Willa Brown

Willa Beatrice Brown was born on the twenty-second of January 1906 at Glasgow, Kentucky, the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister and a teacher of the rural Black-Kentucky community. The family migrated to Terre Haute, Indiana around 1920, and she was raised there through her secondary education.

She took the bachelor’s in business at the Indiana State Teachers College at Terre Haute in 1927 — among the first Black bachelor’s graduates of the institution. She took the master’s in business at the Northwestern University in Chicago in 1937.

She took employment in the closing years of the 1920s as a teacher at the Roosevelt High School at Gary, Indiana and at the Roosevelt Junior College at Chicago, and in the early 1930s as a social worker at the Black Wabash YWCA at Chicago.

She was given her first flight in 1934 by the Chicago Black mechanic Cornelius Coffey (placed in this archive) at the Harlem Airport in Oak Lawn, Illinois. She enrolled at the Aeronautical University of the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical School at Chicago at the close of 1934 for the master’s in aeronautics, completing it in 1937 — the first African American woman to hold the master’s in aeronautics from the Aeronautical University.

She was issued the Department of Commerce private pilot’s licence on the twenty-second of June 1937 at the close of the Curtiss-Wright course — the first African American woman to hold a federal pilot’s licence in the United States — and the commercial pilot’s licence in 1938. She married Cornelius Coffey in 1937 — they later divorced in 1947.

She co-founded with Coffey and Enoch P. Waters of the Chicago Defender newspaper in 1939 the National Airmen’s Association of America at Chicago — the principal Black-aviator professional association of the period — and served as the Association’s national secretary from 1939 to 1942. The Association conducted the principal lobbying effort that secured the inclusion of Tuskegee Institute in the federal Civilian Pilot Training Program of 1939–1940 and the eventual creation of the Tuskegee Army Air Field in 1941.

She was the principal flight instructor at the Coffey School of Aeronautics at the Harlem Airport across the war period from 1941 to 1945 and was named in 1942 the federal coordinator of the United States Civil Aeronautics Authority Civilian Pilot Training Program for Black trainees in the Chicago region — the first African American officer of the federal Civil Aeronautics Authority.

She was the first Black member of the Civil Air Patrol Illinois Wing on the eighteenth of June 1942 as a first lieutenant of the Squadron 613-6 at the Harlem Airport. She held the rank of lieutenant of the Civil Air Patrol until 1947.

She stood unsuccessfully for Congress from the First Congressional District of Illinois on the Republican ticket in 1946 — the first Black woman to stand for Congress from Illinois.

She died at Chicago on the eighteenth of July 1992 of complications of stroke, at eighty-six.

She is honored here as the first Black woman commercial pilot.