respect and study the intelligence and
accumulation of power that has put them where they are.” Schuyler asserts, as do his New
Negro characters such as Belsidus, Patricia, Carl, Ettara, Dick, and Yamrou, that the New
Negro knows and “believes that to combat this White Internationale of oppression a Black
Internationale of liberation is necessary. […] No longer ignorant, terrorized or lacking
confidence, he waits, and schemes and plans. He is the Damoclean sword dangling over the
white world. Everywhere he is on the march, he cannot be stopped, and he knows it.” In his
aviation-inspired novellas, Schuyler envisions precisely this sword hanging in the air in the
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form of an all-black air force in Black Empire and the incredibly-skilled and ingenious
Ethiopian pilot, Yamrou, standing up against and overpowering colonial fleets.
Knowledgeable, prepared, confident, and skilled New Negroes take into the air – or devise
and organize plans for aerial missions and attacks – to establish, defend, and maintain a black
empire of the air.
335
336
WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED
Newspaper Articles
“10 Race Women, 93 Men Qualify as Aviators.” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 Oct 1937, p. 12.
“10,000 Cheer Aviators as They Start Their Flight from Coast to Coast.” Chicago Defender,
5 Mar. 1927, p.1.
“100 Scholarships to Be Given Race Aviation Students.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Sep 1936, p.
A3.
“1100 Memphis Students Hear Noted Flyer.” Chicago Defender, 13 Mar 1937, p. 3.
“12 Race Pilots Invited.” Chicago Defender, 24 Sep. 1938, p. 4.
“12 White American Aviators Ready to Fight for Ethiopia.” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 Jul 1935,
p. 1.
“2,000 View Circus Staged at Airport.” New York Amsterdam News, 14 Oct 1931, p. 1.
“3 Haitians Learning to Fly the U.S. Way at TAFS.” Baltimore Afro-American, 3 Apr 1943,
p. 5.
“3,000 See Julian in Stunt Flying.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 Aug 1931, p. A1.
“5,000 Pay Tribute to Robinson.” New York Amsterdam, 30 May 1936, p. 11.
“55 Hold U.S. Air Licenses, Report Shows.” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 May 1936, p. 9.
“A Christmas Package of Wit and Fun.” New York Times Book Review, 6 Dec. 1942, pp. 28.
“About Us.” Amsterdam News, 30 Aug. 2018, www.amsterdamnews.com/about.
“Ace Foreman Lived Eventful Life; Death Was Sad, Tragic End.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17
Aug. 1929, p. 2.
“Ace Foreman, Los Angeles Aviator, Back Home Again.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Jul. 1927,
p. 1.
“Advertisement.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Dec 1932, p. 1.
“Advertisement.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 Oct 1932, p. 1.
337
“Aero Club to Buy 100 Planes.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 May 1929, p. 5.
“Aero Organization Begins at Meeting.” New York Amsterdam News, 16 Dec 1931, p. 9.
“Aero Organization Begins at Meeting.” New York Amsterdam News, 16 Dec 1931, p. 9.
“Aid for Ethiopia.” New York Amsterdam News, 13 Jul. 1935, p. 12.
“Aided by Father of His White School Chum, Ohio Youth Studies Aviation, Gets Transport
License.” Pittsburgh Courier, 14 Aug 1937, p. 2.
“Air Ace Flies to Memphis.” Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Feb 1937, p. 20.
“Air Conqueror.” Chicago Defender, 31 Mar. 1928, p. A1.
“Air Exhibition Planned.” Chicago Defender, 13 Aug 1932, p. 22.
“Airman and Wife Die in Crash.” Chicago Defender, 8 Jul 1933, p. 1.
“Airman Returns.” New York Amsterdam News, 19 Oct 1932, p. 1.
“Airmen Land in Bahamas.” Chicago Defender, 17 Nov 1934, p. 1.
“Air-Minded!” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Jul 1937, p. 13.
“Air-Minded.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Jul 1935, p. A2.
“Air-Minded.” Pittsburgh Courier, 23 Aug 1930, p. A9.
“Airport for Pilots Named.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Oct. 1939, p. 3.
“Alice Takes to the Air.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Apr. 1930, p. 6.
“All Harlem in Tribute to Julian.” Pittsburgh Courier, 13 Dec. 1930, p. 4.
“All Ready.” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Aug 1937, p. 7.
“All Roads Led to Chicago.” Chicago Defender, 1 Sep 1934, p. 5.
“Along the Rialto.” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Nov. 1928, p. 15.
“Alphas in Air.” Pittsburgh Courier, 30 Nov 1935, p. 3.
“Amelia Earhart Discusses the Negro.” Pittsburgh Courier, 23 Feb. 1929, p. A2.
“America’s Orgy in Haiti.” New York Amsterdam News, 20 Feb 1929, p. 16.
“American Aviation School.” Pittsburgh Courier, 30 May 1930, p. 4.
338
“American Correspondent and Pilot.” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 Nov 1935, p. 4.
“Amsterdam News Purchases New Plane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 23 Aug. 1930, p. 2.
“An Ode to Banning.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 25 Feb 1933, p. B2.
“Another Evidence of the Race’s Soaring Interest in Aviation.” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Mar
1933, p. A1.
“Another on Julian.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Nov 1931, p. A2.
“Arizona – Phoenix.” Chicago Defender, 4 Jan. 1930, p. 15.
“Arkansas Airplane Pilot Gets License.” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Dec 1932, p. 5.
“Arkansas May Get Licensed Negro Pilot.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 Dec 1937, p. 2.
“As Americans Should Die.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 15 May 1926, p. A2.
“Ask ‘Hub’ Mayor to bar Julian.” Pittsburgh Courier, 1 Feb 1936, p. 3.
“At Checkerboard Field.” Letter. Chicago Defender, 31 Aug. 1929, p. A2.
“Atlantic City Pays Tribute to Its Flyers.” Chicago Defender, 2 Sep 1933, p. 13.
“Attempt to Raise Funds for Young Aviator.” New York Amsterdam News, 30 Oct. 1929, p.
9.
“Aviateur Leon Desire Paris.” Le Matin, 28 Apr 1932, 1.
“Aviation Boom Sweeps West ; 75 Now Pilots.” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 May 1936, p. A8.
“Aviation College is Opened Here by Col. John Robinson.” Chicago Defender, 10 Oct 1936,
p. 11.
“Aviation School Draws Line.” Chicago Defender, 27 Oct. 1928, p. 1.
“Aviation School Opens.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 May 1930, p. 2.
“Aviation.” Chicago Defender, 3 Apr 1937, p. 17.
“Aviation.” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 Sep. 1930, p. A2.
“Aviation.” Pittsburgh Courier, 6 Sep. 1930, p. A2.
“Aviator Arrives in Haiti.” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 May 1932, p. A7.
339
“Aviator Dies in Crash.” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Sep 1932, p. 1.
“Aviator Dies in Crash; Fog Blurred Path.” Chicago Defender, 2 Jan 1932, p. 2.
“Aviator Hurt When Plane Falls.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 Aug. 1923, p. 10.
“Aviator James Buried.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Sep 1932, p. 13.
“Aviator James Gets New Plane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 28 May 1932, p. 2.
“Aviator James Has Sunday Air Circus.” Chicago Defender, 10 May 1930, p. 11.
“Aviator Narrowly Escapes Death in Crash.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 May 1935, p. 4.
“Aviator Paris Will Come Back to United States.” Pittsburgh Courier, 30 Jul 1932, p. 2.
“Aviator Seeks $8,000.” Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Apr. 1924, p. 14.
“Aviator Sued.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Aug. 1929, p. 7.
“Aviator Takes Part in Four California Races.” Chicago Defender, 29 Sep. 1928, p. 2.
“Aviators Abused.” New York Amsterdam News, 2 Mar. 1935, p. 3.
“Aviators Drop in on Commencement at Tuskegee Inst.” Chicago Defender, 2 Jun 1934, p.
2.
“Aviators End First Cross-Country Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 Oct 1932, p. 1.
“Aviators Hop Off This Week on Pan-American Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Nov 1934,
p. 1.
“Aviators in Crash; Plane Falls in Yard.” Chicago Defender, 22 Dec 1934, p. 2.
“Aviators Land in Abilene, Texas.” Chicago Defender, 5 Jul. 1930, p. 13.
“Aviators Map Course for Latin American Flight.” Chicago Defender, 15 Sep 1934, p. 2.
“Aviators Pause Here to Tell Chicagoans of Flight.” Chicago Defender, 1 Sep 1934, p. 1.
“Aviators School Open.” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Jan 1933, p. 5.
“Aviators Talk to ‘Lindy’.” Pittsburgh Courier, 1 Sep 1934, p. 1.
“Aviatrix Hurt.” Chicago Defender, 15 Oct 1932, p. 3.
“Aviatrix in ‘Tail Spins’ Test Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 28 Jan. 1939, p. 13.
340
“Aviatrix is Cited in ‘Time.’” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Oct. 1939, p. 13.
“Aviatrix Must Sign Away Life to Learn Trade.” Chicago Defender, 8 Oct. 1921, p. 2.
“Aviatrix Thrill Elks.” Pittsburgh Courier, 6 Sep. 1930, p. A9.
“Aviatrix.” Chicago Defender, 3 May 1930, p. 13.
“Aviatrix.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 Feb 1931, p. 4.
“Banning Dies in Air Crash.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Feb 1933, p. 1.
“Banning, Allen to Fly Courier Plane at Game.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Nov 1932, p. 4.
“Beautiful Dancing Party at Aero Challenge Club.” Chicago Defender, 24 Dec 1932, p. 6.
“Bessie Coleman Aero Club.” Chicago Defender, 20 Jun 1931, p. 6.
“Bessie Coleman Club Planes to Tour.” Chicago Defender, 29 Jun. 1929, p. A1.
“Bessie Coleman Clubs Get New Airplane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 25 May 1929, p. A6.
“Bessie Coleman Leaves New York for France.” Chicago Defender, 25 Feb. 1922, p. 2.
“Bessie Coleman Makes Initial Aerial Flight.” Chicago Defender, 21 Oct. 1922, p. 3.
“Bessie Coleman Says Good Will Come from Hurt.” Chicago Defender, 10 Mar. 1923, p. 3.
“Bessie Coleman, Aviatrix, Killed.” Chicago Defender, 8 May 1926, p. 1.
“Bessie Coleman.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 14 May 1927, p. A2.
“Bessie Coleman’s Spirit Must Live.” Chicago Defender, 24 Sep. 1927, p.3.
“Bessie Gets Away; Does Her Stuff.” Chicago Defender, 9 Sep. 1922, p. 3.
“Bessie to Fly Over Gotham.” Chicago Defender, 26 Aug. 1922, p. 1.
“Bidding the Eagle Good Luck.” Chicago Defender, 16 Jun 1934, p. 3.
“Big Aerial Meet to Draw Cream of Aces to Chicago.” Chicago Defender, 10 Aug. 1929, p.
4.
“Big Air Chute Company Employs Colored Expert.” Pittsburgh Courier, 28 Jun. 1930, p. 2.
“Black American Aviators to Enter $35,000 Non-Stop Hawaiian Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier,
16 Jul. 1927, p. 5.
341
“Black Eagle Appeals for Donations of 5 Gallons of Gas.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Jun 1934,
p. 3.
“Black Eagle Hurts Arm on Way to China.” Chicago Defender, 2 Oct 1937, p. 3.
“Black Eagle in Air Carnival.” New York Amsterdam News, 19 Aug. 1931, p. 13.
“Black Eagle is Admitted to U.S.” Chicago Defender, 8 Feb 1936, p. 24.
“Black Eagle Julian is Hurt When Chair, Not Plane, Crashes in Paris.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2
Oct 1937, p. 24.
“Black Eagle to Make Ocean Try Again, Is Claim.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 Apr 1931, p. 1.
“Blame White Flier in Quiz of Banning’s Death.” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Feb 1933, p. 1.
“Bluebird Aero Club.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 Jun. 1929, p. 7.
“Bob Church Greets Flyer.” Chicago Defender, 13 Mar 1937, p. 1.
“Booker T. Washington to Soar Over Americas.” Pittsburgh Courier, 29 Sep 1934, p. 5.
“Breaks Record.” Chicago Defender, 21 Feb 1931, p. 22.
“Brilliant Military Honors Accorded Fallen Aviatrix.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 May 1930, p.
1.
“Brown Condor at Tuskegee Institute.” Chicago Defender, 11 Jul 1936, p. 24.
“Brown Condor Lands Plane in Memphis.” Chicago Defender, 6 Mar 1937, p. 6.
“Brown Condor.” Chicago Defender, 4 Apr 1936, p. 3.
“Business Men Inspect Modern Airports.” Chicago Defender, 18 Mar 1933, p. 4.
“California Aviators Make Rapid Progress.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 Jul 1936, p. 12.
“California News.” Chicago Defender, 13 Feb 1932, p. 17.
“California News.” Chicago Defender, 14 Apr 1934, p. 20.
“California News.” Chicago Defender, 26 Dec 1931, p. 19.
“California News.” Chicago Defender, 29 Jun. 1929, p. A4.
“California News.” Chicago Defender, 9 Jun 1934, p. 18.
342
“California Women Become Airminded.” Chicago Defender, 12 May 1934, p. 19.
“Californians Take Lead in Aviation.” Chicago Defender, 23 May 1936, p. 20.
“Call of the Wings.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 6 June 1931, p. B2.
“Calvin ‘Taken for a Ride.’” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Oct. 1931, p. 11.
“Calvin Makes First Flight in Airplane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Oct. 1929, p. 9.
“Calvin’s Digest.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 Oct 1932, p. A2.
“Ce Qu-Il Faudrait Faire Pour Desire Paris.” Le Nouvelliste, 10 May 1932, p. 1.
“Chanting His Annual Song!” Pittsburgh Courier, 12 May 1934, p. 3.
“Chanting Throng Parades in Harlem.” New York Times, 2 Apr. 1934, p. 3.
“Chatting with Lou Swartz.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Jul 1937, p. 18.
“Chicago Aviation Enthusiasts.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 Jun. 1938, p. 3.
“Chicago Aviators Planning Goodwill Flight to Tuskegee.” 19 May 1934, p. 11.
“Chicago Defender Flood Relief Plane Warms up for Flight South.” Chicago Defender, 20
Feb 1937, p. 1.
“Chicago Girl is a Full-Fledged Aviatrix Now.” Chicago Defender, 1 Oct. 1921, p. 1.
“Chicago Goes Air-Minded.” Chicago Defender, 22 Jun 1929, p. A10.
“Chicago Pays Parting Tribute to Brave Bessie Coleman.” Chicago Defender, 15 May 1926,
p. 2.
“Chicago Pays Tribute to Transcontinental Flyers.” Chicago Defender, 29 Jul 1933, p. 13.
“Chicagoans Fly to Detroit.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Aug. 1929, p. A4.
“Chinese in Aviation.” Chicago Defender, 1 Oct. 1927, p. B3.
“Christens Julian’s Plane.” Chicago Defender, 7 Oct 1933, p. 4.
“Citizens Entertain Senorita Fuentes.” New York Amsterdam News, 25 Jan. 1928, p. 3.
“City Fliers Make Appeal to Mayor Kelly.” Chicago Defender, 1 Apr. 1936, p. 6.
343
“Cleo Desmond Gets Break in Movies and Makes Good.” Chicago Defender, 5 Aug 1933, p.
5.
“Clothes, Shoes and Bedding Sent by Chicagoans Big Factor in Rehabilitation of Flood
Victims.” Chicago Defender, 6 March 1937, p. 5.
“Coast-to-Coast Aviator Thrills Hundreds with Daring Air Stunts at Bettis Field.” Pittsburgh
Courier, 26 Nov 1932, p. 1.
“Coast-to-Coast Flyers Feted by Governor.” Chicago Defender, 30 Sep 1933, p. 13.
“Coast-to-Coast Via the Aerial Highways.” Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Nov 1932, p. A1.
“Coast-to-Coast Via the Aerial Highways.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 Oct 1932, p. A1.
“Coast-to-Coast Via the Aerial Highways.” Pittsburgh Courier, 29 Oct 1932, p. A1.
“Coast-to-Coast Via the Aerial Highways.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Nov 1932, p. A1.
“Coffey Named Chairman for National Air Meet.” Chicago Defender, 17 Jun. 1939, p. 24.
“Col. J. Robinson Makes Flight to Sommerville.” Chicago Defender, 25 Sep 1937, p. 7.
“Col. John C. Robinson Honored at Luncheon.” Chicago Defender, 2 Oct 1937, p. 14.
“Col. John C. Robinson to Fly Relief Aid to Flood Zone for Chicago’s Defender’s
Committee.” Chicago Defender, 6 Feb 1937, p. 1.
“Col. John Robinson Checks Plan of War.” Chicago Defender, 16 Nov 1935, p. 1.
“Col. John Robinson Opens Aviation College.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Sep 1936, p. 5.
“Col. Julian and Partner Plan Flight to India.” Chicago Defender, 16 Apr 1932, p. 4.
“Col. Julian Honored by Actor Vets.” Chicago Defender, 21 Nov 1931, p. 3.
“Col. Julian in California to Show Them How to Fly.” Chicago Defender, 5 Dec 1931, p. 3.
“Col. Julian Leaves Ethiopia for U.S.” Chicago Defender, 23 Nov 1935, p. 2.
“Col. Julian Passes Test for Pilot’s Rank.” Chicago Defender, 8 Aug 1931, p. 13.
“Col. Julian Plans Hop from from New York to Paris.” Pittsburgh Courier, 25 Mar 1933, p.
2.
344
“Col. Julian Restored to King’s Favor.” Chicago Defender, 21 Sep 1935, p. 24.
“Col. Julian to Make ‘Goodwill’ Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 29 Jul 1933, p. 1.
“Col. Robinson Downed by Bad Weather on Mission of Mercy to Flooded Area.” Chicago
Defender, 27 Feb 1937, p. 1.
“Col. Robinson is Feted at Poro College.” Chicago Defender, 6 Jun 1936, p. 6.
“Col. Robinson is Guest of Hartmans.” Chicago Defender, 7 Aug 1937, p. 24.
“Col. Robinson Named Aviation Consultant.” Chicago Defender, 21 Oct 1939, p. 5.
“Col. Robinson Orders Six New Planes for Chi Flyers to Fight for Ethiopia.” Pittsburgh
Courier, 4 Jan 1936, p. 7.
“Col. Robinson Pays Visit to New Orleans.” Chicago Defender, 31 Jul 1937, p. 6.
“Col. Robinson Speaker at Du Sable.” Chicago Defender, 30 May 1936, p. 20.
“Col. Robinson Stages Air Duel in Clouds with Enemy Planes!” Pittsburgh Courier, 14 Dec
1935, p. 1.
“Col. Robinson Starts Own Aviation College.” New York Amsterdam News, 3 Oct. 1936, p.
24.
“Col. Robinson, Ethiopian Air Ace, Returning.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 May 1936, p. 3.
“Col. Robinson, Ethiopian Air Hero, Tells Story in Three Eastern Cities.” Pittsburgh
Courier, 27 Jun 1936, p. A1.
“Col. Robinson, Mrs. Malone, Speakers.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Dec 1937, p. 7.
“Col. Robinson’s National Air College Stages Gala Opening.” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Oct
1936, p. 5.
“Colonel Hubert Julian Prepares for His Sea Flight.” Chicago Defender, 30 Sep 1933, p. 13.
“Colonel Hubert Julian to Carry Good Will Letters on Hop to Abyssinia.” Pittsburgh
Courier, 16 Jun 1934, p. 2.
“Colonel Julian Has Story.” Chicago Defender, 21 Dec 1935, p. 24.
345
“Colonel Julian May Fly the Atlantic.” Chicago Defender, 16 Sep 1933, p. 9.
“Colonel Robinson in Harlem Monday.” New York Amsterdam News, 16 May 1936, p. 1.
“Commercial News.” Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Jul. 1930, p. A3.
“Commercial News.” Pittsburgh Courier, 28 Dec. 1929, p. 11.
“Committee Planning Meeting to Push Interest in Paris’ Caribbean Flight.” New York
Amsterdam News, 9 Mar 1932, p. 3.
“Community Crusaders and Fliers Spread Goodwill Message.” Chicago Defender, 12 Nov.
1938, p. 10.
“Congratulations!” Chicago Defender, 2 Jul. 1938, p. 1.
“Correspondent Tells of Lindbergh’s Arrival.” New York Amsterdam News, 8 Feb. 1928, p.
1.
“Costs of Flying Has Reached High Altitude, Says California Aviatrix.” Pittsburgh Courier,
7 May 1932, p. 3.
“Craftsmen of Black Wings at Work.” Pittsburgh Courier, 25 Jul 1936, p. 2.
“Craftsmen of Black Wings Designing New Planes.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Aug 1937, p.
22.
“Crash Ends Good-will Tour.” Chicago Defender, 29 Dec 1934, p. 4.
“Cross-Country Aviators Down.” Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Mar. 1927, p. 1.
“Cross-Country Flier Addresses Youth Meet.” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Aug 1934, p. 3.
“Cross-Country Flight Now On.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 Jul 1933, p. 4.
“Cross-Country Flyer to Continue Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Mar. 1927, p. A1.
“Cross-Country Flyers Stop in City on Fast Return Trip to Seashore.” Pittsburgh Courier, 29
Jul 1933, p. 1.
“Current Events.” Chicago Defender, 4 Jun. 1921, p. 2.
“‘Cuts Capers’ in Air.” Chicago Defender, 3 Sep. 1938, p. 1.
346
“Dans le Theatre.” Le Nouvelliste, 17 May 1932, p. 3.
“Daring Air Pilots Forced Down.” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 Nov. 1929, p. 1.
“Daring Aviators Near Goal.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Oct 1932, p. 1.
“Daring Kansas City Aviator Victim of Crash.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Jan 1932, p. A2.
“Daring.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Jul. 1930, p. 3.
“Dashing Colonel Julian Returns with Corpse, Princess and Monocle.” New York Amsterdam
News, 4 Dec. 1937, p. 1.
“Death-Defying Bird-Woman.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 Sep. 1923, p. 3.
“Defender Scribe Greets Robinson.” Chicago Defender, 23 May 1936, p. 1.
“Defender Sports Editor Inspects W.Va State’s Air Pilots’ Program.” Chicago Defender, 23
Dec. 1939, p. 7.
“Defender’s Goodwill Flyer is Warmly Received in Memphis.” Chicago Defender, 13 Mar
1937, p. 19.
“Defender’s Goodwill Flyers Inspired Wings at West Virginia State.” Chicago Defender, 21
Oct. 1939, p.6.
“DePriest Takes Ride in Airplane.” Chicago Defender, 12 Oct. 1929, p. 1.
“Desire Paris est Nommé Premier Lieutenant.” Le Nouvelliste, 2 June 1932, p. 1.
“Died in Crash.” New York Amsterdam News, 31 Dec. 1938, p. 20.
“Dixie Youth Sees Future in Aviation.” Chicago Defender, 7 Dec 1935, p. 3.
“Doctor Wins Aviation Award.” Chicago Defender, 2 Sep. 1939, p. 1.
“Don’t Forget the Negro Soldiers.” Editorial. Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Jul 1934, p. 10.
“Dorothy Darby to Make Leap at 15,000 Feet.” Chicago Defender, 27 Jun 1936, p. 8.
“Dr. Renfroe Passes Air Examination.” Chicago Defender, 14 Sep 1935, p. 2.
“Dr. Stanley Lucas Off on South American Tour.” Chicago Defender, 31 Mar 1934, p. 4.
“Dutch Aviator Will Teach Race to Fly.” Chicago Defender, 24 May 1924, p. 1.
347
“Echos.” Le Matin, 13 Oct 1932, p. 1.
“Editor Abbott in Tribute to Robinson.” Chicago Defender, 30 May 1936, p. 2.
“Eight Licensed Pilots.” Chicago Defender, 14 Sep. 1929, p. A2.
“Emancipation Anniversary Observed by West Indians.” Chicago Defender, 11 Aug 1934, p.
13.
“Emperor and Air Hero Are Honored in Song.” New York Amsterdam News, 30 May 1936,
p. 11.
“Emperor Gets Special Plane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Jan 1936, p. 5.
“Encourages Aviation.” Chicago Defender, 11 Mar 1939, p. 2.
“Epochal Air Trip to Start Thursday.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Nov 1934, p. 1.
“Ethiopia Airman Returning Home.” New York Amsterdam News, 11 Apr. 1936, p. 1.
“Ethiopia Banishes Julian After Plane Crash.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Nov. 1930, p. A1.
“Ethiopia Gets Check for $100 from Pilgrim.” Chicago Defender, 18 Jan 1936, p. 24.
“Ethiopia Gets Huge Load of Machine Guns – Bullets.” Chicago Defender, 13 Apr 1935, p.
1.
“Ethiopia Glad to Be Rid of Julian.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Mar 1936, p. 3.
“Ethiopia Making Own Airplanes and Gas Masks, Rogers Reveals.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4
Apr 1936, p. 1.
“Ethiopia Seeks Negro Doctors: Technicians, Nurses Also Sought Here.” New York
Amsterdam News, 20 Jul 1935, p. 1.
“Ethiopia Welcomes U.S. Volunteers on Eve of War with Italy.” Pittsburgh Courier, 13 Jul
1935, p. 1.
“Ethiopia’s Black Condor.” New York Amsterdam News, 26 Oct. 1935, p. A1.
“Ethiopian Air Ace Outwits Italian Planes in Battle.” Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Oct 1935, p. 4.
“Ethiopian Air Chief.” Chicago Defender, 1 Sep 1935, p. 1.
348
“Ethiops Plan Battle from High Ravines.” New York Amsterdam News, 12 Oct. 1935, p. 1.
“Expect Big Crowd at Paris Meeting.” New York Amsterdam News, 16 Mar 1932, p. 6.
“Expected to Feature in Big Air Circus.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Dec 1931, p. A1.
“Experienced Rare Thrill.” Pittsburgh Courier, 28 Dec. 1929, p. 9.
“Ex-Slave, 103, Takes Joyride in Plane.” Chicago Defender, 26 Sep 1931, p. 1.
“Famous Trials.” Famous Trials, 30 Aug. 2018, www.famous-trials.com/sheriffshipp/1084-
lynchingsyear.
“First Race Airport Celebrates Opening.” Chicago Defender, 18 Sep 1937, p. 4.
“Flier is Ready for Hop to Joe Louis Camp.” Chicago Defender, 18 Jun. 1938, p. 2.
“Fliers Heads East on Record Hop.” Pittsburgh Courier, 1 Oct 1932, p. 4.
“Fliers Made History.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Dec 1932, p. A2.
“Fliers Who Scattered Leaflets on Chicagoans.” Chicago Defender, 19 Nov. 1938, p. 1.
“Flies Fifty Miles with Julian.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Oct 1931, p. 11.
“Flies from Business League Meeting.” Pittsburgh Courier, 28 Sep. 1929, p. A6.
“Florida Aviator to Tour Southland.” Chicago Defender 17 Oct 1931, p. 4.
“Flyer Burns to Death in Plane Crash.” Chicago Defender, 4 Sep 1932, p. 1.
“Flyer is Ready.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Jul 1935, p. A2.
“Flyer.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 Nov 1933, p. A3.
“Flyers Forced Down in Salt Lake.” Chicago Defender, 12 Mar. 1927, p. 3.
“Flyers Get Their Wings.” Chicago Defender, 9 Mar 1935, p. 3.
“Flyers Nearing Goal.” Chicago Defender, 22 Jul 1933, p. 1.
“Flyers Score Men Who Mock Their Efforts.” Chicago Defender, 4 Jun. 1927, p. 3.
“Flying Hoboes Start Back.” Chicago Defender, 19 Nov 1932, p. 22.
“Flying Minister Disappoints Delegation of Greeters.” New York Amsterdam News, 11 Jan.
1936, p. A10.
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“For Air Service.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Jul 1935, p. A2.
“Ford Tells President Plans for Air Force.” Chicago Defender, 7 Aug. 1926, p. 3.
“Form Flying Club.” Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Oct. 1928, p. 1.
“Forsythe – Anderson Arrive on Coast After Record Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 Jul
1933, p. 1.
“Forsythe, Anderson Continue Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 Dec 1934, p. 4.
“Found Aviation School.” Chicago Defender, 30 Jun 1934, p. 3.
“Fox Studio May Shelve Air Story.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 May 1934, p. A8.
“Free Flights Make Chicago Air Conscious.” Chicago Defender, 22 Apr. 1939, p. 7.
“From an Aviator.” Letter. Chicago Defender, 21 May 1927, p. A2.
“From Operative 22’s Mail.” Chicago Defender, 14 Mar 1936, p. 24.
“Fulton Alexander’s ‘Flying High’ at Dave’s Café Good Entertainment, Says Courier’s
Theatrical Critic.” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 May 1936, p. A6.
“Future Aces at Grave of Bess Coleman.” Chicago Defender, 4 Jun 1932, p. A1.
“Future Flyer.” Chicago Defender, 22 Jan. 1927, p. B8.
“Future Flyers.” Chicago Defender, 2 Mar. 1929, p.22.
“Gets Pilot’s License.” Chicago Defender, 19 Sep 1931, p. 13.
“Gets Wings.” New York Amsterdam News, 15 Aug 1936, p. 9.
“Gets Wings.” New York Amsterdam News, 20 Aug 1930, p. 11.
“Girl Flyer is Injured as She Leaps from Plane.” Chicago Defender, 15 Oct 1932, p. 13.
“Girl Flyer to Head Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 9 Feb. 1929, p. 4.
“Girl Wins Place in White Flying Club.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 May 1929, p. 1.
“Girl, A Year Out of School, is Plane Pilot.” Chicago Defender, 2 Nov. 1929, p.10.
“Give Air Circus as a Tribute to Bessie Coleman.” Chicago Defender, 26 Sep 1931, p. 2.
“Gives Aviation Show in Texas.” Chicago Defender, 23 Aug. 1930, p. 3.
350
“Gives Us a Chance.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 25 Feb. 1928, p. A2.
“Going up for Charity.” Chicago Defender, 28 Nov 1931, p. 22.
“Good Will Flyers Crash.” Chicago Defender, 26 May 1934, p. 1.
“Good Will Hop to Pan America Budding.” Pittsburgh Courier, 31 Mar 1934, p. A7.
“Good Will Hop to Pan America Budding.” Pittsburgh Courier, 31 Mar 1934, p. A7.
“Good-Will Aviators Ready for Take-Off.” Chicago Defender, 10 Nov 1934, p. 1.
“Goodwill Fliers Have Bad Luck; Forced to Land.” Pittsburgh Courier, 24 Nov 1934, p. 2.
“Goodwill Fliers Honored in Haiti.” Pittsburgh Courier, 24 Nov 1934, p. 2.
“Goodwill Flight Program Booms as Plans Progress.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Sep 1934, p.
A1.
“Goodwill Flyers Safe in Haiti.” Chicago Defender, 22 Apr. 1939, p. 1.
“Goodwill Flyers to Get Royal Welcome.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Aug 1934, p. A3.
“Governor to Attend Big State-Wide Fair at Columbus.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Sep. 1929,
p. 9.
“Group Lauds Paris for Proposed Hop.” New York Amsterdam News, 23 Mar 1932, p. 11.
“Hail New York Flyer on Good Will Trip to Haiti.” Chicago Defender, 7 May 1932, p. 1.
“Haile’s Future Talk of London.” The Pittsburgh Courier May 28 1938. Print.
“Haiti Celebrates on Lindbergh Visit; Hop to Cuba Today.” New York Times, 8 Feb 1928, p.
1.
“Haiti Extends Warm Welcome to Lindbergh.” Chicago Defender, 11 Feb 1928, p. 2.
“Haiti Invites Black Americans.” Chicago Defender, 15 Sep 1934, p. 12.
“Haiti to Give Flier Relic of Columbus.” New York Times, 1 Feb 1928, p. 2.
“Haitian Army Officer Decorated with Black Eye by Widow’s Escort.” Pittsburgh Courier,
6 Nov 1937, p. 1.
“Haitian Birdman Weds Rich Texan.” New York Amsterdam News, 1 Apr 1939, p. 1.
351
“Haitian Opposition Wars on Lindbergh.” 4 Feb 1928, p. 4.
“Haitian Passes U.S. Tests for License to Fly Plane.” New York Amsterdam News, 20 Aug
1930, p. 11.
“Haitian Trade Project Gets Native’s Okeh.” Chicago Defender, 22 Sep 1934, p. 23.
“Haitian Treasury Secretary Honored by Harlem Leaders.” New York Amsterdam News, 20
Oct 1934, p. 3.
“Haitians Boycotted Lindbergh as Wall St. Traveling Salesman.” Baltimore Afro-American,
11 Feb 1928, p. 6.
“Haitians Open Academy.” New York Amsterdam News, 24 Sep 1930, p. 11.
“Hands Across Sea.” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Jan 1936, p. 1.
“Harlem ‘Hitler’ Killed.” Pittsburgh Courier, 6 Aug. 1938, p. 1.
“Harlem Publisher Backs Cross-Country Hop.” Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Mar 1932, p. 2.
“Harlem Trains ‘Black Legion’ with the Infantry Regiments.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Aug
1935, p. 4.
“Harlem Turns Out En Masse to Greet N.A.A.-Defender Cross Country Flyers.” Chicago
Defender, 20 May 1939, p. 6.
“Harlem’s Air Squadron.” Chicago Defender, 17 Aug 1935, p. 5.
“Harlem’s New Ace Ready for Flight”. New York Times, 21 Mar 1932, p. 17.
“Harlem’s Pride Ready for Air!” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Aug 1935, p. 3.
“Harten Says He’s First Flying Parson.” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Mar. 1936, p. 10.
“Harten Uses Plane to Speed His Work.” New York Amsterdam News, 19 May 1934, p. 11.
“Hazards Dot Route of Good Will Fliers.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 Dec 1934, p. 3.
“Heads Flyers.” New York Amsterdam News, 12 Oct 1935, p. 1.
“Herbert Julian Not an Aviator Detectives Say.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 May 1924, p. 1.
“High Cost of Flying.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 6 June 1931, p. B2.
352
“History-Making is Seen in Newsreel.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 May 1930, p. A6.
“Home Folks Honor Flyer.” Chicago Defender, 11 Jul 1936, p. 18.
“How Black Troops Won War for Italians Exposed by Col. Robinson in Speech Here.”
Chicago Defender, 6 Jun 1936, p. 1.
“Hubert Julian Cables the Courier about ‘Exciting Days’ Prevailing in Ethiopia.” Pittsburgh
Courier, 10 Aug 1935, p. 4.
“If Hubert Julian Can Hop Three Ifs Then He’ll Hop Ocean.” Pittsburgh Courier, 25 Jul
1931, p. 1.
“Il Duce’s Sons Challenged to Air Duel by Sons of Ethiopian Minister.” Pittsburgh Courier,
16 Nov 1935, p. 1.
“Il Faut des Actes.” Le Nouvelliste, 11 May 1932, p. 1.
“In Plane Crash.” Chicago Defender, 26 Nov 1932, p. 3.
“In Sympathy with Ethiopian Cause, Whites Ask to Go.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Jul
1935, p. A2.
“In U.S. Again.” Chicago Defender, 11 Dec 1937, p. 24.
“Interview de F.D. Paris.” Le Nouvelliste, 27 Apr 1932, p. 1.
“Invitation.” New York Amsterdam News, 9 Mar 1932, p. 7.
“Invite Girl Flier to San Diego Expo.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 May 1935, p. 3.
“Italy Ready for Peace; Africa Mobilizes Men, Women for Hostilities.” Pittsburgh Courier,
20 Apr 1935, p. 3.
“Italy’s Greed.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 9 Mar 1935, p. A2.
“J. Herman Banning.” Editorial. Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Feb 1933, p. 10.
“Jackson, Mississippi.” Pittsburgh Courier, 30 Oct 1937, p. 22.
“James, Harlem Aviator, Killed.” New York Amsterdam News, 31 Aug. 1932, p. 1.
“Japan May Aid Ethiopia.” Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Jul 1935, p. 1.
353
“Japan Seen Forcing Hand.” New York Amsterdam News, 27 Jul. 1935, p. 11.
“Jo Baker Takes Daily Trips in Her Own Plane.” Chicago Defender, 2 Nov 1935, p. 8.
“Josephine Baker Marries French Broker and Aviator.” Chicago Defender, 12 Dec 1937, p.
6.
“Josephine Baker to Attempt Aviation.” Chicago Defender, 3 Aug 1935, p. 12.
“Julian ‘Sold Out’ for $1,250, Alleged.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Jan 1936, p. 1.
“Julian Always Good Copy, Says New York Daily.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Feb 1935, p. 3.
“Julian Arrives in London on Way to Ethiopia.” Chicago Defender, 9 Mar 1935, p. 5.
“Julian Back from Boston Flight.” Chicago Defender, 14 Oct 1933, p. 13.
“Julian Becomes Ethiopian Citizen.” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 Jul 1935, p. 1.
“Julian Brings $8,000 Airplane to Harlem.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Jun. 1924, p. 13.
“Julian Drops Flowers from Airplane.” New York Amsterdam News, 26 Aug. 1931, p. 1.
“Julian Names Plane Black Eagle.” Pittsburgh Courier, 24 Mar. 1928, p. A1.
“Julian Pays $9,000 on New $15,000 Plane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Aug. 1926, p. 1.
“Julian Quits Ethiopia.” Pittsburgh Courier, 23 Nov 1935, p. 4.
“Julian Reported Again in Air Corps.” New York Amsterdam News, 20 Jul. 1935, p. 13.
“Julian Secures Pilot’s License.” New York Amsterdam News, 5 Aug. 1931, p. 2.
“Julian Seeks Funds for Fine Plane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Oct 1931, p. 3.
“Julian Seeks Testimony of Abyssinian Emperor.” Pittsburgh Courier, 14 Mar 1931, p. 5.
“Julian Starts First of His Exhibition Flights.” Chicago Defender, 15 Aug. 1931, p. 5.
“Julian to Name Plane Pgh. Courier.” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 May 1932, p. 1.
“Julian, with Monocle and Princess, Back in Harlem.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Dec. 1937, p.
12.
“Junior Club Member Reports Airplane Ride.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 July 1930, p. SM10.
“Just Landed.” Chicago Defender, 2 Jan 1932, p. 22.
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“Kansas Aviation Field Bars Physician’s Plane.” Chicago Defender, 20 Oct. 1928, p. 3.
“Kansas City Boy in Solo Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Nov 1931, p. A1.
“Kansas City Physician Purchases Airplane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Mar. 1928, p. 12.
“Kariéra Černého Letce.” Moravské noviny: Příloha Brněnských Novin, 22 Aug. 1930, p. 1.
“L’aviateur Paris Nous Visite.” Le Nouvelliste, 2 May 1932, p. 1.
“L’aviateur Paris sur Jacmel.” Le Matin, 4 May 1932, p. 2.
“L’aviateur Paris.” Le Matin, 30 Apr 1932, p. 1.
“La Chambre et Desire Paris.” Le Nouvelliste, 3 May 1935, p. 1.
“La Modestie de Desire F. Paris.” Le Nouvelliste, 28 Apr 1932, p. 1.
“Ladies’ Flying Club Drawing National Attention.” Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Sep. 1930, p. 6.
“Lauds Courier for Part in Boosting Aviation to Race.” Pittsburgh Courier, 4 Jan 1936, p.
A2.
“Le Courrier des Etats-Unis et L’aviateur Paris.” Le Nouvelliste, 12 May 1932, p. 1.
“Le Festival de Samedi Soir.” Le Matin, 17 May 1932, p. 2.
“Le Lieutenant Desire Paris.” Le Matin, 20 May 1932, p. 3.
“Leaders Should Encourage Field of Aviation, Says.” Pittsburgh Courier, 28 Nov 1936, p.
14.
“Leon Desire Paris s’en va.” Le Matin, 31 May 1932, p. 2.
“Leon Paris Will Make Flight to Haiti.” New York Amsterdam News, 2 Mar 1932, p. 3.
“Let Us Fly.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 30 Sep. 1922, p. A2.
“Let’s Go!” Chicago Defender, 28 Mar 1936, p. 1.
“Let”s Not Forget.” Editorial. Pittsburgh Courier, 19 Sep 1931, p. 10.
“Letters to the Editor.” Editor. Pittsburgh Courier, 15 Nov. 1930, p. 10.
“Letters to the Editor.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Mar. 1929, p. A8.
“Letters to the Editor.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 31 Jun. 1930, p. A10.
355
“Liberian Army Trainer Takes Aviation Course.” Chicago Defender, 9 Sep. 1928, p. 1.
“Licensed Air Pilot.” Chicago Defender, 23 Apr 1932, p. 1.
“Lieut. Herbert Julian Finally Receives His U.S. Aviator’s License.” Pittsburgh Courier, 14
Mar. 1925, p. 9.
“Lieut. Powell to Teach L.A. School Children to Fly.” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Jul 1934, p. 2.
“Lieutenant Edison Badly Hurt in Fall.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Aug. 1923, p. 4.
“Lincoln Payne, Flying Mail Carried Dead.” Chicago Defender, 31 Oct 1936, p. 20.
“Lindbergh and Haiti, the Country of a Great Liberator.” New York Amsterdam News, 18
Jan. 1928, p. 5.
“Lindbergh and Lynching.” Pittsburgh Courier, 25 Jun. 1927, p. A8.
“Lindbergh Arrives at Santo Domingo in Hop on Birthday.” New York Times, 5 Feb 1928, p.
1.
“Lindbergh at St. Thomas.” New York Amsterdam News, 8 Feb. 1928, p. 8.
“Lindbergh Lands at Port au Prince as New Discoverer.” New York Times, 7 Feb 1928, p. 1.
“Lindbergh Looks on His Cuban Hop as Forerunner of Air Mail Service.” 9 Feb 1928, p. 1.
“Lindbergh Reaches Goal at Havana.” New York Times, 9 Feb 1928, p. 1.
“Lindbergh Receives Honors and Acclaim at Santo Domingo.” New York Times, 6 Feb 1928,
p. 1.
“Lindbergh, in 3 Hops, Visits Two Capitals, Reaches Porto Rico.” New York Times, 22 Sep
1929, p. 1.
“Little Rock Sees Its First All-Race Air Circus.” Chicago Defender, 28 Nov 1936, p. 24.
“Local Airport Officials Pay Flyer Fine Tribute.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Feb 1933, p. 1.
“Local Fliers Organize to Foster Meet.” Chicago Defender, 18 Mar. 1939, p. 7.
“Local Youth Wins Pilot’s License.” Pittsburgh Courier, 1 Mar. 1930, p. 4.
356
“Los Angeles Mayor Sends New York Mayor Letter by Negro Cross Continental Flyer.”
Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Feb. 1927, p. A2.
“Los Angeles Residents Lose Money in Effort to Aid Aviation Among Our Race.” Chicago
Defender, 18 Oct. 1930, p. 10.
“Loses Pal.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Feb 1933, p. 1.
“Louis Rushes to Detroit to See Big Fight.” Chicago Defender, 4 Sep. 193”7, p. 2.
“Louisville Hails Chicago Aviatrix.” Chicago Defender, 12 Aug. 1939, p. 11.
“Makes First Solo Flight in Four Hours.” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 Feb 1937, p. 4.
“May His Spirit Never Die.” Cartoon. Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Feb 1933, p. 10.
“May Open Flying School at Xavier.” Chicago Defender, 14 Aug 1937, p. 4.
“McEnheimer to Stage Air Show at Butler Airport Oct. 30.” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Oct.
1930, p. 1.
“McEnheimer’s Air Show Proves Big Thriller, Gay Crowd.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Nov.
1930, p. 3.
“Memphians Throng to Pilot.” Chicago Defender, 27 Mar 1937, p. 4.
“Memphis Officially Welcomes Col. John C. Robinson.” Chicago Defender, 13 Mar 1937,
p. 23.
“Memphis Pharmacist and Wife Take Air Trip.” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Dec 1932, p. 6.
“Mississippian Flies Here with Colonel.” Chicago Defender, 28 Aug 1937, p. 6.
“Mme. Malone, Poro Head, Takes to Air.” Chicago Defender, 24 Jul 1937, p. 9.
“More about Aviation.” Letter. Chicago Defender, 12 Nov. 1927, p. A2.
“Mourned Aviator’s Wife is Destitute.” Pittsburgh Courier, 25 Feb 1933, p. A1.
“Move to Halt Recruiting for Ethiopia is Launched.” Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Jul. 1935, p. 1.
“Mrs. John Hope is Taken for a Ride.” Pittsburgh Courier, 23 Jan 1932, p. 3.
“Mrs. Malone, Head of Poro, Takes to Air.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Jul 1937, p. 7.
357
“Mrs. Moton Christens Airplane.” Chicago Defender, 22 Sep 1934, p. 2.
“N.Y. Aviator Plans Haiti Hop.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Mar 1932, p. 1.
“N.Y. Aviators Give Stunt Exhibition.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Jun 1932, p. 2.
“Name Ethiopia Air Fund for Local Aviator.” Chicago Defender, 19 Oct 1935, p. 10.
“National Guard Aviation.” Chicago Defender, 8 Oct. 1927, p. A2.
“Negress an Air Pilot.” Washington Post, 4 Jul. 1922, p.1.
“Negro Aviator Returns to Atlanta.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Jan 1932, p. 2.
“Negro Aviator Starts School.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Sep. 1927, p. 5.
“Negro Aviator to Fly over Atlanta.” Pittsburgh Courier, 28 Nov 1931, p. A7.
“Negro Aviatrix Arrives.” New York Times, 14 Aug. 1922, p. 14.
“Negro Flier on Ripley Program.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 May 1937, p. 5.
“Negro Pilot Earns ‘Wings:’” New York Amsterdam News, 19 Aug. 1939, p. 11.
“Negroes to Welcome Lindbergh.” New York Amsterdam News, 25 Jan. 1928, p. 12.
“Never Too Old to Fly.” Chicago Defender, 25 Feb 1939, p. 1.
“New York Gives Welcome to Pan-American Flyers.” Chicago Defender, 9 Mar 1935, p.
13.
“New Yorkers Make Trip to Chicago by Plane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 1 Aug. 1931, p. A2.
“Newark to Honor Famous Aviators.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Sep 1933, p. A1.
“Newspapers: The Amsterdam News.” PBS, 30 Aug. 2018,
www.pbs.org/blackpress/news_bios/newbios/nwsppr/amsterdam/amstrdm.html.
“Newsy Newsettes.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 Oct 1932, p. A6.
“No Flight by Bessie Coleman; Flight Interferes.” Chicago Defender, 8 Sep. 1923, p. 2.
“No U.S. Race Aviators.” Letter. Chicago Defender, 24 Nov 1934, p. A2.
“Noted Aviators in Exhibition at Bettis Airport.” Pittsburgh Courier, 19 Nov 1932, p. 1.
358
“Noted Aviatrix to Teach Kiddies How to Fly Planes.” Chicago Defender, 13 Apr 1935, p.
15.
“Noted Aviatrix to Teach Kiddies How to Fly Planes.” Chicago Defender, 4 May 1935, p.
16.
“Noted Aviatrix to Teach Kiddies How to Fly Planes.” Chicago Defender, 25 May 1935, p.
15.
“Noted Flyer on Southern Lecture Tour.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Oct 1936, p. 6.
“NRA Gives Teachers ‘Break’.” Pittsburgh Courier, 24 Feb 1934, p. 5.
“Number 55 of Race as Holding Pilot Licenses from U.S.” Chicago Defender, 16 May 1936,
p. 2.
“Ol Satchmo Flies to Hollywood Friday.” Chicago Defender, 22 May 1937, p. 20.
“On Julian.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Aug 1935, p. A2.
“On Julian.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Nov 1931, p. A2.
“On Negro Pilots.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 24 Oct 1931, p. A2.
“One Girl and Three Men Graduated from Chicago Aeronautical College.” Pittsburgh
Courier, 2 Mar 1935, p. 2.
“Opportunity Magazine Awards 22 Literature Prizes.” New York Amsterdam News, 5 May
1926, p. 1.
“Opportunity to Learn Aviation.” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 Apr. 1929, p. B2.
“Organize Aviation Association in N.Y.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Jun. 1929, p. 3.
“Our Duty to Aviation.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 18 Feb 1933, p. 12.
“Our Regiments.” Editorial. Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Sep 1931, p. 10.
“Our Women Advancing in Aviation.” Pittsburgh Courier, 23 Jul. 1938, p. 13.
“Overcome with Joy.” Letter, Pittsburgh Courier, 6 Aug. 1938, p. 14.
359
“Pan-America Flyers to Name New Plane ‘Booker T. Washington’.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15
Sep 1934, p. 4.
“Pan-American Fliers Complete Water Hop.” Pittsburgh Courier, 1 Dec 1934, p. 6.
“Paper to Aid Negro Flyers.” New York Amsterdam News, 11 Aug 1934, p. 1.
“Parachute Jumper Quits Uptown Aviation School.” New York Amsterdam News, 30 Jul.
1930, p. 10.
“Parachute Man Sued by Wife.” Pittsburgh Courier,
“Paris Reaches Cuba in Flight to Haiti.” Pittsburgh Courier, 30 Apr 1932, p. 1.
“Paris Ready for Last Leg of Hop.” New York Amsterdam News, 27 Apr 1932, p. 20.
“Paris Survole Jacmel.” Le Nouvelliste, 2 May 1932, p. 1.
“Pastor Flies to Capital Revival.” Pittsburgh Courier, 19 May 1934, p. 20.
“Patriotism.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 30 Nov. 1929, p.14.
“Philadelphian, Pilot on Goodwill Flight to Hawaii.” Chicago Defender, 15 Apr. 1939, p. 2.
“Philly’s First Transport Pilot.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Mar 1932, p. 2.
“Pilot.” Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Apr. 1929, p. 1.
“Pilots Wander.” Chicago Defender, 16 Nov. 1929, p. 2.
“Pioneers Who Made Chicagoans Air-Minded.” Chicago Defender, 16 Sep. 1939, p. 13.
“Plan Big Aerial Exhibit.” Chicago Defender, 3 Aug. 1929, p. 12.
“Plan Big Aviation Carnival in Atlanta.” Pittsburgh Courier, 9 Jan 1932, p. 3.
“Plan Monument to Banning.” Pittsburgh Courier, 25 Feb 1933, p. A4.
“Plan Transatlantic Flight.” Chicago Defender, 27 Feb 1932, p. 1.
“Plane Given Name of Miss Harlem.” New York Amsterdam News, 7 May 1930, p. 3.
“Plane of Forsythe, Anderson Wrecked.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 Dec 1934, p. 1.
“Plans Coast to Coast Flight.” Chicago Defender, 23 Jul. 1938, p. 1.
“Plans Long Air Voyage.” Chicago Defender, 14 Nov 1931, p. 22.
360
“Plenty of Thrills Here.” Chicago Defender, 30 Sep 1933, p. 4.
“Pontiac, Mich.” Chicago Defender, 27 Jun 1936, p. 23.
“Powell Fails to Land in Cleveland.” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Sep 1932, p. 1.
“Powell, C.B.” Black Past, 30 Aug. 2018, www.blackpast.org/aah/powell-c-b-1894-1977.
“Pretty Jo Baker, Home Again, Brings the Elusive Charm of Paris.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26
Oct 1935, p. 8.
“Prince Kojo of Dahomey Pays Tribute to Lincoln.” Chicago Defender, 25 Oct. 1924, p. 2.
“Progress in Aviation.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 24 Aug. 1929, p. A2.
“Promises His Best.” New York Amsterdam News, 30 Mar 1932, p. 3.
“Propos Humides.” Le Matin, 21 May 1932, p. 2.
“Proud of Flyers.” Letter. Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Jan 1935, p. A2.
“Que Fait-On de Paris.” Le Nouvelliste, 9 May 1932, p. 1.
“Queen of the Air.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Jun 1932, p. 1.
“Questions and Answers.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Nov. 1936, p. A2.
“R.R. Moton to Christen Plane of Noted Flyers.” Chicago Defender, 15 Sep 1934, p. 4.
“Race Aviator Flies for Hospital Fund.” Pittsburgh Courier, 19 Sep. 1925, p. 5.
“Race Aviator Flies U.S. Air Mail Route.” Chicago Defender, 21 May 1938, p. 1.
“Race Aviator Make Take Part in Air Derby in Fall.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Apr. 1928, p.
A6.
“Race Aviators Flying to Cleveland.” Pittsburgh Courier, 27 Aug 1932, p. 1.
“Race Aviators to Give Air Show Decoration Day.” Chicago Defender, 19 May 1934, p. 5.
“Race Flyers in Texas Give Exhibitions.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Jul. 1930, p. 4.
“Race Flyers Plan South American Good Will Tour.” Chicago Defender, 4 Aug 1934, p. 3.
“Race Neglects Opportunities in Aviation.” Chicago Defender, 17 Nov 1934, p. 10.
“Race Neglects Opportunities in Aviation.” Chicago Defender, 24 Nov 1934, p. 12.
361
“Rally to Buy Col. Robinson a New Plane.” Chicago Defender, 13 Jun 1936, p. 24.
“Ready for Their Hop to South America.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Sep 1934, p. A1.
“Ready to Fly Again.” Chicago Defender, 18 Mar 1933, p. 2.
“Recalls Exploits of Brave Bessie Coleman on 10th
Anniversary of Tragedy.” Chicago
Defender, 9 May 1936, p. 12.
“Reporter Tells of Powell Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Sep 1932, p. A9.
“Retired Mortician Buried in District.” Baltimore Afro-American, 4 Dec. 1965, p. 19.
“Rev. Austin Takes Airplane Ride with Col. Hubert Julian.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Nov
1931, p. 1.
“Rev. Austin, in Plane, Sees Way to Pearly Gates.” Chicago Defender, 21 Nov 1931, p. 1.
“Reveal Six Attempts to Kill Condor.” Chicago Defender, 30 May 1936, p. 20.
“Rioting Marks Demonstration for War Ace.” Chicago Defender, 23 May 1936, p. 1.
“Roanoke Youth.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 Oct. 1927, p. 1.
“Robinson Flies a New Plane to City.” Chicago Defender, 28 Aug 1937, p. 4.
“Robinson Tells All in The Bombing of Adowa.” Chicago Defender, 12 Oct 1935, p. 4.
“Robinson’s Chi Air Ass’n Names Officers.” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Jan 1936, p. 5.
“Rogers at Front.” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Dec 1935, p. 1.
“Rogers Pays Tribute to Colonel Robinson.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Sep 1936, p. A2.
“San Diego to Get Aviation School.” Chicago Defender, 21 Feb 1931, p. 2.
“Says England Will Lose India.” Pittsburgh Courier, 31 Aug. 1935, p. A2.
“Says Japan May Defend Ethiopia.” New York Amsterdam News, 27 Jul. 1935, p. 20.
“Seamstress Gives up Her Duties to Become Aviatrix.” Chicago Defender, 2 Jan 1932, p.
13.
“Second to Get Pilot’s License.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Sept 1931, p. 3.
“Seek Support for Airplane Project.” Pittsburgh Courier, 1 Jul 1933, p. 2.
362
“Sees Future in Aviation for Negro Youths.’ Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Aug 1936, p. 14.
“Select Two Race Colleges for Civil Aviation Courses.”
“Sick, Wounded Burned Alive by Italian Bombs.” Pittsburgh Courier, 14 Dec 1935, p. 1.
“Sissle and Band Fly to England.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 Nov. 1930, p. A8.
“Sister Sees Pilot Die in Crash.” Chicago Defender, 18 Jul 1936, p. 1.
“Skillful Piloting Prevents Death.” Pittsburgh Courier, 31 Aug. 1929, p. A1.
“Snowstorm Forces Flyer to Come Down.” Chicago Defender, 19 Mar. 1927, p. 3.
“So it Seems.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Apr. 1930, p. 2.
“Socialites Greet Hero at Airport.” Chicago Defender, 30 May 1936, p. 7.
“Solo Licenses Go to 2 Women.” New York Amsterdam News, 23 Jul. 1938, p. 4.
“Son of Tuskegee President Plans to Fly Atlantic.” Chicago Defender, 5 Dec 1936, p. 4.
“Sons of Warring Fathers May Meet in Air Battles.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Nov 1935, p. 23.
“Speakers Offer Solutions for Unemployment and Housing Ills.” New York Amsterdam
News, 28 May 1930, p. 3.
“Spencer Thrills Huge Crowd.” Chicago Defender, 1 Oct. 1938, p. 1.
“Sponsor.” Pittsburgh Courier, 11 Apr 1936, p. 2.
“Stalled Plane Landed Safely in Chi Park.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Jul 1933, p. 3.
“Stepin Fetchit Made Over $62,000 Last Year.” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Apr 1936, p. A6.
“Storm Destroys Airport.” Pittsburgh Courier, 13 May 1933, p. 2.
“Study Plans for National Air Meet in Chicago.” Chicago Defender, 4 Mar. 1939, p. 3.
“Swing Music Goes to Haiti and the Youngsters Love It.” Baltimore Afro-American, 16 Oct
1937, p. 11.
“Takes Plane Ride to Inspect Troops.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Oct 1935, p. 20.
“Teaches Air-Minded.” Pittsburgh Courier, 24 Sep 1932, p. A9.
363
“Tells of Italy’s Efforts to Have Haile Selassie Return to Throne of Ethiopia.” Pittsburgh
Courier, 18 Dec 1937, p. 5.
“Texas State News.” Chicago Defender, 7 Aug 1937, p. 9.
“The Brown and Jones Girls…First Sepia Airport Hostesses.” Pittsburgh Courier, 31 Oct
1936, p. 8.
“The Colonel Gets Victory Trophy.” New York Amsterdam News, 30 May 1936, p. 11.
“The Good Will Fliers in the West Indies.” Tuskegee Messenger, Dec 1934, p. 3.
“The Goodwill Flight.” Editorial. New York Amsterdam News, 25 Aug 1934, p. 8.
“The Lindbergh Question.” Letter. Chicago Defender, 15 Oct. 1927, p. A2.
“The New Order.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 29 Nov. 1930, p. A2.
“The Race and Aviation.” Letter. Chicago Defender, 6 Oct 1934, p. 12.
“The Social Institute.” Pittsburgh Courier, 13 Mar 1937, p. 22.
“The Stuff of which Lindberghs Are Made.” Letter. Chicago Defender, 17 Sep. 1927, p. A2.
“The Week: Avout Aviation.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 26 Sep. 1929, p. 1.
“The Week: Debarring Aviators.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 3 Nov. 1928, p. 1.
“The Week: Heroes of the Air.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 21 May 1927, p. 1.
“The Week: Lindbergh in Haiti.” Baltimore Afro-American, 25 Feb 1928, p. 1.
“The Week: Nerve and Courage.” Editorial. Chicago Defender, 28 May 1927, p. B1.
“The World This Week.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Nov 1934, p. 1.
“The World This Week.” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Apr 1937, p. 1.
“The World This Week.” Pittsburgh Courier, 30 Nov 1935, p. 1.
“Thousands Cheer Fliers in Nassau, Havana and Santiago.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Nov
1934, p. 1.
“Throng at Dedication of Airship.” New York Amsterdam News, 30 Mar 1932, p. 3.
“Throngs Greet Air Aces with Tremendous Ovation.” Chicago Defender, 5 Aug 1933, p. 2.
364
“Throngs Hear Rev. Austin In Brilliant Sermon.” Pittsburgh Courier, 12 Nov. 1930, p. 4.
“Through the Lorgnette of Geraldyn Dismond.” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Jun. 1927, p. A1.
“Thrusts and Lunges.” Pittsburgh Courier, 30 May 1925, p. 9.
“To Christen Plane Oscar DePriest.” Pittsburgh Courier, 13 Jul. 1929, p. 5.
“To Fly Soon.” Chicago Defender, 9 Mar 1935, p. 13.
“To Fly to Bridge Tourney.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 May 1937, p. 24.
“To Help Us.” Chicago Defender, 16 May 1936, p. 15.
“To Honor Outstanding Pilot at Air Meet.” Chicago Defender, 19 Aug. 1939, p. 4.
“To Make Air Tour.” Chicago Defender, 26 Sep 1931, p. 22.
“To Make Leap.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Oct 1931, p. 19.
“To Open Airport Near Washington.” Baltimore Afro-American, 23 Dec. 1933, p. 3.
“To Organize Junior Birdmen.” Chicago Defender, 16 May 1936, p. 15.
“To Study.” New York Amsterdam News, 8 May 1937, p. 1.
“To Study.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 May 1937, p. 1.
“To Stunt at Texas Exposition.” Pittsburgh Courier, 21 Aug 1937, p. 23.
“Tornado Plays Prank with Airplane.” Chicago Defender, 6 May 1933, p. 3.
“Train 500 Ethiopian Pilots in Japan.” Chicago Defender, 24 Oct 1936, p. 24.
“Train for Aviation.” Letter. Chicago Defender, 3 Jul 1937, p. 12.
“Transcontinental Flyer Hops Off on First Leg of California-New York Journey.” Pittsburgh
Courier, 5 Mar. 1927, p. 1.
“Trio Fly to Cleveland to Attend Air Races.” Chicago Defender, 10 Sept 1932, p. 19.
“Tuskegee Alumni Map $12,000 Endowment Plan.” Chicago Defender, 25 Aug 1934, p. 5.
“Twenty Thousand Greet Brown Condor on Return.” Chicago Defender, 30 May 1936, p. 1.
“Two Fly from Coast to Coast in an Old Plane.” Chicago Defender, 15 Oct 1932, p. 2.
“Two Race Birdmen in Flight to California.” Chicago Defender, 19 Nov 1932, p. 11.
365
“Two Young Haitians Take to Air in Attempts to Earn Pilots’ Licenses.” New York
Amsterdam News, 9 Apr 1930, p. 1.
“Two Young Haitians Take to Air in Attempts to Earn Pilots’ Licenses.” New York
Amsterdam News, 9 Apr 1930, p. 1.
“U.S. Air Corps May Soon Admit Race Applicants.” Chicago Defender, 11 Feb. 1939, p. 16.
“U.S. Law Blocks Enlistment.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Jul 1935, p. 1.
“U.S. Marine Rule in Haiti Seen as Colossal Failure.” New York Amsterdam News, 11 Dec
1929, p. 1.
“U.S. to S. America Flyers Stop at County Airport.” Pittsburgh Courier, 25 Aug 1934, p. 1.
“Un Quart d’Heure avec Paris.” Le Matin, 29 Apr 1932, p. 2.
“Une Soirée Desire Paris.” Le Matin, 11 May 1932, p. 2.
“Up in the Air.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Nov 1932, p. 7.
“Urges Race to Become Airminded.” Chicago Defender, 7 Dec 1936, p. 17.
“Want Race Students to Learn Flying.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Apr. 1930, p. SM11.
“Wanted: Aviators and Mechanics.” Pittsburgh Courier, 9 Mar. 1929, p. A8.
“Wants to Fight Italian Bombers.” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 Jan. 1936, p. 1.
“War Department Bars Negroes from Air Corps.” Pittsburgh Courier, 26 Sept 1931, p. 3.
“War in Ethiopia by September!” Chicago Defender, 15 Jun 1935, p. 1.
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“Watchtower: John C. Robinson.” New York Amsterdam News, 23 May 1936, p. 12.
“We’re Up in the Air.” Pittsburgh Courier, 30 Nov. 1929, p. A11.
“Welcome Good Will Flyers in South America.” Pittsburgh Courier, 22 Dec 1934, p. 6.
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“West Indies Air Line Open.” New York Times, 25 Feb 1928, p. 31.
366
“Westerners Joyous at Flyers’ Success.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Aug 1933, p. 7.
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“What Will the Negro Contribute to Aviation.” Pittsburgh Courier, 25 Jun. 1927, p. A1.
“When Soldiers Meet.” New York Amsterdam News, 22 May 1937, p. 2.
“Where There’s a Will-.” Pittsburgh Courier, 14 Jun. 1930, p. 10.
“Where Trail of Plane Ended.” Pittsburgh Courier, 10 Sep 1932, p. 1.
“Who Said Ethiopia Didn’t Have Airplanes.” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 Jul 1935, p. 1.
“Who’s Who in Aviation.” Pittsburgh Courier, 31 May 1930, p. A2.
“Will a Negro Ever Fly Them.” Editorial. Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Dec 1938, p. 10.
“Will Fly Back Home.” New York Amsterdam News, 2 Mar 1932, p. 3.
“Will Rogers Joins Vidal in Boost to Aviation.” Pittsburgh Courier, 5 Jan 1935, p. 7.
“Win Contest Prizes for Literature: ‘Opportunity’s’ Annual Marked by Many Fine
Contributions.” Pittsburgh Courier, 1 May 1926, p. 1.
“Wing Way to Virgin Islands.” Chicago Defender, 5 Jan 1935, p. 3.
“Winging Way to South America.” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Nov 1934, p. 3.
“Wins Degrees.” Chicago Defender, 1 Aug 1936, p. 3.
“Woman Dives 2,000 Feet from Plane.” Pittsburgh Courier, 24 May 1930, p. 2.
“Woman Flyer Is Awarded Pilot License in Chi.” New York Amsterdam News, 2 Jul. 1938,
p. 4.
“Work Started on Big Aviation School in East.” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 Feb 1932, p. 3.
“Yesterday in Negro History.” Jet, 13 Aug. 1964, p. 11.
“Young Aviator, Pretty Wife Dead in Plane Crash.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Jul 1933, p. 7.
“Young Oklahoman Wins Flying Permit; Called Only Qualified Race Flyer in State.”
Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Jan 1937, p. 2.
367
“Young Woman Flyer Gets Pilot’s License.” Pittsburgh Courier, 2 Jul. 1938, p. 11.
“Youthful Aviator Makes Flight.” Pittsburgh Courier, 1 Feb. 1930, p. 2.
“Youths Must Prepare for Aviation Age.” Chicago Defender, 29 Oct. 1927, p. A1.
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Dismond, Binga H. “Negroes, Despite Handicaps, Make Rapid Progress in Various Fields of
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Mencken, H.L. “About Books: Wings of Ethiopia.” New York Amsterdam News, 17 Nov.
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Ottley, Roi. “Hectic Harlem.” New York Amsterdam News, 23 May 1936, p. 13.
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Robinson, John C. “Robinson’s Own Story of Epic Flight.” Chicago Defender, 6 Mar 1937,
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---. “Ethiopia Has Just Started to Fight.” The Pittsburgh Courier May 21 1938. Print.
Rouzeau, Edgar. T. “Plan Flying School for Harlem Youth.” New York Amsterdam News, 11
Apr. 1928, p. 3.
---. “Views and Reviews.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 May 1926, p. 2.
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---. “Views and Reviews.” Pittsburgh Courier, 20 Sep. 1930, p. 10.
---. “Views and Reviews.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Nov. 1930, p. 10.
---. “Views and Reviews.” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 Aug 1931, p. 10.
---. “Views and Reviews.” Pittsburgh Courier, 3 Oct 1931, p. 10.
---. “Views and Reviews.” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Jul 1934, p. 10.
---. “Views and Reviews.” Pittsburgh Courier, 8 Dec 1934, p. 12.
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---. “Views and Reviews.” The Pittsburgh Courier, 17 Aug. 1935, p. A10.
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