Brown, Willa, 1906-1992

Willa Beatrice Brown January 22, 1906, Glasgow, Kentucky – July 18, 1992, Chicago, Illinois; 1927, she graduated from Indiana State Teachers College with a degree in business. She received an M.B.A. from Northwestern University in 1937; worked as a high school teacher in Gary, Indiana, and a social worker in Chicago; decided to learn to fly, studying with Cornelius Coffey; In 1938, she became the first African American woman who earned a private pilot's license in the United States; Later, Brown and Coffey married and established the Coffey School of Aeronautics at Harlem Airport in Chicago, where they trained black pilots and aviation mechanics; Together with Cornelius Coffey and Enoch P. Waters, Willa Brown helped form the National Airmen's Association of America in 1939; continually lobbied the government for integration of black pilots into the segregated Army Air Corps and the federal Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP); Brown became the coordinator for the CPTP in Chicago; Willa Brown eventually became the coordinator of war-training service for the Civil Aeronautics Authority and later was a member of the Federal Aviation Administration's Women's Advisory Board. She was the first black female officer in the Civil Air Patrol and the first black woman to hold a commercial pilot's license in the United States