BLACK HISTORY TODAY-JANET BRAGG

Janet Bragg made history in 1942 by becoming the first Black woman to earn her commercial pilot’s license in the United States. Bessie Coleman, another pioneering aviator whose exploits predated Bragg, was forced to earn her pilot’s license in France, becoming the first African-American, first woman and first American to earn an international pilot’s license.
Born Janet Harmon on March 24, 1907 in Griffin, Ga., Bragg entered Spelman College earning a registered nurse degree in 1929. While working in Chicago, Bragg became interested in flying and joined an all-Black aviation school, Aeronautical University, in the small town of Robbins, Illinois. Bragg, who married and divorced Evans Waterford during this period, was the only woman in the class of 24.
The school was poor and didn’t have a plane, so it couldn’t offer actual flight instruction. Bragg used $600 of her own money to buy a plane and rented it out to the school. While at the school, she earned her private pilot’s license and helped build an airfield there. At the time, Black pilots were not allowed to fly out of airfields where white pilots flew.
In the ’30’s, Bragg wrote a weekly column titled “Negro Aviation,” for the
Chicago Defender under the byline Janet Waterford. She joined the Civilian Pilot Training Program in Tuskegee, Alabama, but despite completing the program, she was denied a commercial license in the state because she was a “colored girl.”