7 October 2025, 4pm BST
Simon Building, Room 2.57 [maps and travel]
Online Access https://zoom.us/j/99892131330

Alan D. Meyer, Associate Professor, Department of History, Auburn University

Flying While Black: The Slow Pace of Racial Integration in the U.S. Airline Industry

Abstract: 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 my 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, my research 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 teaches history of technology and aviation history. He earned his BA in history at Western Michigan University, spent eight years on active duty as an officer in the U.S. Army, then returned to graduate school to complete his PhD in American history and history of technology as a Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware. Prior to joining Auburn’s faculty in 2009, Meyer worked for several years in Washington, D.C., as a civilian historian for the U.S. Air Force. His first book, Weekend Pilots: Technology, Masculinity, and Private Aviation in Postwar America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), explores the intertwined relationships among technology, individual skill, and the construction of a gendered community identity. His current project, Flying While Black, investigates the slow pace of racial integration in the airline cockpit from the Civil Rights Era to the present. Meyer is a longtime private pilot and a Smithsonian Research Fellow with the National Air and Space Museum, and he recently retired as a colonel from the U.S. Army Reserve. For more about Dr. Meyer’s background and research interests, click here.

All welcome!

Seminar Programme on the CHSTM Website

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