The LIT History Series is for the Legends, Innovators, and Trailblazers that have shaped our culture. I love history, and in turn, I love Black history. So much of our culture has been defined by those who’ve come before us, so I write this to capture and chronicle our narratives.
We all know about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first ever black aviators of the U.S. Armed Forces during WWII, but not many of us know about Jesse Brown, the first black pilot for the U.S. Navy.
Jesse Brown was born and raised in Mississippi and grew up in a house with no electricity and no central heating. Even still, Brown was a child prodigy and knew from age 6 that he wanted to fly. He saw a local farmer’s son fly over the sharecropper fields as he worked and dreamed of flying himself. Brown’s family and friends thought he was insane.
As WWII began, he realized there was a lack of black leadership in the military and wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt asking why there were no black commissioned officers. Six weeks later, the president had written him back and told him that change was soon to come.
By the time Jesse Brown made it to high school, he was fluent in French and had even designed an irrigation pump for an engineering firm, CNN reported. He graduated at the top of his class and went on to Ohio State University, the alma mater of his favorite athlete, Jesse Owens.
At Ohio State, he studied engineering during the day, worked on freight cars at night and fought to get in the Navy’s V-5 Aviation Cadet Training Program to be commissioned a naval aviator.
Brown wasn’t allowed to take the entrance exam for two years and constantly told he would never make it because he was black.
In an article from USA Today, his brother Fletcher recalls Jesse’s difficulties saying, “His flight trainer told him, ‘You’ll never be a Navy pilot. Before I let you become a Navy pilot, I’ll crash this damn plane and die with your black ass.’ So … I guess that was supposed to frighten him, but it didn’t. He stuck with it and got his wings.”
However, once on the naval base, he was bullied by both blacks and whites. He was racially abused by the white flight instructors and picked on by the black workers in the kitchen who resented his position, serving him only half portions in meals.
In a letter he wrote to his wife Daisy, Brown called himself an ‘earthbound crow’.
Eventually, Brown was stationed on USS Leyte and then sent to fight in the Korean War.
In 1950, while flying over a mountainous area near North Korea’s Chosin Reservoir, Jesse Brown’s plane was shot, and his fuel line was ruptured. He was hemorrhaging fuel and didn’t have a way out. He crashed landed his plane with plans to escape, but his legs were pinned inside his cockpit.
Tom Hudner, a white man from an affluent Massachusetts family and Brown’s close friend, saw Brown’s plane go down and crash-landed his own plane in an effort to save him. When a rescue helicopter arrived to pick the two of them up, it was clear that Brown wasn’t going to make it. They tried for 45 minutes to rescue him, but there was no way they could free his legs to save him.
Jesse Brown died a hero at the age of 24, leaving behind a wife and 2-year-old daughter.
Even though it was the end of his life, it was the beginning of a legacy.
Jesse’s shipmates took up a collective for his daughter and raised the equivalent of $24,000 today for her college education. Hudner was awarded the Medal of Honor and received a gift of the equivalent of $9,000 today from his hometown. He decided to give all of the money to Jesse’s wife so she could pay for college.
And in 1973, the Navy christened the USS Jesse L. Brown in his honor.
“He didn’t set out to be a hero, but that’s what he was in that he had the fortitude to go out and do what he wanted to do and he didn’t let anything stop him,” said his daughter, Pamela Knight. “I want other people to understand, especially young African-American men, if you have a dream, don’t let anyone stop you. He didn’t let anyone stop him.”
