page_title: Willa Brown
section_title: Aviation career
hierarchical_section_title: Willa Brown / Aviation career
caption_attribution_description: English: Harlem Airport in Chicago is where the Coffey School of Aviation was located. The school was co-founded by Willa Brown and Cornelius Coffey.
context_page_description: Willa Beatrice Brown was an American aviator, lobbyist, teacher, and civil rights activist. She was the first African American woman to earn a pilot's license in the United States, the first African American woman to run for the United States Congress, first African American officer in the Civil Air Patrol, and first woman in the U.S. to have both a pilot's license and an aircraft mechanic's license.
  She was a lifelong advocate for gender and racial equality in the field of aviation as well as in the military. She not only lobbied the U.S. government to integrate the United States Army Air Corps and include African Americans in the Civilian Pilot Training Program, she and Cornelius Coffey co-founded the Coffey School of Aeronautics, distinguishing it as the first private flight training academy owned and operated by African Americans in the United States. She trained hundreds of pilots, several of whom went on to become Tuskegee Airmen; the creation of the Tuskegee Airmen has been credited to Brown's training efforts.
  Brown remained politically and socially active in Chicago long after the Coffey School closed in 1945.
context_section_description: In 1934, Brown began studying at Chicago's racially segregated Harlem Field with certified flight instructor Cornelius Coffey, an expert in the field of aviation mechanics. She was one of few women who attended Curtiss–Wright Aeronautical University where she studied aircraft maintenance and earned an aircraft mechanic's license in 1935. She earned a private pilot's license in 1938 and a commercial pilot's license in 1939, becoming the first African American woman to earn either type of license in the United States.
  Willa Brown, Cornelius Coffey and Enoch P. Waters worked together to form the National Negro Airmen Association of America, later renamed to National Airmen's Association of America which was incorporated in 1939. Their primary mission was to attract more interest in aviation, help develop a better understanding in the field of aeronautics, and increase African American participation in both fields. Brown was the national secretary and president of the organization's Chicago branch, and an activist for racial equality. She also took on public relations duties for the organization, and flew to colleges and spoke on the radio to get African Americans interested in flying. She and Coffey started the Coffey School of Aeronautics in Chicago, located at Harlem Airport. They established the school for the purpose of training black pilots and teaching aviation mechanics. 
  She lobbied the government as an advocate for the integration of black pilots into a then-segregated Army Air Corps and federal Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP).  She also worked to disprove a 1925 Army War College study which had deemed African Americans unfit to fly. She lobbied the federal government to award CPTP contracts to train African American pilots. In 1940, she was appointed coordinator of the Chicago units of the CPTP, and the Coffey School was selected by the U.S. Army Air Corps as a feeder school to provide black students to its pilot training program. Nearly 200 students from the school went on to join the Tuskeegee Airmen. In 1942, she attained the rank of Lieutenant in Civil Air Patrol Squadron 613-6, becoming the first African American officer in the Civil Air Patrol. She was later appointed war-training service coordinator for the Civil Aeronautics Authority.
caption: Lola Albright (left) and Willa Brown (right) at Harlem Airport, Chicago Illinois, USA
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