Determined to Soar : Laguna Author Hopes His Biography of Navy’s First Black Aviator Will Inspire the Young

Author Theodore Taylor was a Florida newspaper reporter in 1948 when he first heard of Jesse Leroy Brown, the 22-year-old son of a Mississippi sharecropper who had broken the color barrier to become America’s first black naval aviator.

“I’d been in the Navy,” said Taylor, 77, a World War II veteran. “I knew that most of the black people in the Navy were either cooks or they were waiters or guys that cleaned officers’ staterooms. To me, this was amazing--that this guy had fought his way up in that kind of an atmosphere.”

Two years later, after being recalled to active duty during the Korean War, Taylor was working on the Navy press desk in the Pentagon when a communique arrived from the Far East Naval Command: Ensign Jesse Leroy Brown had been killed in action during a mission to help a retreating Marine division trapped by Chinese Communists at the Chosin reservoir.

Taylor wrote the initial press release about Brown’s death on a snowbound mountain slope where he had crash-landed his gull-winged Corsair after it was struck by enemy fire.

For nearly half a century, Taylor thought someone should tell the tale of Jesse Leroy Brown. Finally, the Laguna Beach author of more than 50 fiction and nonfiction books did it himself.

“The Flight of Jesse Leroy Brown” (Avon Books, $23) chronicles the life and death of a man who battled racism to earn the coveted gold wings of a U.S. Navy pilot. This was despite the sentiments expressed by one white Navy lieutenant pilot who used a common racial epithet to tell Brown that no black man “will ever sit . . . in the cockpit of a naval aircraft.”

Taylor tells Brown’s story in a novelistic narrative, with dialogue constructed from Brown’s letters, taped reminiscences with his widow and interviews with his brothers, friends, fellow fighter pilots and his sole surviving flight instructor.

Publishers Weekly calls the book “an engaging and intimate glimpse of a young pioneer who desperately wanted to earn his aviator’s wings.” Booklist says it’s a “compelling portrait of a quiet hero, of the racial climate between 1926 and 1950, and of the last days of propeller-driven naval aviation.”

Jesse Leroy Brown’s passion for flight began when he went to his first air show at age 6. He began devouring Popular Aviation magazines, and as he worked with his family in the cotton fields, he’d stop to stare whenever a plane flew overhead. “I’m sure gonna fly one of those things,” he’d say.

An outstanding student and star athlete in high school, the 17-year-old Brown ignored advice to enter an all-black college and instead enrolled in predominantly white Ohio State University, majoring in architectural engineering, in 1944. While there, Brown’s childhood dream to fly took on a new twist: He wanted to become a Navy carrier pilot.

The Army Air Corps had claimed the first African American fighter pilots--the famed Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, the all-black 332nd Fighter Group. But the Navy, which took to the skies in 1916, had never had a black pilot.

Brown joined the Naval Reserves Officer Training Corps unit in 1946, then begged the officer in charge to let him take the flying midshipman program exam. Told that no black person had ever entered the program and that he’d most likely fail the qualifying test, Brown scored higher than most white applicants.

At preflight school in Iowa, the base commander refused to swear in Brown and gave the job to his executive officer, who looked the other way when Brown raised his right hand. Later, at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, where he was the only black cadet among 600 white cadets, he endured racial epithets from hostile instructors.

But after Brown was assigned to the aircraft carrier Leyte, Taylor writes, there was not “a single word or incident that he was aware of that involved the color of his skin. The invisible line had vanished.”

Posthumously Received Flying Cross

In October 1950, Brown flew his first combat mission over Korea.

Taylor provides a gripping account of Brown’s final mission less than two months later. A fellow carrier pilot, Lt. (j.g.) Thomas Hudner, would earn the Medal of Honor for crash-landing his own plane in a futile attempt to pry the injured but still breathing Brown from the twisted wreckage of his Corsair.

The accomplishments of Brown, who posthumously received a Distinguished Flying Cross in 1951, haven’t gone unrecognized over the years.

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and the San Diego Aerospace Museum in Balboa Park in San Diego mention Brown in exhibits on black aviation history. In 1973, a destroyer escort was named after him, the first Navy vessel to be named for an African American. Brown’s hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss., erected a granite monument in his honor, named a street after him and still displays his portrait and medals in the county courthouse.

The story of the first black man to fly a Navy fighter has been told in various magazine articles, and Brown has been mentioned in books about the Korean War. Lt. Gen. Frank E. Petersen, America’s first black Marine aviator, acknowledged Brown as his inspirational role model in his own autobiography, “Into the Tiger’s Paw,” published by Presidio Press in October.

Yet no one had ever written a biography of Jesse Leroy Brown.

“The thing I was up against is that I’m a sailor, not a pilot. And the other thing is, of course, I’m not black,” said Taylor, recalling a conversation he had with an executive at Ebony magazine while tracking down photos for the book.

“She said, ‘Why didn’t an Afro American write this book?’ I said, ‘Well, gee, the story’s been around for more than 40 years. . . . I kept thinking a black writer would do it, but it never happened. I just figured it was time for somebody to do it, and I did.’ ”

Taylor has touched on the black experience twice before: In “The Cay,” his best-selling 1969 young-adult novel about a white boy who is forced to confront his racial prejudices when he is shipwrecked with an old West Indian black seaman during World War II; and in the 1993 prequel, “Timothy of the Cay.”

Taylor dedicated “The Cay,” which won 11 literary awards and became required reading in schools throughout the United States, to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In his foreword to “The Flight of Jesse Leroy Brown,” Taylor expresses hope that “Jesse will serve as a shining role model for all young Americans, especially young African Americans, both male and female.”

“Certainly his life, to me, was an example of someone who had dogged determination and absolutely refused to be put aside,” Taylor said.

Taylor said Brown was a quiet man with a good sense of humor, and a religious man who served as a chaplain’s assistant on the Leyte. He also was “very much in love” with his wife, Daisy, his high school sweetheart.

Brown told her that the pressures were so great during flight training in Pensacola that he didn’t think he could make it without her at his side. Forbidden to marry until he received his commission as an ensign, Brown nevertheless risked being kicked out by secretly marrying Daisy in 1947.

He was killed three years and three months later. Daisy was 23; their daughter, Pam, not yet 2 years old.

In his book, Taylor quotes Brown’s last letter to Daisy, written the night before his final mission. It has been compared by some to the famous Civil War letter written by Maj. Sullivan Ballou of the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers, who wrote to his wife before the Battle of Bull Run, in which he was killed.

“My own dear sweet Angel,” Brown’s letter begins. “. . . The last few days we’ve been doing quite a bit of flying, trying to help slow down the Chinese Communists and to give support to some Marines who were surrounded when the Chinese launched their big drive. Knowing that he’s helping those poor guys on the ground, I think every pilot on here would fly until he dropped in his tracks. . . . Darling, heaven alone can know how much I need you and how badly I want to see you.”

‘You Get Kind of Choked Up’

Before leaving for Korea, Brown made his wife promise that if anything happened to him, she would go to college. She did, earning a master’s degree in home economics education and retiring in 1990 after 34 years as a teacher. She remarried in 1958, to a career Army enlisted man, Gilbert Thorne, who died in 1985.

Daisy Thorne, a friendly, good-humored woman, said she was contacted about a dozen years ago by an African American writer who wanted to write a book about Jesse, “but the way he came on to me about the whole thing, I did not cooperate with him” and the book was never done.

Then, about two years ago, Taylor called.

“I feel like I’ve known him a hundred years because we just hit it off so well,” Thorne said. “During the time he was writing the book, there were times we’d communicate several times a day. So we got to know each other quite well on the phone.”

They finally met this month, when Taylor and his wife, Flora, flew to Hattiesburg for a book signing with Thorne at the city’s public library, where she serves on the board of trustees. About 200 Hattiesburg residents, spurred by an article in the local paper, turned out for the signing.

Thorne, 71, isn’t the only member of her family to have gone to college. Jesse’s daughter, Pam Knight, is a social worker with a master’s degree in social work. Last May, Pam’s son, Jamal Knight, received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Southern University in Baton Rouge.

“I love to brag about my children’s degrees,” said Thorne, adding that Jesse has two grandchildren, one named Jessica LeRoyce Knight, after him.

Thorne said she read each chapter of the book as Taylor completed it. There weren’t any surprises for her in reading Jesse’s story, she said. But reading Taylor’s account of Tom Hudner crash-landing his own plane in a vain attempt to pull her husband from his wrecked plane was unsettling.

“Every time I hear it, I feel the same, it’s just, you get kind of choked up.”

Like his former sister-in-law, Fletcher Brown is pleased to finally see his oldest brother’s story in print.

“I want to believe the book could be an inspiration to a lot of young people,” the 67-year-old Los Angeles resident said. “Knowing the beginning [of the story], his accomplishments still inspire me.”