African-American aviator who found freedom in the sky
Azellia White 1913-2019
Azellia White, who has died aged 106, overcame gender and racial discrimination to become one of the first AfricanAmerican women to qualify as a pilot, said The Daily Telegraph. She started training at the end of the Second World War – and found that flying gave her a freedom denied to her on the ground, in the Jim Crow years. “We lived in the highly segregated South, where going on foot from town to town could be dangerous,” she explained. “Instead, I could head to the airfield and take a plane to cities where I could shop and be myself.”
White was born in Texas in 1913, the daughter of a sharecropper and a midwife. Having excelled at school, she took a secretarial job, and in 1936 married her childhood sweetheart, Hulon “Pappy” White. A few years later, they moved to Tuskegee, Alabama, where he worked as a mechanic for the US Air Corp at Moton Field. At that time, black servicemen were restricted in the jobs they could be offered. But in 1939, President Roosevelt had introduced Public Law 18, a section of which called for new training programmes for black recruits – raising hopes that they’d be able to escape the kitchen and the motor pool. Two years later, the War Department announced the creation of the 99th Pursuit Squadron – an allblack flying unit, based at Tuskegee, whose members became known as “the Tuskegee Airmen”. Eleanor Roosevelt took a keen interest in this and, in 1941, the First Lady paid the airfield a visit. “To our amazement, and against the advice of the Secret Service men who’d accompanied her, she asked if she could fly with one of the pilots,” Azellia White recalled. “This handsome airman was dumbfounded when she climbed into his plane. They were gone for almost an hour!” Mrs Roosevelt was so impressed she recommended deployment of the squadron in the War. “My husband and I saw history made right at that very moment,” White said. In the next five years, 2,000 African Americans trained at Tuskegee, three-quarters became pilots; most of the rest, support crew.
Inspired by the work going on around her, White resolved to learn to fly herself, and asked her husband – who had qualified six months earlier – to teach her. “I lost myself up in the clouds,” she recalled. “It was breathtaking.” She earned her private pilot’s licence in 1946. After the War, she and her husband and two other ex-servicemen launched the Sky Ranch Flying Service, an airport and flight school for African Americans, where she continued to fly. Azellia White was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame in 2018, and in Houston, the Aviation Science Lab at Sterling High School is named in her honour. Her name, the principal said, is “a powerful reminder to our students that they can be anything they want to be, and achieve anything they want to achieve. No one can stop them.”