Flying to freedom: African-American visions of aviation, 1910-1927

Between 1910 and 1927, African-Americans participated in U.S. aviation in various capacities, and during the 1920s black flyers emerged as heroes in the black press. This study documents their experiences, and looks at the cultural meaning the aviator as a hero and aviation as a symbol assumed in the rhetoric of black journalists, who often were the greatest supporters of aeronautics in their communities. Examining the views of flight they developed, it provides an analysis of their visions that is sensitive to the racial, political, and social conflicts of the time.;The study argues that the increasing strength of the press combined in 1921 with a shocking riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma (in which white rioters took up airplanes) to shatter journalists' previous lack of attention to aviation. In Tulsa's shadow, two competing views of flight emerged. One, formulated by black nationalist writers (and embodied in flyer Hubert Julian), stressed the Apocalyptic potential of the airplane. The other, shaped by journalists contributing to the popular black press (and represented by aviator Bessie Coleman), emphasized its promise for social change. Both visions, despite their differences, portrayed the aviator as a hero on a racial mission. Invoking a rhetoric known as the "jeremiad" to urge their readers toward airmindedness, journalists warned of disaster if the public did not follow aviators' lead in technological progress and prophesied a millenial age once the race took up its aeronautical mission. Reporters and editors applied this rhetoric to white aviators also, and it helped in 1927 to inform an interpretation of Charles Lindbergh's famed transAtlantic flight that was uniquely African-American. Posing a threat to the press's concept of racial mission, however, was the goal of profit. As newspapers emerged as economically viable enterprises, journalists became not only spokespeople for their race, but entrepreneurs as well, and conflict between the desire for individual profit and the ideal of group advancement was inevitable, and could at times undermine the ideal of racial mission.