The Man Called Brown Condor

by Thomas E. Simmons

  Booths had been set up by church groups to sell sandwiches, cookies, cakes, ice tea and soft drinks. Mr. Hughes was to get ten percent of the proceeds. Several churchwomen walked through the crowd selling chances for a plane ride with Colonel Robinson.

  Chairs had been set up on the flat bed of a truck decorated with red, white, and blue bunting. Charles and Celeste Cobb were introduced and seated there with various dignitaries who took turns making short speeches and announcements. Among the white citizens seated were Gulfport Mayor, J. W. Milner, and Dr. Cox, president of Gulf Park College who also taught flying at the all-girl school. John, uncomfortable in his uniform, was seated beside Mayor Milner.

  Speaking last, John made a short speech thanking those present for honoring him with such a homecoming. There was much applause. It was then time for the drawing for the airplane rides.

  A lady from the AME church climbed up the steps to the platform and held out a large hat box filled to the brim with tickets. John reached into the box and pulled out a ticket for the first ride. When he read the number there was a squeal from the crowd as a young woman ran forward holding the matching number ticket tightly in her hand. The crowd applauded and then roared with laughter when a man at the edge of the platform recognized the winner and called out, “My goodness, Colonel Robinson, you be careful! That’s my daughter.”

  John smiled down at the man. “I certainly will, Mr. Gaston.”

  The crowd standing around the blue and silver-gray Stinson parted to allow John and his passenger through. They watched with intense interest as the colonel made a last inspection of the craft before helping a very excited Julia Gaston into the plane, securing her seat belt and closing the passenger door. He asked the onlookers to move away from the plane, climbed into the pilot’s seat, and closed the door. Checking to make sure the area was clear, he primed the engine and engaged the starter. The propeller turned several revolutions before the engine roared to life exhaling a cloud of blue smoke from oil accumulated in the lower cylinders of the radial engine. The blast from the propeller scattered those standing behind the plane as it began to taxi. Miss Gaston waved frantically at her friends. The crowd moved to the edge of the grass runway and grew silent as John wheeled the plane into the wind. The engine thundered as the plane began its takeoff roll. Several young boys ran chasing after the graceful ship. The Stinson lifted into the air, the people all waving and clapping their hands. Standing on the speaker’s platform, tightly clutching the arm of Charles Cobb, Celeste felt both immense pride and trembling fear as her son’s plane roared past.

  John carried his passenger south over the shore then circled the town. A few minutes later he was back over the field. Before landing he made a long, fast, low pass down the field to the great approval of those gathered below. He then brought the Stinson around on final approach, lowered the flaps and made a graceful landing. Slowing quickly, he taxied back to the parking area.

  For a dollar and a half a piece, John flew eager passengers, four at a time, all that afternoon, including Mayor Milner, Dr. Cox, and a slightly reluctant Mr. Gaston. Finally, he took his quietly terrified momma and his proud and thrilled daddy for a gentle flight at sunset, giving them their first aerial view of the beautiful coastline. John pointed out their house and the G&SI railroad shop where his daddy worked. His momma closed her eyes for the landing.

  Those who were there that day remembered it as a grand occasion, outdone, perhaps, only by the brief stop that year of the presidential train. During his short appearance and speech, given from the observation platform of the club car, Franklin Roosevelt, campaigning for re-election, assured the crowd gathered at the Gulfport Railroad Station that the nation’s dreadful economic problems were being solved by government spending and that America would never become involved in another war in Europe should one occur.

  Chapter 25

  Hard Choices

  BY LATE 1936, JOHN, ALONG WITH HIS PARTNER CORNELIUS COFFEE, moved the John Robinson National Air College to Poro College in Chicago. The move was made at the invitation of Annie Turnbo Malone, one of the most successful businesswomen in America. She had started the first cosmetics company devoted exclusively to the development, manufacture, and sale of beauty products designed for Negro women. She moved the original Poro College from St. Louis to Chicago because of the larger Negro population there. The huge main Poro College building served not only as the cosmetics development and manufacturing plant, but as a business school to train young Negro women in the management and sale of her products. Annie Malone, then a woman of “a certain age,” was a pioneer in the field of black entrepreneurship and recognized in John Robinson his achievements in aviation and his ability to set an example for others. It is not unreasonable to say that she, like women of all ages who met him, was charmed by his sometimes daring yet always gracious manner.

  The separate building on the Poro College campus where the Robinson aviation school was located was a two-story stone building that faced South Parkway. Entrance was gained through an iron gate. As you entered, John had a large office to the left. His secretary, Rosie Morgan, had a small adjoining office. Classrooms occupied the rest of the first floor and the entire second floor. The school taught both flying and mechanics. Actual flying instruction was carried out at Harlem field located south of Chicago Municipal Airport. The school had about fifty students and six instructors. Most did double duty as classroom and flight instructors. Coffey oversaw the aviation mechanics classes on the second floor where students practiced on actual aircraft engines. It was an impressive operation especially considering the country was still in the grip of the Great Depression.

  In the summer of 1937, John, flying the Stinson, and Coffey, piloting one of the school’s new J-3 Cubs, went on barnstorming tours to promote their aviation school. While Coffey flew the J-3 training plane to the smaller towns surrounding Chicago, John flew a recruiting tour in the Stinson. At their stop at Kansas City, the Kansas City newspaper described the flight under the headline, “Colonel John C. Robinson Lands at Local Airport.” The article continues:

  “Ambitious to make American Negro youth air-minded, Col. Robinson, chief of Haile Selassie’s air forces during the Italo-Ethiopian war, landed his five-passenger monoplane at the Kansas City municipal airport Sunday morning, July 4, to spend a few hours before continuing to Topeka where he spoke Sunday and Monday nights. The blue and silver-gray Stinson monoplane, NC 1616, hit the runway of the airport at exactly 11:50 am on Sunday.

  “Flying with the colonel were his two copilots, Frank Browning and Joe Muldrew, both of Chicago. His passengers were Mrs. Annie Malone, head of the Poro College of Chicago, and Miss Yutha Tolson, Kansas Citian, who has been in Chicago several weeks taking a special course at the Poro College.

  “Robinson and his copilots are making a tour in the interest of Colonel Robinson’s school of aviation in Chicago in which fifty students already are enrolled, forty white and ten Negro. Colonel Robinson believes that aviation is a field with a great future for young Negroes well trained in aeronautics.

  “At his school on the Poro College grounds in Chicago, established in September 1936, half a dozen instructors are busy teaching youths flying from the bottom up.

  “The Brown Condor will be in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, for the fiftieth anniversary celebration July 12–17.”

  They continued on to stops at Paducah, Kentucky, and Cairo, Illinois, where John made a speech at Sumner High School. It was a well-planned tour, the expense of which was shared by Mrs. Malone who promoted Poro College and her products at each stop while Robinson promoted his school of aviation.

  While John spent 1937 successfully promoting his flying school, including performing stunt flying in Dallas at the Pan American Exposition (on Negro participation day), it was a disastrous year for aviation. In one terrible month, five planes serving America’s struggling airlines were lost at a cost of forty-five lives. Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were lost on a flight from Lae, New G
uinea, to Howland Island, and the German Zeppelin Hindenburg was destroyed by fire while landing at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. There was also talk of “mystery rays that could see planes and ships miles away even in fog.” Three years later, the “mystery rays” were instrumental in saving England during the Battle of Britain. The name of the applied technology was “radio direction and ranging,” more commonly known as radar.

  Robinson continued to build a profitable business in the risky field of aviation at a time when the nation was struggling to find a way out of the Great Depression. Re-elected, Roosevelt continued his New Deal programs, spending massive amounts of money in an attempt to create jobs and gaining from Congress more power than any president in history.

  Across oceans, Hitler, Mussolini, and the military leadership of Japan were also creating jobs but they were doing it by expanding their military might. An article that appeared in several major newspapers described a Chinese warlord who controlled the entire northeast of China. His name was Mao Tse-tung. “In the West,” the article stated, “his growing Communist army is viewed with curiosity.” The newly created LIFE magazine published photographs of German aviation students being trained in bombing techniques, while in Spain, bombs were falling on civilians from German and Italian planes supplied to the Fascist Nationalists and from Russian planes supplied to the Marxist Republicans.

  In America, the focus was on problems at home. In 1937, unemployment remained stubbornly high. On Broadway, Erskine Caldwell’s play Tobacco Road depicted the plight of the struggling poor to sellout audiences. Then, the disastrous flood of 1937 saw the Ohio and Mississippi rivers overflow their banks, forcing nearly a million refugees in eight affected states to flee their homes. Although Memphis, Tennessee, did not flood, it had to deal with an estimated fifty thousand refugees that fled to the city. John Robinson, with the sponsorship of the Chicago Defender newspaper, made repeated flights from Chicago to Memphis transporting donated clothing and supplies to flood victims.

  John had never been blind to the problems of segregation and prejudice. In his home state, more than one white politician used racial fear to get elected. One such politician, elected to the US Senate, was a white supremacist, a defender of segregation, and a member of the Ku Klux Klan who filibustered the US Senate in an attempt to block an anti-lynching law. His name was Theodore Gilmore Bilbo.

  All his life determined to succeed, Robinson found ways to work around such prejudice. He saw some of the same sort of men in the North, but he had no time to worry about racists and bigots. He never let such things distract him from his goals. “Nothing worth a damn ever comes easy.” Like Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee founder, John believed the best way to help the advancement of his people was to teach them knowledge and skills that were in demand. It had worked for him. Now he was certain that war was coming and that men with flying skills, white or black, would be needed. Yet, he found that even in his own school there were more whites than blacks learning to fly. He felt he was not accomplishing enough alone. But John Robinson was not alone.

  A fresh graduate of West Point, class of 1936, was Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. He got to West Point because his father, Benjamin Davis, Sr. was the first Negro to be promoted to the rank of general in the United States Armed Services. Even so, for four years the cadets at West Point refused to speak to cadet Davis except in circumstances prescribed by official school duties.

  When Benjamin Jr. graduated from the academy, he applied for flight training. In reply to his application, he received a letter signed by the army chief of staff stating flatly that no Negroes were in the Army Air Corps and there weren’t going to be any.

  Tuskegee had never given up on John’s idea of gaining a school of aviation. The college was ever struggling to find the financial means to establish such a school. Then in 1939, an event occurred that changed the playing field. A former corporal named Hitler invaded Poland.

  President Roosevelt realized the United States needed to find a way to greatly increase the number of pilots he was sure would be needed to defend America. In 1937, the Army Air Corps had less than two thousand pilots and an inventory of less than nine hundred obsolete aircraft. Politically, Roosevelt wanted a way to increase the number of American pilots without alarming voters. The answer was the creation of the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP). Airport operators badly in need of business and colleges all over the country applied for the program.

  Cornelius Coffee was among the first flying instructors to apply for a grant to establish a new school under the Civilian Pilot Training Program, and left the John Robinson National Air College in preparation to start his own flight school. His application was turned down, as were those from black colleges across the country including Tuskegee.

  A group of black pilots, Coffee among them, organized a flight to Washington to seek help for inclusion in the CPTP from Senator Harry Truman. Truman played a significant role in the passage of the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 which created the Civil Aviation Administration (CAA). But Senator Harry Truman had the common prejudiced opinion of the time: He didn’t believe Negroes had the inherent aptitude necessary to learn to fly. Confronting the contingent, he casually asked how the group had traveled to Washington. He was more than a little surprised to learn that they had all flown themselves there. Truman changed his mindset and began to support aviation training for blacks. As a result, Coffee got a CPTP certificate and started the Coffee School of Aviation, and Tuskegee finally received a government grant to establish its own Civilian Pilot Training Program. By 1940, six years after John Robinson had convinced them of the need for a school of aviation, Tuskegee was ready to open the program.

  Thirty-seven-year-old John Robinson was immediately notified by Tuskegee officials. They estimated the school would be ready for operation by late 1940. He was overjoyed that the school could finally establish an aviation department. He was also saddened that he could not accept the offer made to him by the college. Robinson’s school, which was well-established and had a majority of white students, had just been requisitioned under the government pilot training program as part of the Works Project Administration (WPA). Besides monetary compensation, Robinson was appointed to the position of director of the Chicago National Youth Administration, another of Roosevelt’s WPA projects. When the offer from Tuskegee was weighed against his obligations, he felt compelled to turn down the offer to head the Tuskegee aeronautics school, which he had inspired. There was another factor that influenced his decision. The government of Ethiopia in exile had maintained contact with him. There was hope that Britain, now engaged in war with both Germany and Italy, would drive the Italians from Ethiopia to protect their interests in Sudan and Kenya, both bordering Ethiopia, as well as ensuring the operation of the vital Suez Canal. If the British were successful, John had obligated himself to once again volunteer his services should the emperor need him.

  With John Robinson unavailable, the man selected to head the school at Tuskegee Institute was another serious young black flyer, C. Alfred Anderson. Years earlier he had saved his money and bought a small, 65-horsepower used airplane. Because there was no instructor available to him, he taught himself to fly it, not an unusual occurrence at the time. On one occasion Anderson made a forced landing in a field where he sustained a nasty head injury. Afterwards he had to keep finding new places to hide his repaired plane because his mother started carrying an ax in her car and searching the countryside for it. She said if she found the plane she would “chop it up” to keep her crazy son from killing himself.

  Later, Anderson with his friend Dr. Forsythe bought a new 90-horsepower Lambert Monocoupe, named it The Spirit of Booker T. Washington, and flew it island-hopping across the West Indies all the way to South America. Anderson was recruited by Tuskegee through his affiliation with the Howard University Civilian Pilot Training Program.

  Anderson’s first order from Tuskegee was two-fold. First, he was to pick up a new WACO UP-F-7 biplane from the factory
at Troy, Ohio. Second, he was instructed to fly the new WACO to Chicago and take advanced training from John C. Robinson, including aerobatics, in preparation for the Civil Aeronautics Authority (CAA) commercial certification as a flight instructor. While in Chicago, Anderson stayed with Robinson as a guest in his apartment. The two became fast friends.

  The following fall, “Chief ” Anderson (as he was fondly called the remainder of his life) set up Tuskegee’s flying school at a small grass strip just off the Union Springs Highway. A short time later, Tuskegee purchased land for a new field nearer the college. It was named Moton Field in honor of Dr. Robert R. Moton, a former president of the school (1915–1935) and the man John Robinson had convinced of the need for a school of aviation during his flying visit to the institution in 1934.

  By 1941 Germany and Italy controlled virtually all of Western Europe. Only Great Britain remained unoccupied, standing alone against Hitler at a terrible price. In the United States, though the public was still in an isolationist mindset, the Roosevelt Administration ordered thousands of new aircraft while the Army Air Corps was establishing new training bases as quickly as possible. Judge William Hastie, an aide to Secretary of War Henry Stimpson, fought, begged, and fought some more for the establishment of a particular Army Air Corps training base. He finally got it. Judge Hastie was black and the base he had fought for was built at Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1941. It was located ten miles from Tuskegee Institute’s Moton Field and named Tuskegee Army Airfield. After graduating from primary flight school at the Tuskegee School of Aeronautics under Chief Anderson, volunteer students were sent to the Army Airfield for advanced training in AT-6 and BT-13 aircraft.