Storming the Heavens: African Americans and the Early Fight for the Right to Fly

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the U.S. effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly. This struggle involved pioneers like Bessie Coleman, who traveled to World War I-era Paris in order to gain piloting skills that she was denied in her U.S...