Lewis A. Jackson

Lewis Akin Jackson was born on the third of October 1912 at Angola, Indiana, the son of Henry Daniel Jackson — an itinerant Methodist preacher of the Steuben County, Indiana, Methodist Episcopal Church — and Edna Akin Jackson. He was raised in the small Black household of his family across the Methodist parsonage postings of the rural Indiana of the period.

He was placed at six at the Angola public schools and at the Steuben County Coloured Schools, and at twenty at the Anderson College at Anderson, Indiana for the bachelor’s in education. He completed the Anderson College bachelor’s in 1936 cum laude.

He took the additional bachelor’s at the Indiana University at Bloomington in 1939 in administration and the doctoral degree in education at the same institution in 1950 — among the first Black Indiana University doctoral graduates.

He was given his first flight in 1932 at twenty by the white Anderson aviator Albert Forsythe — a chance encounter at the Anderson airfield. He was issued the Department of Commerce private pilot’s licence in 1935, the commercial pilot’s licence in 1937, and the federal flight instructor certificate on the twenty-fourth of November 1939 — the first African American certified flight instructor of the Civil Aeronautics Administration.

He was hired in 1940 at twenty-eight at the Tuskegee Institute Civilian Pilot Training Program at Moton Field, Tuskegee — under the supervision of C. Alfred Anderson (placed in this archive) — and rose in 1941 to chief flight instructor of the Tuskegee Pre-Flight School. He was the principal flight instructor of the Tuskegee Pre-Flight School from 1941 to 1945 — during which the Pre-Flight School trained the entire cadre of the Tuskegee Airmen primary-flight phase.

He was at the same time the principal designer of the Jackson J-1, J-2, and J-3 Cabin Biplanes — three short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft he designed and built between 1939 and 1948 at the Tuskegee airfield workshops. The Jackson J-2 of 1943 was at the time of completion the principal Black-designed-and-Black-built American aircraft.

He was named in 1956 dean of education and acting president of the Central State University at Wilberforce, Ohio — the principal historically Black college of Ohio — and rose to permanent president from 1965 to 1972. He directed Central State across the principal expansion period of the post-war Civil Rights era.

He died at Yellow Springs, Ohio on the seventeenth of June 1994 of complications of stroke, at eighty-one.

He is honored here as the first Black FAA-certified flight instructor.