C. Alfred Anderson

Charles Alfred Anderson was born on February 9, 1907, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the son of Iverson and Janie Anderson. Drawn to flight from boyhood, he came of age when segregation barred Black students from nearly every flight school in America. Undeterred, he saved and borrowed to buy his own aircraft in 1929 and, with little formal instruction, largely taught himself to fly — earning his private pilot's license that same year.

In 1932 Anderson became the first African American to hold an air transport pilot license. With Dr. Albert Forsythe he made pioneering long-distance flights, including the first round-trip transcontinental journey by Black aviators and a celebrated 1934 Pan-American goodwill tour in a plane christened the Booker T. Washington. These flights carried a quiet, insistent argument: that skill and courage know no color line.

Recruited to Tuskegee Institute in 1940, Anderson became chief civilian flight instructor of the Civilian Pilot Training Program and, as the effort grew into the Tuskegee Army Air Field, the founding instructor of the airmen who would become legend. His students named him "Chief." In April 1941 he flew First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt over Alabama — a flight so publicly persuasive it helped secure the program's future.

For decades he trained pilots at Tuskegee, earning across the nation the title "Father of Black Aviation." He died on April 13, 1996, in Tuskegee, Alabama, at the age of eighty-nine. Chief Anderson lifted a generation into the sky and taught a nation that the horizon belongs to all who dare to reach it.