Cornelius Coffey

Cornelius Robinson Coffey was born on the sixth of September 1903 in Newport, Jackson County, Arkansas, the son of Henry Coffey and Ida Wright Coffey. A boyhood ride in an aircraft around 1916 fixed his purpose, and in 1925 he left Arkansas for Chicago to master the mechanics of flight in a era that told Black Americans the sky was not theirs.

Barred by segregation from formal aviation programs, Coffey and his friend John C. Robinson taught themselves, building engines and a small airplane and learning to fly by their own hand. When the Curtiss-Wright School of Aeronautics rejected them for their race, they pressed until its doors opened, and both graduated among the top of their class. In 1932 Coffey became a certified aircraft mechanic, and he stands in the record as the first African American to hold both a mechanic's license and a pilot's license at once.

With Robinson he helped raise a Black-owned airfield at Robbins, Illinois, and co-founded the Challenger Air Pilots' Association. In 1938 he established the Coffey School of Aeronautics at Harlem Airport, south of Chicago at 87th Street and Harlem Avenue in Oak Lawn, Illinois. From 1938 to 1945 more than a thousand students trained under his instruction, and many went on to serve among the Tuskegee Airmen.

Honored with the Dwight H. Green Trophy, inducted into aviation halls of fame, and remembered in a federal air navigation fix bearing his name, Coffey died in Chicago on the second of March 1994. He opened the sky for those who came after, and the horizon still carries his name.