In honor of Black History Month, an updated repost 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.