On December 6, 1931, thousands of Angelenos filled the field Los Angeles Eastside Airport in East Montebello Gardens. Although it was winter and the depths of the Great Depression, they spent more than 50 cents to see waking months parachuting from planes and planes flying in breathable formations. The Colored Air Circus, a benefit for the unemployed in the city, was one of the first airshows in the world to be fully piloted by Black aviators.
Even the Los Angeles Times, known for ignoring events by and for people of color – to say nothing of the racist reporting on issues such as housing, segregation and police brutality – gives the airshow a good review:
The ‘Black Eagle’, known in private as Col. Hugh Julian … and five other colored pilots held nearly 10,000 neck cranes skyward over Los Angeles Eastside Airport yesterday afternoon during the colored air circus performed under the auspices of the Associated City Staff Fund for the unemployed. Along with the ‘Black Eagle’, the ‘Five Blackbirds’ stunt squadron of colored speeds flew. Stunt and parachute jumps completed an afternoon of excitement. “
Watch episode three of HBOs carefully Perry Mason restart. During the scene where Mason (Matthew Rhys) tries to get more information about the death of a suspect and murder of lieutenant Paul Drake (Chris Chalk), you will find a billboard for the Colored Air Circus.
The real event was the brainchild of a longtime pilot and aviation instructor named William J. Powell. A veteran and successful owner of World War I, Powell became enthusiastic about flying in 1927, after taking his first spin over Paris. Due to several race rejections from various aviation schools, he was eventually accepted into the Warren School of Aeronautics, located at 120 West Slauson Avenue, in 1928. After earning his pilot license, Powell worked to convince other African Americans that the growing aviation industry was bidding. her the opportunities they were denied in many other professions.
“There is a better job and a better future in aviation for Negroes than in any other sector,” he wrote in his autobiographical novel Black wings, published in 1934. “And the reason is this; aviation has just begun its period of growth, and if we enter it now, even though it is not yet full, we can grow as aviation grows.”
He elaborated on this theory in the novel:
“There is before our eyes a grandmother sector that once honestly offered to become a bigger giant than one. We have a chance to get on the ground floor, a chance to help develop this sector – we have a chance to grow with this sector, a chance to become producers – what are we going to do? “
To further his mission, Powell founded the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in 1928, sponsored by bandleader Duke Ellington and boxer Joe Louis, according to the Los Angeles Times. The club was named after the first licensed African American pilot in the world, Bessie Coleman, who died in 1926 in a plane crash near Jacksonville, Florida.
Under the auspices of the club, Powell, who holds a degree in electrical engineering, began teaching airlines to men and women at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles. During the day, he gave flying lessons to locals, including Marie Dickerson Coker (shown here dancing with friends in a delicious home movie), a fearless “high spirited, entertaining lady, “who danced and sang at popular LA jazz spots such as the famous Culver City Cotton Club.
Coker had become enthusiastic about flying after a chance encounter on one evening. “I was working in Culver City at the Chicken Coop when these pilots ran into it – in those days it was something to be a pilot, just a black one – anyway, they asked if I wanted to be on the run and I said yes, “Coker told the Los Angeles Sentinel. She was hired and soon earned her pilot license.
According to aviation expert Phil Scott, author of several definitive articles on the Colored Air Circus including “The Blackbirds Take Wing” published in the journal Aviation History, Powell was inspired by the National Air Race held in LA in 1928. He decided to mount his own show, the “All-Negro Air Show,” at the Los Angeles Eastside Airfield on Labor Day, 1931.
To an audience of about 15,000 people, the show attracts the Negro Formation Flying Group, consisting of Powell, William Aikens and a charismatic aviator named Irvin Wells. A blimp dropped flowers in honor of Bessie Coleman. Lottie Theodore and Maxwell Love made parachute jumps.
Encouraged by the success of the event, Powell began organizing a larger show, the Colored Air Circus. He put together a flying team, known as the Blackbirds, and invited Coker to join. “This is going to be the greatest thing you’ve ever been in a thing,” he told Coker, according to Scott. Powell also invited friend and frequent contributor James Herman Banning, a famous aviator and the second licensed African-American pilot, to reverse the show.
Banning refused to perform without pay, so Powell instead recruited a clever self-promoter who styled himself colleague Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, and according to Dickerson often wore a monocle. Julian called himself the “Black Eagle of Harlem” and the Washington Post reports that he would participate later the Ethiopian Air Force to fight Italian fascists in the Italo-Ethiopian War.
“If anyone could free Julian from his convulsive outbursts of selfishness, there could hardly be a speaker found to excel him,” Powell later wrote.
As for Powell’s concerns, he made sure Julian was accused as the “biggest Negro flyer“and met with fanfare when he was from New York. According to de Los Angeles Times, on December 5, 1931, the day before the Air Circus took place, dignitaries, including LA Mayor John Clinton Porter, were allowed to gather with the flyers in preparation for the big event.
On December 6, thousands of people (the LA Times counted 10,000; Powell claimed 40,000) at Eastside Airfield. First up was Julian, who intended to fall out of a flying plane, but instead parachuted across the crowd. His sluggish performance continued as he took to the skies. He had promised to “perform hair-warming stunts that never materialized,” Powell the back. “He didn’t even make a sharp bench, but immediately came down, asked for a glass of water, and stated that it was very different to do all that hard flying and also to jump a parachute.”
Fortunately, the Blackbirds are “saved the day, “Powell said later. One by one, they stepped over the airport. According to Scott:
Wells went first, then Aikens, Julian, Johnson, Matthew Campana, Coker and finally Powell. They flew to a nearby field and landed – all except Julian, who later claimed he was lost. After waiting for him , got the six up and set off again, flew in a ‘V’ back to the field, then whispered to the crowd in a train, or ‘follow the leader’, as Coker described it. She did back: ‘[Powell] would lead, the first would fall, then the second, then the third, and we would make a line and come back and make another sign and come down. We all did that, and that was good enough. ‘”
The show ended with parachute jumps by Maxwell Love and Marie Daughtry. According to aviation expert Scott, Powell’s Colored Air Circus received rave reviews in the Black press and demonstrated that Black Americans deserve their place in the air.
Powell had plans to stage 100 air shows across the country, however, a plane crash and money problems would ruin these ambitions. He continued to preach the Gospel of African American aviation and made it in 1935 Unemployment, the Negro and Aviation. The movie, shown church groups, told the story of a young Black man who discovered the promise of the aviation industry. Powell died in 1942, as the famous Tuskegee Airmen, some of whom had adopted learned, were training for World War II where they will be destroyed 261 enemy aircraft and fly 1,578 missions. (This was a different group than the Black men subjected to the horrors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, who were mostly farmers and sharecroppers).
In Black wings, Powell described what flight – and the realization of Bessie Coleman – meant to Black people. “We have overcome that which was much worse than racial barriers,” he wrote. “We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and thirsted to dream.
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