James Herman Banning

James Herman Banning was born on the fifteenth of November 1899 at El Reno, Oklahoma, the son of Riley Banning — a freedman of Black-Cherokee descent who had received an Oklahoma land-rush allotment in 1893 — and Cora Banning. He was raised at the family allotment at Canton, Oklahoma and at the household at Ames, Iowa to which the family moved in 1919.

He was placed at twelve at the Oklahoma rural Coloured schools and at twenty in 1919 at the Iowa State Agricultural College — subsequently Iowa State University — at Ames, where he enrolled in electrical engineering. He left Iowa State in 1922 after two and a half years for the J. L. Fisher Garage and Auto Service at Ames — the only Iowa garage of the period to take a Black apprentice mechanic.

He was given his first flight at the Ames Municipal Airport in 1922 at twenty-three by the white aviator Raymond Fisher — the brother of J. L. Fisher — and was determined on the strength of the flight to obtain the pilot’s licence. He was rejected for instruction by every white American flight school he applied to across the closing months of 1922 and was given private instruction across 1923 and 1924 by the army Captain Lawrence E. Patterson at Ames at a fee Banning paid by labour at the Fisher Garage.

He was issued the Department of Commerce limited commercial pilot’s licence number 1,324 on the eleventh of June 1929 — the first Black American to hold a federal pilot’s licence under the new Air Commerce Act of May 1926 — and opened the Banning Flying School at Ames Municipal Airport at the close of 1929 with a single Hispano-Suiza-engine Curtiss JN-4 trainer.

He moved the Banning Flying School to Bessie Coleman Aero Club’s Black Aviator Aviation Training School at Los Angeles in 1932 under the school’s director William J. Powell (placed in this archive). He served as Bessie Coleman Aero Club chief flight instructor for the closing months of 1932.

He undertook from the close of September 1932 with the Bessie Coleman Aero Club mechanic Thomas Cox Allen the first Black transcontinental flight in American history — in an Alexander Eaglerock aircraft they purchased used for one hundred dollars cash and named the Eaglerock for the cross-country tour. The flight departed Los Angeles Municipal Airport on the eighteenth of September 1932 and arrived Roosevelt Field at Garden City, Long Island on the ninth of October 1932 — a twenty-one-day flight of approximately three thousand three hundred miles. They had no money to start the flight and raised the fuel and lodging across the route by the courtesy of the Black communities of every town at which they landed, who they later named the Flying Hobos.

He was killed at the San Diego Camp Kearny Airfield on the fifth of February 1933 — five months after the transcontinental triumph — when the aircraft in which he was a passenger nose-dived at the conclusion of a passenger flight. He was thirty-three.

He is honored here as the first Black transcontinental pilot.