Did You Know... with Robert Green and Black Aviators Historian Guy E. Franklin

In 2004, Pennsylvania native Mary Groce was going through a box of family papers with her cousin Aileen when she found a sheet of old letterhead for an “Emory C. Malick, Licensee: Pilot No. 105.” Included on the letterhead was a photograph of a handsome young man in a Curtiss pusher-type airplane.

Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, nicknamed the Black Eagle, was born in Trinidad on January 5th, 1897. In 1922, when he was 25 years old, he flew over parades in support of Marcus Garvey. He subsequently took flying lessons from Air Service, Inc., and purchased a plane to fly to Africa. After flying to Roosevelt airfield, when he attempted to depart in July 1924, the plane crashed and burned. He survived and spent the next month in a Long Island hospital. In 1929, he did succeed in a Trans-Atlantic flight two years later than Charles Lindberg.

---------

Here's the link to Pilot Fauntleroy Julian's Film Lying Lips

__________

In 1930 after flying to Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie granted him Ethiopian citizenship and made him a Colonel. One year later, in 1931, he became the first black man to fly coast to coast over the American continent and also broke the world record for endurance flying with a non-stop non-refueling flight of 84 hours and 33 minutes.

In 1935, Julian commanded the small Ethiopian Air Force  during the Italian invasion of that country by Benito Mussolini’s Army. Four years later Julian produced the classic melodrama, Lying Lips, which starred Robert Earl Jones, father of James Earl Jones. In 1965, in collaboration with John Bulloch, he wrote the 200-page autobiography, Black Eagle. 

Black Aviators, Hubert Fauntleroy, William Powell, Bessie Coleman, John C. Robinson Coleman Young, George Washington,