An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 10/17/2020
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"You can understand that a qualified man must know more than just a trade. He must also be prepared to sacrifice, to work hard and to go to that country without stirring up ill feeling among the whites there."
Aviator and activist John C. Robinson was born in 1903 Florida. A self-professed childhood fan of barnstorming pilots, he showed an early aptitude for mechanics and engineering, studying at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Unfortunately laws being what they were at the time, he was unable to enroll in Chicago's Curtiss-Wright School of Aviation and instead had to take a job there as a janitor, surreptitiously sitting in on classes while the faculty pretended not to notice! He later, along with other aspiring Black pilots from Chicago, formed the Challenger Air Pilots Association, who were ultimately later able to attend Curtiss-Wright... this time as honest-to-goodness flight students. Robison himself ultimately became an instructor at Curtiss-Wright, the first such Black man in the school's history.
A student of history as well as aviation, Robinson took notice of current events (1935) when Ethiopia was preparing for war with fascist Italy --one of the earliest chapters in the unfolding of what would become World War II. Significantly, Ethiopia was the only African nation to have ever successfully resisted colonial conquest in the 19th century, and, Robinson reasoned, were such a country to then fall to the Italian invaders, it might in turn lead to a greater threat to all of Africa. He opened a flight training school in Addis Ababa and ultimately became Colonel-in-Command of the Ethiopian Air Force, commanding nearly 70 pilots and a force of 24 planes.
Unfortunately history played out exactly as Robinson predicted, and Ethiopia was conquered by Italy in 1936. Robinson saw some action himself, flying recon missions and narrowly escaping several dogfights with Italian aircraft, earning the nickname "The Brown Condor of Ethiopia." Robinson escaped back to the U.S. and parlayed his notoriety into the creation of a school of flight at Tuskegee. This laid the groundwork for the legendary Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, who in turn would ultimately be one of the catalysts toward integrating all of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Homework: Watch the video at https://thebaffler.com/salvos/hidden-fighters-crabapple
Next page - Lesson 49: Mary MacLeod Bethune