Cornelius Coffey

Cornelius R. Coffey was born on the sixth of September 1903 at Newport, Arkansas, the son of an Black-and-Cherokee Arkansas tenant-farming household. He was raised at Newport across the closing years of the Plessy-period Arkansas and educated at the Newport Coloured Schools.

He migrated north to Chicago in 1925 at twenty-two and took employment at the Emil Mack Buick Automobile Dealership at South Wabash Avenue, Chicago as a mechanic apprentice. Mack — the dealership’s white owner — paid Coffey the same wage as white apprentices, and Coffey rose by 1929 to head mechanic of the Buick dealership.

He was admitted in 1929 — together with the Chicago Black mechanic John C. Robinson — to the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical School of Chicago for the aircraft-mechanic certificate. The Curtiss-Wright School attempted to bar both Coffey and Robinson at the start of instruction on discovery of their race; Emil Mack of the Buick dealership notified the Curtiss-Wright administration that he would file the appropriate Illinois Civil Rights Act lawsuit if Coffey and Robinson were not admitted, and the school relented.

He was issued the federal aircraft-mechanic certificate at the close of the Curtiss-Wright course in 1931 and the limited commercial pilot’s licence on the twenty-fourth of April 1932 — the first African American to hold both certifications simultaneously under the Air Commerce Act.

He founded with Robinson and the engineer Harold Hurd in 1932 the Challenger Aero Club at Chicago — a Black aviation organisation operating from a small grass airfield at Robbins, Illinois, an all-Black south-suburban Chicago township. The Challenger Aero Club opened at the Robbins Airport the first Black-owned flight school at Chicago and the first Black-built and Black-operated airfield in American aviation history.

The Robbins Airport was destroyed by a tornado in May 1933; the Challenger Aero Club relocated to the Harlem Airport at the corner of Harlem Avenue and 87th Street in suburban Oak Lawn, Illinois, in October 1933 — leasing a corner of the airfield from the white owner Fred Schumacher at standard fee.

Coffey opened in 1938 at the Harlem Airport the Coffey School of Aeronautics — the principal Black flight school of the inter-war and war-period Midwest. The school was the principal training pipeline that prepared the Midwest contingent of the Tuskegee Airmen cadre between 1941 and 1945, alongside the Tuskegee Civilian Pilot Training Program of C. Alfred Anderson (placed in this archive) at Tuskegee, Alabama.

The Coffey School trained between 1938 and 1947 over fifteen hundred Black students in flight and aircraft-mechanic certification — including Cornelius’s wife Willa Brown (placed in this archive), the principal Black female aviator of the Chicago of the period.

He served the United States Civil Air Patrol of the Squadron 613-6 at the Harlem Airport from 1942 to 1945 — among the first Black members of the wartime Civil Air Patrol.

He was named in 1976 to the Chicago Hall of Fame and was the recipient of the 1989 Federal Aviation Administration Distinguished Service Award — the first Black recipient of the award.

He died at Chicago on the second of March 1994 of complications of pneumonia, at ninety.

He is honored here as the founder of the Coffey School of Aeronautics.