Willa Brown Broke Both Race and Gender Barriers

The first Black woman to earn a U.S. pilot license trained a generation of trailblazers

By Daniel Lagiovane

Published February 24, 2025

Read Time: 3 mins

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Editor’s Note: This is part of a series honoring aviation pioneers during Black History Month.

Willa Brown was the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license in the United States and the first to become a Civil Air Patrol officer. Her efforts as a teacher and advocate also significantly contributed to the creation of the Tuskegee Airmen.

Brown was born in 1906 in Glasgow, Kentucky. At age 3, the family moved to Indiana, where integrated schools promised better educational opportunities.

After graduating from high school in Terre Haute, she enrolled in what is now Indiana State University and earned her bachelor’s degree in business in 1927. After graduation, she took a job in Gary, Indiana, as a teacher.

Education would remain a passion over much of her life, even after she moved to Chicago in the early 1930s and took on a variety of jobs: post office clerk, secretary, laboratory assistant and social worker. While in Chicago, she enrolled at Northwestern University and earned a master’s in business administration.

At the same time she was furthering her education, she was training to be a pilot. She joined the Challenger Air Pilots Association and started taking flying lessons at Chicago’s segregated Harlem Field from John Robinson and Cornelius Coffey – two key figures in the history of aeronautics. She also attended classes at the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical University, the school that Robinson and Coffey had integrated a few years earlier.

Just like everything she had done, Brown excelled, earning a master mechanic’s certificate in 1935. Three years later, she received a pilot’s license, making her the first Black woman in the United States to do so. Brown began giving flight and ground school instruction at the Harlem Field.

Willa Brown was the first Black woman in the United States to earn a pilot’s license and become a Civil Air Patrol officer. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)

Brown married Coffey in 1947 (they divorced not long after) and became the director of the Coffey School. Her efforts led the school to be selected by the Civil Aeronautics Administration as one of several Black schools to offer the Civilian Pilot Training Program.

In 1939, Brown co-founded the National Airmen’s Association of America (NAAA), whose mission was to promote participation in the aviation field and bring Black pilots into the armed forces. Brown served as the organization’s national secretary and president of the Chicago chapter. When World War II started, the United States had a serious shortage of experienced pilots. A 1939 Time Magazine article mentioned Brown, the NAAA and their proposed solution – train Black men to become pilots.

That proposal became reality with the War Training Service program that provided a pool of instructors and trainees at Tuskegee Army Airfield. According to the World War II Museum, Brown was directly responsible for training over 200 Tuskegee Airmen and instructors.

During World War II, Brown sought to join the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) but was rejected because of her race. She contributed to the war effort in other ways when she helped to organize Civil Air Patrol Squadron 613 in conjunction with the Coffey School of Aeronautics. She was the lieutenant and adjutant of the squadron, which flew anti-submarine missions, border patrols and courier services.

She continued to break ground throughout her life, including in 1946 when she became the first Black woman to run for Congress. Brown lost to the incumbent but remained active in the struggle for civil rights until her death at the age of 86 in 1992.

She is buried in the same cemetery as her heroine and fellow pioneer aviator, Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to hold a pilot’s license (obtained overseas).

Brown’s legacy lives on as an inspiration to aspiring aviators and as a trailblazer who helped pave the way for Black men and women.

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