’A Rare Bird….’: Race, Masculinity, and the Community of Pilots in Postwar America

In the summer of 1969, one year after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. sparked race riots across the United States, Flying magazine published an article titled: “Can a Black Man Fly?” Despite the potentially provocative title, the author clearly had no doubts whether African Americans could master the complex technology of flight; that issue had been decisively settled during World War II by the famously successful Tuskegee Airmen. Instead, he wondered whether or not they were welcomed – or even allowed to enter – into the informal yet closely knit “community of pilots” that dominated aviation in postwar America. His question reflected a stark demographic reality: most civilian aviators at the time were white. Although the federal government did not track the race of pilots, anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. During the decades following World War II, non-white pilots were almost entirely absent from the pages of mainstream aviation publications. And in an interview conducted years after Flying published this article, Jesse Lee Brown, an African American who earned his private pilot’s license shortly after returning home from the Vietnam War, joked that he was considered “a rare bird” wherever he landed during flights around Alabama and neighboring states in the early 1970s. Even today, some estimates suggest that fewer than five percent of civilian pilots are non-white minorities. The scarcity of non-white pilots is easy to explain in the immediate postwar era when racial segregation was legal in much of the country. Economics played a role, too. Private flying is expensive, and many minorities – who historically had lower incomes than their white counterparts – could not afford to become pilots even if they wanted to. However, formal barriers fell in the 1960s, informal attitudes regarding race began to change, and the economic prospects for minorities improved, yet private flying remained a mostly white activity. Why? In addition to being mostly white, the community of pilots was also overwhelmingly male. In a book-length project nearing completion, I argue that postwar private fliers consciously created a culture that celebrated the mastery of technology as a hallmark of American masculinity. This, in turn, created an atmosphere in the cockpit and around the airport that, at the very least, made those who did not conform to these norms feel like unwelcome outsiders. This conference paper represents the genesis of my next research project, in which I will examine the experiences of non-white pilots, especially African Americans. R.W. Connell’s path-breaking book Masculinities (1995) argues that different versions of masculinity, embraced by various subgroups of society, coexist side-by-side. This suggests that the masculine culture of postwar private aviation I describe in my first project was actually a form of white masculinity, created and defined by white males. Informed by Connell’s conclusions, as well as more recent work in the history of technology described in Amy Sue Bix’s bibliographic essay and other chapters in Bruce Sinclair, ed., Technology and the African-American Experience (2004), I argue that differing definitions of masculinity, as well as deep-rooted social and cultural expectations regarding who is (and is not) a pilot, help explain the longstanding dearth of non-white participants in private flying. This in turn helps shed light on the complex relationship amongst technical expertise, gender, and race. Sources include the postwar experiences of former Tuskegee Airmen, records and oral history interviews related to the three largest organizations for African-American fliers in the U.S., articles from aviation magazines with a mostly white audience of licensed fliers, and popular publications aimed at minority, non-pilot audiences such as Ebony, Jet, and Black Enterprise

Fiction Fix 10

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Fighting and writing: journalists and the 1916 Easter Rising

The relationship between journalists and the Irish rebellion of Easter 1916 is a complex one. While the Rising was led in large part by a miscellany of poets, editors and journalists (many of whom feature prominently in the Rising’s historiography) many lesser-known journalists acted as planners and participants in the insurrection. As well as assessing the contribution of these lesser-known journalists to the events of 1916 and the Rising’s impact on journalistic life in Dublin, it explores how a representative organisation – the Irish Journalists’ Association – acted as a cover for the clandestine insurgent-related activities of many journalists. It finds that the IJA played a key role in facilitating the expression of radical views by this cohort of journalists who could not express their radicalism through their everyday posts on the mainstream media and, by so doing, it played a key, though hitherto unacknowledged, role in the events of Easter 1916

To the Ice: George Bird Grinnell\u27s 1887 Ascent of Grinnell Glacier

This article discusses a climbing expedition undertaken by U.S. conservationist George Bird Grinnell to ascend what would come to be known as Grinnell Glacier in Montana. Grinnell’s efforts to establish Glacier National Park are detailed. Grinnell’s previously unpublished descriptions of the glacier and its surrounding area are analyzed by the author

How the city of Indianapolis came to have African American Policemen and Firemen 80 years before the modern civil rights movement.

This study explores a series of events that occurred in the spring of 1876. The relationship between the Indianapolis city government, the Marion County Courts, the Indianapolis Police Department, and the African American community came together to usher in changes never before envisioned. The Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) was formed in 1855, then disbanded 12 months later in a political dispute. From 1857-to-1876, the IPD was all white. These changes took place as the Reconstruction era was coming to a close. The first Ku Klux Klan was at its apex, terrorizing black communities, and Jim Crow was coming into its own. There have been at least two dissertations written on the Indianapolis Police Department and several books explore the rise of the Indiana KKK and its interactions with the IPD

Superpower Relations, Backchannels, and the Subcontinent

In his 1978 memoirs, President Nixon claimed, “By using diplomatic signals and behind-the-scenes pressures we had been able to save West Pakistan from the imminent threat of Indian aggression and domination. We had also once again avoided a major confrontation with the Soviet Union.”[1] Kissinger’s far more detailed chapter on “the tilt,” in the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years, complements and largely corroborates Nixon’s. Kissinger argued that Nixon did not want to “squeeze Yahya” and tried to put forward a neutral posture to the bloodshed in East Pakistan so as not to encourage secessionist elements within an ally, Pakistan, which was divided into two wings over 1,000 miles apart astride India.[2] Above all, before his secret trip to China in July 1971, Kissinger wanted to preserve the special channel to the P.R.C., and he saw three obstacles to handling the situation in South Asia: “the policy of India, our own public debate, and the indiscipline of our bureaucracy.” Kissinger stressed that the U.S. attempted to restrain India by making clear American opposition to Indo-Pakistani conflict and attempting to force the Soviet Union to control their ally, India. Nevertheless, the two South Asian countries marched towards conflict following a string of natural disasters in East Pakistan (later the independent nation of Bangladesh), an election loss for Pakistan President Yahya Khan to Mujib Rahman, and Yahya’s subsequent crackdown in East Pakistan against Bangladeshi independence. [1] Nixon, RN, p.530. [2] Nixon famously wrote by hand on a memo of April 28, 1971, on “Policy Options Towards Pakistan: “To all hands. Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.” Aijazuddin correctly notes that the language did not originate with the President, but actually with Alexander Haig, who wrote in a cover memo, “Henry has suggested you could include a note to the effect that you want no actions taken at this time which would squeeze West Pakistan.” The cover memo is in Aijazuddin, The White House and Pakistan, p.241. The longer memo from Kissinger to the President in Ibid, pp.242-247; and FRUS, IX, pp.94-98