Marlon Green

Marlon Dewitt Green was born on the sixth of June 1929 at El Dorado, Arkansas, the son of McKinley Green — an Arkansas saw-mill worker — and Lucy Green, a domestic. The family moved to Lansing, Michigan in 1937 and he was raised in the small Black community of the Lansing automobile-industry belt.

He was placed at six at the Lansing public schools and at sixteen at the Lansing Eastern High School. He took the bachelor’s at the Xavier University of Louisiana at New Orleans in 1949 — among the first generation of post-war Xavier University graduates.

He was admitted in 1949 to the United States Air Force Aviation Cadet programme — under the post-Truman-Executive-Order-9981 desegregated Air Force — and completed the Cadet flight programme in 1950. He flew across the closing year of the Korean War as a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber pilot of the Strategic Air Command in the Pacific theatre.

He served the United States Air Force across the post-Korean-War period from 1953 to 1957 as a flight instructor at Selma Air Force Base, Alabama and at Vance Air Force Base, Oklahoma, accumulating over three thousand hours of multi-engine flight time.

He applied at the close of his Air Force service in 1957 to over a hundred United States commercial passenger airlines — including the principal four-engine jet operators American Airlines, Pan American Airlines, United Airlines, Trans World Airlines, Eastern Airlines, Delta Air Lines and Northwest Orient Airlines — and was rejected by every one of the applications. The standard rejection letter cited his Black race as the disqualifying factor.

He applied in 1957 to Continental Airlines for a pilot position. He photographed his application photograph and left the race-identification block deliberately blank, and was on the strength of the application invited to the Continental Airlines flight-evaluation programme at the Denver corporate hangar in November 1957. He scored highest in the evaluation cohort. Continental nevertheless rejected him on the post-evaluation disclosure of his race.

He filed on the eighth of November 1957 a formal complaint with the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Commission against Continental Airlines under the 1957 Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. The complaint progressed across the following seven years through the Colorado Supreme Court, the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, the United States Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court — where the case Colorado Anti-Discrimination Commission v. Continental Air Lines, Inc., 372 U.S. 714 (1963), was decided unanimously on the twenty-second of April 1963 in Green’s favour, holding that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act applied to interstate airline employment and that Continental had unconstitutionally discriminated.

Continental Airlines was ordered by the Court to hire him as a pilot and did so on the seventeenth of February 1965 — the first African American pilot hired by a major United States passenger jet airline.

He served Continental Airlines as a first officer and captain for twelve and a half years until his retirement on the twentieth of November 1978.

He died at Denver on the six of July 2009 of complications of a heart attack, at eighty.

He is honored here as the first Black pilot at a major American jet airline.