Janet Bragg

Jane Nettie Harmon was born on the twenty-fourth of March 1907 at Griffin, Georgia, the youngest of seven children of Samuel Harmon — a brick contractor and the principal Black contractor of the Griffin Spalding County brick trade — and Cordia Batts Harmon, a homemaker of the Cherokee-and-African-American community of the Griffin railroad shops. She was raised in the relatively prosperous Black-Cherokee Griffin of the post-Reconstruction Georgia.

She took the bachelor’s at the Spelman Seminary at Atlanta in 1929 in nursing — the only Black professional vocation available to her at the time of graduation in Georgia. She took employment after Spelman as a nurse at Rockford, Illinois between 1929 and 1932 and at Chicago after 1932.

She attended in October 1933 the Chicago World’s Fair Century of Progress International Exposition — where the German pilot Lina Beul gave parachute-and-aerobatic exhibition flights — and was determined on the strength of the exhibition to obtain the pilot’s licence.

She was admitted on the recommendation of Cornelius Coffey (placed in this archive) and John C. Robinson to the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical School at Chicago in 1933 — among the first three Black women admitted to the school — and completed the master’s mechanic certificate at the school in 1934. She bought across the same period the first aircraft of the Challenger Aero Club — a Piper Cub trainer at five hundred dollars — and was the principal owner of the Challenger Aero Club aircraft from 1934 onward.

She gave the Challenger Aero Club’s Piper Cub trainer the rough-airstrip use at the Robbins, Illinois Black-township airfield across the early years of 1935.

She was issued the Department of Commerce private pilot’s licence in 1935 — having completed the flight instruction at the Coffey School of Aeronautics at the Harlem Airport under Cornelius Coffey. She applied in 1942 to the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) programme of the United States Army Air Forces and was rejected on racial grounds. She enrolled instead at the Tuskegee Institute Civilian Pilot Training Program at Tuskegee Army Air Field in 1942 and was issued the commercial pilot’s licence at the close of the Tuskegee programme in 1943.

She never flew commercially — both the post-war Pan American Airways and the post-war Trans World Airlines rejected her applications on racial grounds — and continued in her nursing career across the post-war period at the Eddie Boyd nursing-home complex at Bronzeville, Chicago, eventually owning and managing the complex.

She travelled in 1955 to Ethiopia at the personal invitation of Emperor Haile Selassie I to assist in the establishment of the Black Ethiopian commercial-pilot programme, and conducted across the closing months of 1955 the principal flight-instruction work at the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force flight school at Debre Zeyit.

She died at Blue Island, Illinois on the eleventh of April 1993 of complications of cancer, at eighty-six.

She is honored here as the principal Black female pilot of the Challenger Aero Club.