Janet Bragg

Janet Harmon Bragg was born on the twenty-fourth of March 1907 at Griffin, Georgia, seventh child of a family of African and Cherokee blood. Spelman Seminary trained her as a nurse — the registered nurse's pin came in 1929 — and Chicago gave her work in its hospitals. In 1933 she walked into the old Curtiss-Wright aeronautical school's segregated class under Cornelius Coffey and John Robinson, the only woman among some two dozen Black men, and in 1934 she paid six hundred dollars of her nurse's wages for the group's first airplane, an OX-5 International.

With the Challenger Air Pilots' Association she helped build Black aviation an airfield of its own at Robbins, Illinois, when the white fields would not have them, later flying from Harlem Airport; she took her private license in 1934 and wrote the Chicago Defender's weekly "Negro Aviation" column. The war doors closed one by one: the WASP interviewer told her she had never interviewed a colored girl for flying, and the military nurse corps had filled its quota. She kept flying.

At Tuskegee she completed the civilian pilot training coursework and passed her commercial flight test — and the white examiner refused to sign the certificate, telling her he had never given a colored girl a commercial license and did not intend to start. So in 1943 she flew the test again at Pal-Waukee field in Illinois and took what was hers: the first full commercial pilot's certificate held by an African American woman in the United States.

With her husband Sumner Bragg she ran Chicago nursing homes caring for some sixty patients until 1972; she befriended and housed a generation of Ethiopian students, and in 1955 was received in Ethiopia by Emperor Haile Selassie. She retired from the air in 1965 with some two thousand hours, told her story in Soaring Above Setbacks, and died at Blue Island, Illinois on the eleventh of April 1993, at eighty-six. Honored be Janet Bragg, who was refused the sky twice and signed her own name to it anyway.