Storming the Heavens: African Americans and the Early Fight for the Right to Fly

by Gerald Horne

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African-American women shaped the U.S. effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this story and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African-Americans to gain the right to fly. This struggle involved pioneers like Bessie Coleman, who traveled to World War I era Paris in order to gain piloting skills that she was denied in her U.S. homeland; and John Robinson, from Chicago via Mississippi, who traveled to 1930s Ethiopia where he was the leading pilot for this beleaguered African nation as it withstood an invasion from fascist Italy, became the personal pilot of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie and became a founder of Ethiopian Airways, which to this very day is Africa's most important carrier. Additionally, Horne adds nuance to the oft told tale of the Tuskegee Airmen but goes further to discuss the role of U.S. pilots during the Korean war in the early 1950s. He also tells the story of how and why U.S. airlines were fought when they began to fly into South Africa―and how planes from this land of apartheid were protested when they landed at U.S. airports. This riveting story climaxes with the launching of the Soviet satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 which marked a new stage in the battle for aerospace and helps to convince the U.S. that the centuries-long fixation on the "race race" was hampering the new challenge represented by the "space race." This conflict was unfolding as the battle to desegregate public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas was spotlighting, globally, the bleeding wound that was Jim Crow and sheds light on how and why depriving African-Americans of skills and education was causing the nation to fall behind. Thus, in this embattled context, barriers are broken and African-Americans who once endured inferior conditions on planes and in airports and in airport manufacturing facilities alike, gained added impetus in their decades long struggle to win the right to fly.

275 pages, Paperback

Published March 6, 2018

About the author

Dr. Gerald Horne is an eminent historian who is Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. An author of more than thirty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews, his research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations, war and the film industry.

Reviews

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a topic I had not thought about before. I was aware of the Tuskegee Airmen but I thought it was just the United States Army that would not let black men fly military planes. I was surprised to learn that in the early days of flight black people were prohibited the right to fly. These black men and women had to go to Europe or Africa to learn to fly and be employed as pilots.

The author tells the story of the early black aviators such as Bessie Coleman who went to France during WWI to learn to fly. Home also tells in detail the story of John Robinson who left Mississippi and traveled to Ethiopia in the 1930 to learn to fly. He fought against Italy when they attacked Ethiopia. He was the pilot for Emperor Halle Selassie and then went on to found the Ethiopian Airways which still exist today. Home also tells of the battles black pilots had to fight to be employed as pilots in the United States. The author also briefly reviewed the list of black aviation inventors and their contribution to aviation. It is yet another shameful story of our country.

I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. The book is six hours and thirty-eight minutes. Bill Andrew Quinn does a good job narrating the book. Quinn is a voice-over artist and well-known audiobook narrator.

[LuAnne Feik · Rating 5 out of 5]

In STORMING THE HEAVENS, Chicago is the "early cradle" of Black aviation. I remember O'Hare Airport as a shack, runway, and windsock near where my white mother drove her two young daughters to see planes take off and land in the 1950s. Like my mother Dr. Gerald Horn recognizes aviation's history needs to go beyond Tuskegee Institute's Airmen to include the black female pilots, such as Bessie Coleman and Willa Brown, who stimulated African American interest in aeronautics. Their deeds and attractive appearances gained newspaper publicity and, Horne concludes, enabled them to enter "a field dominated by men."
If African American history reveals the influence of women on aviation, it also shows today's young males and females of all colors how advances in technology create career opportunities at home and abroad. Black pilots realized aviation enabled them to both escape and challenge Jim Crow's segregation in white America. Horne notes, "Many U.S. Negroes were able to take advantage of this incipient globalization." They found foreigners willing to train them and risked aviation's early dangers to "refute the naysayers who believed an ability to adapt to new technologies was beyond their competencies."
During World War II, one Tuskegee Airman, Virgil Richardson, observed, "It seems everybody has respect for any individual, white or black, who can fly a plane." But after the war, the black servicemen who had mastered new skills and defeated enemies of democracy returned to the same old segregated restrooms, water fountains, restaurants, hotels, neighborhoods, and southern white colleges. Airplane manufacturers refused to hire them. Black passengers were unwelcome on civilian airlines, and there were no black stewards or stewardesses. To avoid racial harassment and Jim Crow attitudes and laws, some black pilots chose to live outside the U.S., even in the Soviet Union and China.
In 1957, a little Soviet Sputnik satellite demonstrated something was wrong with the U.S. system. Prior to Sputnik, U.S. diplomats knew discrimination against minorities at home strained relations with non-white majorities in foreign countries. African American columnist, Gordon Hancock, summarized, "With every Russian giving his best and with only the whites of our country giving their best, we can never overtake Russia in the missile and space race." When we see government officials, business executives, and academic authorities in their 60s and 70s, they all are white men. Generations of intellectual input from blacks and women have been lost. Horne concludes STORMING THE HEAVENS by observing, "...the deleterious import of seeking to bar African Americans from modernity and the future itself has yet to be learned altogether, even as our small planet faces even stiffer challenges." Women like my mother who formed an aviation club in the Chicago high school where she taught until 1976, as well as today's women, say, "Amen."

[Davon Peoples · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read a lot of stuff that’s not mainstream that would get overlooked in history . I thought A.A was in the aviation field after their efforts in the war but even after that it was still hard for them in aviation.

[Gail Johnson, Ph.D · Rating 5 out of 5]

As disorganized as Gerald's books can be, in this book, "Storming the Heavens," I found it to be a little more organized. A good book on black aviation history and the prerequisites needed to be a pilot.