William J. Powell

William Jenifer Powell was born on the twenty-seventh of July 1897 at Henderson, Texas, the son of an Black East Texas tenant farmer and a homemaker. The family migrated to Chicago in 1913, and Powell was raised in the Black middle-class Chicago of the inter-war period at the South Side.

He took the bachelor’s in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1922 — among the first Black bachelor’s graduates of the Illinois School of Engineering. He served the United States Army during the closing year of the European war from 1918 to 1919 as a second lieutenant of the segregated 365th Infantry of the 92nd Infantry Division and was gassed in October 1918 at the Argonne Forest offensive — a poisoning from which he never fully recovered.

He took employment in the early 1920s at the Chicago Service Station chain — a Black-owned gasoline-station-and-auto-repair chain — and operated by 1925 a chain of seven Chicago service stations of his own that he sold in 1927 to finance his entry into aviation.

He was rejected for flight instruction at every white American flight school of the period — both at Chicago and at the post-war Selfridge Field at Detroit and at Curtiss Field at Long Island — and was given his first flight instruction in 1928 at the new aviation school at Los Angeles operated by the white aviator Jeppy Davis under the Westchester airfield. Davis was the only Caucasian flight instructor of the period to take Black students at standard fee.

He was issued the Department of Commerce pilot’s licence in 1928 — among the first Black holders of the federal licence — and undertook from the close of 1928 the principal Black aviation organisational work of the American West.

He founded on the twenty-second of November 1929 the Bessie Coleman Aero Club at Los Angeles — named after Bessie Coleman (placed in this archive) — the first sustained Black aviation school and Black-aviator professional association of the United States. The Aero Club operated in the closing years of the 1920s and the 1930s a flight school, an aircraft mechanic’s school, a parachute-rigging school, and an aircraft-manufacturing operation at the corner of Avalon Boulevard and 92nd Street in South Central Los Angeles.

He trained at the Bessie Coleman Aero Club across its first decade over a hundred Black student pilots — among them James Herman Banning (placed in this archive), Marie Daugherty Dickerson, Janet Bragg (placed in this archive), and Cornelius Coffey (placed in this archive).

He published in 1934 the Black aviation manifesto Black Wings — the principal Black-aviation publishing event of the inter-war period — at the Bessie Coleman Aero Club Press at Los Angeles. The book combined a memoir of the founding of the Aero Club, a recruiting tract for Black aviation, and a programmatic statement of Black aviation’s strategic importance to the Black American future.

He died at Los Angeles on the eleventh of July 1942 of complications of the 1918 mustard-gas poisoning, at forty-four.

He is honored here as the founder of the Bessie Coleman Aero Club.