Today on #WorldPilotsDay, i’ll highlight black pilots who broke barriers 👨🏿✈️👩🏿✈️
—A THREAD—
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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Happy Birthday to the late Coretta Scott King. She was an author, activist, civil rights leader and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr.
She wasn’t just the wife of an American hero, she was an icon in her own right.
A THREAD!
Coretta Scott King was her high school valedictorian at Lincoln Normal School in 1945.
She played trumpet and piano, sang and participated in school musicals.
In College, at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She became active in the nascent civil rights movement; she joined the Antioch chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
64 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.
Did you know that a black enslaved man was responsible for introducing innoculation (vaccination) to America?
Onesimus, introduced the idea of vaccination based upon the African practice of inoculation in Libya,to help mitigate spread of smallpox thus saving lives
💉THREAD💉
Onesimus was an enslaved African who introduced the concept of inoculation to America and helped save hundreds of Bostonians from smallpox in 1721. But his role has hardly been told.
It began in 1716. When asked by his owner, prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather, about a scar on his forearm, Onesimus described the basics of smallpox inoculation - a practice that was common Africa (and Asia) but relatively unknown in the American colonies.
German colonizers in Namibia, due to their interest in evolutionary theory & missing links executed inmates and decapitated them.
Herero women were required to remove all flesh from the heads to create clean skulls suitable for shipment for study in German Institutes.
A THREAD
The German missionaries began working in Southern Africa in the late 1820s and experienced significant success in evangelizing and educating their converts. But toward the end of the 19th century, a new ‘gospel’ was increasingly introduced to Africa.
Germans, many indoctrinated in Social Darwinian ideas, colonized South West Africa (Namibia) in the 1880s.
They generally regarded the Herero people as primitive and frequently referred to them as 'subhuman' and 'baboons!'
On this day in 1939, Billie Holiday recorded the first great protest song of the Civil Rights Movement, 'Strange Fruit’
The Chilling Story of Strange Fruit and Billie Holiday.
A THREAD!
"Strange Fruit" was originally a poem written by Jewish-American writer, teacher and songwriter Abel Meeropol, under his pseudonym Lewis Allan, as a protest against lynchings and later set it to music.
The song soon came to Billie Holiday's attention & after so many frequent requests of that song, she closed out EVERY performance with it. The waiters would stop serving ahead of time for complete silence, the room would darken, a spotlight would shine on Holiday's face…
111 years ago today, Joseph Phillipe Lemercier Laroche, the only black passenger on RMS Titanic, died when it sank.
THREAD
Joseph Phillipe Lemercier Laroche was the son of a white French army captain and a Haitian woman who was a descendant of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of independent Haiti.
Laroche’s uncle, Dessalines M. Cincinnatus, was president of Haiti from 1911 to 1912.