Soaring above setbacks

by Janet Harmon Bragg

When Americans fell in love with aviation in the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans found their enthusiasm met with discrimination. In 1920 the legendary Bessie Coleman was forced to travel to France to learn to fly because no American flight schools would accept her. Ten years later, Janet Harmon Bragg and other black students at Chicago's Aeronautical University fought exclusion by organizing a club that built its own airport in a nearby all-black community. By 1934 Bragg had earned her private pilot's license and bought her first plane. By 1942 she had become the first African American woman to earn a full commercial pilot's license. . In Soaring above Setbacks, Janet Harmon Bragg recalls a life of multifaceted achievement, in which every obstacle was seen as a surmountable challenge. A 1929 graduate of Spelman College with a degree in nursing, she not only became a pioneering aviator but also a successful businesswoman, running two nursing homes on Chicago's South Side. But her sti