Today on #WorldPilotsDay, i’ll highlight black pilots who broke barriers 👨🏿✈️👩🏿✈️
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In 1921, Bessie Coleman became the first black licensed pilot.
When she developed an interest in flying, women and people of color had no flight training opportunities in the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Willa Brown was the first black woman to earn both a pilot's license and a commercial license. (Bessie got hers in France)
Marlon D. Green, was an Air Force Pilot who fought to desegregate the Airline Industry. He became the 1st black pilot hired by a major airline.
Jill E. Brown became the first female African-American pilot for a major US airline in 1978 when she joined Texas International Airlines as a pilot.
Ahmet Ali Celikten was the world's first black fighter pilot.
He served in the air forces of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. He was a veteran of World War 1 and the Turkish War of Independence.
Jesse L. Brown was the first black US Navy pilot. He flew 20 combat missions before being shot down in 1950 during the Korean War.
Eugene Jacques Bullard was the first African American military combat pilot. Often referred to as the “Black Swallow of Death” for his courage during missions, he faced incredible obstacles to become the only African-American pilot in World War 1.
He grew up in Georgia, flew for France in BOTH world wars, ran a Paris nightclub, spoke 3 languages and unironically owned a pet monkey.
Special mention to the Tuskegee Airmen became the first African American flying unit in the U.S. military and fought in World War II.
The Tuskegee Airmen epitomized courage and heroism.
Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr. is one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.
He survived 43 combat missions during World War II and is one of only a dozen remaining Tuskegee Airmen from the famed “Red Tails” fighter group still alive.
In 2001, Shawna Rochelle Kimbrell became the first Black woman to serve as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force.
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In July of 1963, 15 black girls were arrested for protesting segregation laws at the Martin theatre. Aged 12-15, they were locked in an old, abandoned stockade for 45 days without their parents knowledge. They came to be known as The Leesburg Stockade Girls,
A THREAD
The girls marched from Friendship Baptist Church to the Martin Theater, attempting to buy tickets at the front entrance, defying segregation laws. Police attacked with batons and arrested them, transporting them to a Civil War-era stockade in Leesburg, Georgia, 15 miles away.
The stockade had no beds, a broken toilet, and only hot water from a shower. The girls slept on concrete floors in sweltering heat, ate undercooked burgers, and drank from a single cup. Parents were not informed of their location for weeks, heightening their fear and isolation.
Did you know Sesame Street was originally created for black and brown inner city kids?
A THREAD
Children usually spend a lot of time watching a lot tv and technically it was sort of a babysitter. It was even worse for inner city children whose parents spent endless hours at work, thus their kids were usually exposed to long hours of mindless programs.
Lloyd Morrisett, regarded as the father of Sesame Street and vice-president of the Carnegie Corporation with a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale University developed
a special interest in children's education.
Did you know that the Oompa-Loompas In Roald Dahl's 1964 Charlie and the Chocolate were originally Black pygmies from "deepest, darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before" but was Revised in 1973 after the NAACP complained?
A THREAD
Dahl described Oompa-Loompas as a tribe of 3,000 "amiable Black pygmies" starving on green caterpillars in Africa. Wonka lured them with cocoa beans, smuggled them in crates, and housed them in his factory. The text framed them as enslaved.
Joseph Schindelman’s 1964 illustrations showed Oompa-Loompas as African pygmies in grass skirts, reinforcing racist imagery. Wonka treated them as property, even experimenting on them. This mirrored pro-slavery "positive good" narratives.
66 years ago today, Mack Parker was murdered by a white mob. It’s considered one of the last civil rights era lynchings.
THREAD
Mack Charles Parker was a 23-year-old truck driver who had returned to his hometown of Lumberton, Mississippi, after receiving a general discharge following two years in the Army.
On the morning of February 24, 1959, Parker was awakened by Marshal Ham Slade and several deputies, who alleged that he had raped a young white woman, June Walters, the night before.
More than 8000 black women in Mississippi and S. Carolina were given involuntary hysterectomies (removal of uterus) between 1920s and 80s when they went to see white doctors for other complaints.
These came to be known as ‘MISSISSIPPI APPENDECTOMIES’
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In 1961, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black sharecropper and civil rights activist, entered a Mississippi hospital to remove a benign uterine fibroid tumor. She returned to her family’s shack on the Marlow plantation to recover, unaware of the life-altering procedure she endured.
While Hamer recovered, unsettling rumors spread in the plantation’s big house. Vera Marlow, the owner’s wife & cousin of the surgeon who treated Hamer, gossiped to the cook that the surgeon had removed Hamer’s uterus during the procedure, rendering her sterile without consent.
In 1780, Paul Cuffee, his brother & 5 other Black men petitioned the Massachusetts legislature demanding the right to vote.
He won free black men the right to vote in Massachusetts on the basis of "No Taxation Without Representation."
THREAD
Paul Cuffee was born Paul Slocum on Jan. 17, 1759, Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, to Kofi Slocum, a farmer & freed slave, and Ruth Moses, a native American of the Wampanog nation.
In 1766 he & his brother John inherited a 116 acre farm from their father in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, near Dartmouth. He changed his surname to Kofi, spelled "Cuffee." The name Kofi suggests that his father came from the Ashanti or Ewe people of Ghana.