Willa Brown

Willa Beatrice Brown was born on the twenty-second of January 1906 in Glasgow, Kentucky, to an African American father and a mother of Native American heritage. The family later moved north, and Brown came of age with a hunger for learning that carried her through college and into teaching, before the pull of the open sky redirected the whole course of her life.

In Depression-era Chicago she found her calling at the airfields on the city's edge, studying under and later partnering with the mechanic and aviator Cornelius Coffey. She earned her pilot's licence in the late 1930s and, in 1939, became the first Black woman in the United States to hold a commercial pilot's licence. By the early 1940s she also held an aircraft mechanic's licence, making her the first American woman to carry both.

Brown was a builder of institutions as well as a flyer. She helped found the National Airmen's Association of America to press for the admission of Black Americans into military aviation, and with Coffey ran the Coffey School of Aeronautics — a Black-owned flight academy that trained hundreds of aviators, among them men who would become Tuskegee Airmen. She served as a wartime officer in the Civil Air Patrol and was among the first Black women to run for the United States Congress.

She died on the eighteenth of July 1992 in Chicago. May the maker of pilots be honored: she opened the runway so that others of her people could rise.