Perry H. Young Jr.

Perry Henry Young Jr. was born on the twelfth of March 1919 in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the son of Perry Henry Young Sr., a tradesman who ran a dry-cleaning store and owned several garages, and Edith Lucille Young. In 1929 the family moved north to Oberlin, Ohio, seeking better schooling. As a freshman at Oberlin College, Young spent his earnings on flying lessons, soloing after only a few hours and earning his private pilot's license at twenty.

Enthralled by flight, he left college for the Coffey School of Aeronautics in Chicago to earn his commercial license. For three years racial discrimination barred him from a cockpit. Through the Civilian Pilot Training Program he became a flight instructor, and after Pearl Harbor the Army engaged him to train airmen of the 99th Pursuit Squadron. He taught more than 150 of the men who became the celebrated Tuskegee Airmen.

Peace brought no airline job at home. Young went abroad, founding a small carrier in Haiti and flying commercially in the Caribbean, amassing some 13,000 hours. New York Airways sought him out in the Virgin Islands and hired him on the seventeenth of December 1956. On the fifth of February 1957 he flew his first official run as copilot of a Sikorsky helicopter out of LaGuardia — becoming the first African American pilot hired by a regularly scheduled United States passenger airline.

Within a month he was a captain. He served New York Airways for twenty-three years, until the line ceased operations in 1979, then retired to New York, still drawn to the airfield and the company of pilots. He died on the eighth of November 1998. May his steady wings and his patience against the storm of prejudice be forever honored.