In 1937, Willa Brown became the first African-American woman to earn an airplane pilot’s license in the United States. (Bessie Coleman, who had become the first African-American woman to earn a pilot’s license in 1921, had to go to France to train for and obtain her license.) Brown, who was born in Kentucky in 1906, was also an aviation pioneer in several other key respects. She first worked as a high school teacher in Gary, Indiana, and then a social worker in Chicago, Illinois, before deciding to expand her horizons even further and pursue a career in flight.

In 1934, Brown began taking flying lessons at one of Chicago’s racially segregated airports. One of her flight instructors was Cornelius Coffey. In 1939 – two years after she earned her history-making private pilot’s license – Brown married Coffey. Both of them subsequently established the Cornelius Coffey School of Aeronautics. The school…