When American Airlines hired David Harris in 1964, he became the first African American pilot for a commercial airline. The story of how he broke the color barrier in the clouds is the subject of the young adult book Segregated Skies by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cottman.
At age 87, David Harris doesn’t fly anymore — and he misses it.
“It’s the greatest job in the world. I flew and flew and flew and was ready to fly more in my life,” Harris says wistfully. “I would have done it another 30 years had I not grown old.”
The first inkling Harris had about a career flying airplanes came when he was growing up in Columbus, Ohio. He and his brother used to visit the Lockbourne Air Force Base. That’s where the decorated Tuskegee Airmen were stationed after World War II. At the time the armed forces were segregated.
“My brother and I would run around the base and enjoy the facility and never paid any attention to the fact that all the people on the base were Black,” he remembers.
Harris got to know some of the famed airmen. He says they would’ve been “excellent” as pilots “for major airlines in the U.S.A, but nobody would hire them.”
Even though President Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, racism within the airline industry persisted. “There were certainly people who were saying ‘Well, a Black man cannot fly an airplane,'” says Lyn May, who was married to Harris when he began his training for the U.S. Air Force in the late 1950s. She says, despite the racism he faced, Harris stayed focused. “To learn to do something while you know there are people around you who think you are…