William J. Powell -- USA

William J. Powell was born in Henderson Kentucky on 27 July 1897.  His family soon moved to Chicago where he attended school. In 1914 at the age of 17 Powell was accepted into the University of Illinois Engineering, he was a top student and musically talented.  

But his studies were put on hold when World War I broke out and Powell left school to serve in the racially segregated 370th Illinois Infantry as a lieutenant.  After surviving a poison gas attack while serving in France, Powell moved back to Illinois to finish his degree and to recuperate from the damage done to his health.  Although he did complete his degree, his health suffered from the gas attack, and it’s likely contributed to his early death.  

All flight schools in the area and the Army Air Corps rejected him, but he persevered and in 1928 he was accepted at the Los Angeles School of Flight.  Within four years he was licensed as a pilot, navigator and an aeronautical engineer.  He soon gained prominence in the Los Angeles aviation community.  As a tribute to Bessie Coleman, the first licensed Black female aviator, he started the Bessie Coleman Aero Club and the Bessie Coleman Flying School in Los Angeles.  Powell believed African Americans should become involved at the early stages in this new field of aviation.  He did everything possible to bring black aviation into public awareness, William formed Bessie Coleman Aero, the nation’s first black owned aeroplane manufacturing company. 

In his book "Black Wings," he wrote, "I do not ally myself with the Negro who begs a White man for his job.  I ally myself with that young progressive Negro who believes he has the brain, the ability, to carve out his own destiny."  In 1929, during a visit by Chicago Congressman Oscar DePriest, the nation’s only black representative, Powell and fellow pilot Herbert Banning flew a plane above the parade.  They named their plane the Oscar DePriest in honour of Los Angeles’s distinguished visitor.  The next day, Susan Hancock, the mother in law of Booker T. Washington, and an investor in Bessie Coleman Aero, officially christened the Oscar DePriest. Powell then took Congressman DePriest for a flight over Los Angeles.  The Congressman, noting that this was the first occasion he had been in a plane piloted by an African American, endorsed Bessie Coleman Aero and urged local people to invest in the company.

In 1931 Powell organised an all Negro air show for the Club in Los Angeles, it drew 15,000 visitors, Powell built his own flying school and workshop.  He wasn't an aerial showman or a dramatic public figure, his book was filled with down-to-earth technical detail.  Bessie Coleman Aero collapsed during the first few years of the Great Depression, then in 1934 Powell created a second firm he called Black Wings.  He also published a journal dedicated to aviation in the Black Community titled, Craftsman Aero News and wrote a book titled Black Wings, a semi-biographical account of how he came to become a pilot.

William J. Powell died in 1942, but he lived to see his work bear fruit through the Tuskegee Airman Unit of black fighter pilots.  What he didn't live to see was a world where black airline pilots, and then black astronauts, were no longer unusual.