In honor of Black History Month, a post about the first African-American pilot in the US Navy, Jesse L. Brown.

The story goes that when young Jesse Leroy Brown worked in the cotton fields of Mississippi beside his sharecropper father, whenever he would see a plane in the sky above, he would declare that one day, he would be a pilot. No one took him seriously.

Nevertheless, the young man, born in born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1926, made a name for himself as an athlete in high school and won honors as a math student. In 1944, Jesse Brown was enrolled as the only black student in the engineering program at Ohio State Univesity.

During his second year in college, Brown learned of the V-5 Aviation Cadet Training Program being conducted by the U.S. Navy to commission naval aviation pilots. In spite of resistance from recruiters, Brown passed the entrance exams. Brown earned his pilot wings in October 1948 and was assigned to Fighter Squadron 32 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Leyte in January 1949.

With the outbreak of the Korean War, Leyte was ordered to the Korean Peninsula arriving in October 1950. Brown, an ensign, flew 20 combat missions before his F4U Corsair was shot down and crashed on a remote mountaintop on December 4, 1950 during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. Brown died of his wounds despite the efforts of wingman Thomas J. Hudner Jr., who intentionally crashed his own aircraft in a rescue attempt. Jesse Brown was posthumously awarded Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart Medal, and the Air Medal. For his rescue attempt, Hudner was awarded the Medal of Honor. 

The Knox-class frigate USS Jesse L. Brown (FF-1089) was named in his honor, as was the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center, in Chicago.

Jesse Leroy Brown: First African American Navy Fighter Pilot

Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.