Storming the Heavens by Horne Gerald;

Author:Horne, Gerald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Classic Press
Published: 2018-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Colonel Benjamin O. Davis. Air base at Rametti, Italy.

(Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs)

CHAPTER 6

MORE TURBULENCE

In early 1950, Claude Barnett and his spouse, the actor and singer Etta Moten, were visiting Haiti. At the time, the island was just 4.5 hours from Miami by air, with a stop in Cuba or Jamaica, and flights took off and landed daily at a round-trip cost of $110. While there, they encountered James Plinton, a former Tuskegee Airman who was notorious for flying his plane so low that he terrorized the earthbound. After the war, Plinton, a college graduate, tried to start an aircraft company in Liberia, but the venture collapsed when Pan Am and Firestone Rubber—the latter being the giant of that nation’s economy—balked at training African pilots. He then moved to Haiti and started an innovative dry-cleaning business. According to a dazzled Barnett, Plinton, with his staff of 20 Haitians, had “one of the most successful businesses imaginable.” “He still flies an airplane which he use[s] to pick up and deliver garments to the various towns within a range of 25 miles,” reported the newsman.1

Barnett was surprised to find so many African Americans on the island, all “doing worthwhile things” as they reveled in the many “possibilities” offered there. Barnett claimed that the Haitian president told him that “he was especially anxious to have American Negro business people come to Haiti.” In addition to Plinton, the Barnetts spotted other Negroes such as Giles Hubert, formerly of the faculty at Fisk University; James Johnston of Seattle, a forester trained at the University of Washington; Elle Griffin of Massachusetts, then with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and Griffin’s UNESCO colleague, Barrington Dunbar. Also present on the island were Edzier Carter, an artist from Chicago, and many more.2

As this episode involving Barnett suggests, aviation provided a unique form of upward mobility for African Americans. Piloting was a fungible skill that could be deployed in Africa as easily as in the Caribbean, and planes could easily transport those willing to depart the land of Jim Crow to places far away from its ordinary terror. Abroad, U.S. Negroes also could exert influence on independent nations, who could then pressure Washington in anti-colonial and anti-racist ways. Additionally suggestive of aviation’s increasing grip on the African American imagination was the name Chicago publisher John H. Johnson’s gave to his wildly popular weekly magazine launched in 1951. Appropriately, the affluent Black businessman called the publication Jet.3

As the walls of Jim Crow began to crack and crumble, Plinton, who organized a successful airline venture in Ecuador after his sojourn in Haiti,4 eventually was hired by a U.S. airline.5 Tellingly, a few years after he left Liberia, that neo-colonial nation hired yet another African American aviator—Leon Jordan of Kansas City—to supervise the training of its first pilots.6 Around the same time, Pan Am’s Juan Trippe, in a bow to commercial if not racial reality, resumed his active business interests in Liberia, initiating direct flights between New York and Monrovia.

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