C. Alfred Anderson

Charles Alfred Anderson was born on the ninth of February 1907 at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the son of Charles Alfred Anderson Sr. — a Pennsylvania Railroad porter — and Janie Hilliard Anderson, a domestic. He was raised in the small Black community of the Main Line Pennsylvania of the Edwardian period.

He was placed at six at the Bryn Mawr public schools and was self-taught at the rudiments of automotive mechanics across his late adolescence. He took his first aircraft ride at twenty in 1927 at the Sanatoga Airfield at Stowe, Pennsylvania — a paid airplane-ride experience that planted the lifelong determination.

He was rejected by every white American flight school of the period at which he applied across 1927 and 1928 — both for being Black and for being self-taught at mechanics — and undertook the flight instruction by self-study across 1928 and 1929 with an Aeronca C-2 aircraft he purchased on credit through an Ernest Buehl-financed loan.

He was issued the Department of Commerce limited commercial pilot’s licence number 7,638 on the twentieth of April 1929 — having been instructed informally by Russell Thaw and the German aviator Ernest Buehl — and the air-transport pilot certificate number 1,841 in 1932, the first Black American to hold the air-transport rating under the Air Commerce Act.

He was the principal pilot at the close of 1932 of the new Black-Aviator-owned-and-piloted United States passenger-aircraft test flight, conducted on the twenty-second of May 1932 with the Black-Pennsylvania attorney Albert E. Forsythe — the Anderson-Forsythe pair completed in 1933 the first round-trip Black-piloted flight across the continental United States from Atlantic City to Los Angeles and back, and in November–December 1934 the first Black-piloted ‘Pan-American Goodwill Flight’ from Miami to Nassau, Havana, Kingston, Port-au-Prince, San Juan, and Caracas.

He was named in 1939 the chief flight instructor of the Civilian Pilot Training Program at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama — the federal Civilian Pilot Training Program at Tuskegee being the principal training programme that prepared the cadre of Black pilots admitted to the new United States Army Air Corps Tuskegee Army Air Field in 1941. Anderson was the principal flight instructor of the Tuskegee Civilian Pilot Training Program from 1939 to 1942 and of the Tuskegee Army Air Field primary flight training programme from 1941 to 1945.

He gave a thirty-minute flight at the Tuskegee airfield to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on the twenty-ninth of March 1941 — at the request of Mrs. Roosevelt, who had inspected the Tuskegee Institute that morning — a flight conducted over the resistance of the Secret Service detail. The Eleanor Roosevelt flight is widely understood to have been the principal political event that secured Mrs. Roosevelt’s sustained public advocacy of the Tuskegee Army Air Field’s mission across the following four years.

He trained across his Tuskegee tenure over a thousand pilots — including all but a handful of the original cadre of the Tuskegee Airmen.

He died at Tuskegee, Alabama on the thirtieth of April 1996 of complications of cancer, at eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the principal flight instructor of the Tuskegee Airmen.