CHSTM Research Seminar: Flying While Black - The Slow Pace of Racial Integration in the U.S. Airline Industry
| Dates: | 7 October 2025 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Medical Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Alan D. Meyer |
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Thanks to Black History Month, most school-age children in the United States have heard of the Tuskegee Airmen. We celebrate these pioneering aviators’ impressive record fighting racial prejudice at home and enemy fliers in the skies over Europe. Yet few people today realize that none of the roughly 1,000 African American men who earned their wings at Tuskegee Army Airfield during World War II ever had a chance to fly for a major U.S. passenger airline after the war. Even as the postwar airline industry took off, piloted by thousands of white men who had learned to fly in the military, the airlines flatly refused to hire Black aviators who possessed the same training and experience as their white counterparts. It took the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment, to pry open the cockpit door and allow African American pilots to fly for the airlines. And yet even today, a half century later, only 3 percent of all airline pilots in the U.S. are Black in a nation where more than 13 percent of the population self-identifies as African American.
This presentation, based on Dr Meyer’s current book project titled Flying While Black, explores the slow pace of racial integration of the pilot’s seat in U.S. airlines in historical perspective. From Jim Crow racism before, during, and after World War II, and continuing beyond the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the recent past, the project examines how institutional and structural racism, economics, the military establishment, as well as various cultural factors contribute to the continued low number of Black commercial pilots in the United States.
Alan D. Meyer is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Auburn University in Alabama and teaches history of technology and aviation history.
Speaker
Alan D. Meyer
Role: Associate Professor
Organisation: Department of History, Auburn University
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
2.57 (CHSTM Seminar Room)
Simon Building
Manchester
