A contemporary and colleague of Willa Brown, Janet Harmon Waterford Bragg was the first black woman to earn a commercial pilot’s license. She had to try a second time in Chicago because the examiner in Tuskegee, Alabama refused to issue a license to a “colored girl.” She was a founder and charter member of the Challenger Aero Club, which eventually led to the National Airmen’s Association of America and the Coffey School of Aeronautics.
Bragg also promoted the field of aviation in the 1930s through a regular column in the Chicago Defender newspaper.
Born the youngest of seven children in Georgia, Bragg moved to Illinois to live with her sister and work as a nurse after graduating from Spelman College. She decided that she wanted to learn to fly after seeing a billboard that read “Birds learn to fly. Why can’t you?” She was the only woman in a class with 24 black men at Curtiss Wright Aeronautical School in Chicago. The school was a ground school and had no means of offering flight training. She used the money she earned from working as a nurse to purchase a plane of her own and rent it out to other pilots.
Since black pilots were restricted from using white airports, Bragg along with several of her classmates and aviation instructors formed the Challenger Aero Club and built an airfield in the all-black town of Robbins, Illinois. In 1931, the Challenger club began an annual flyover at Chicago’s Lincoln Cemetery to honor Bessie Coleman.
~The Fresh
Read More:http://www.therefresh.co/2018/03/15/bessie-willa-and-janet-unsung-heroines-in-aviation-history/
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