He ran one of the company's small-business investment arms, North Street Capital Corp., which funded companies that included Essence Communications and Black Enterprise Magazine, according to his son and Brown.Īrcher was an adviser to the late Reginald Lewis in the deal that created the conglomerate TLC Beatrice in 1987, then the largest black-owned and -managed business in the U.S. Trained with P-39 Airacobra and P-40 Warhawk aircraft for an extended period of time as the Army Air Forces was reluctant to deploy African-American fighter pilots to an overseas combat theater. 'A War Department study in 1925 expressly stated that Negroes didn't have the intelligence, or the character, or the leadership to be in combat units, and particularly, they didn't have the ability to be Air Force pilots,' said Brown.Īrcher instead joined a segregated Army Air Corps unit at the Tuskegee, Ala., air base, graduating from pilot training in July 1943.Īfter he retired from the military in 1970, Archer joined General Foods Corp., becoming one of the era's few black corporate vice presidents of a major American company. Eugene Bullard: The First Black Fighter Pilot Eugene Bullard: From Columbus, Georgia to Paris, France The First World War Inter-war Years The Second World. 6, 1919, in Yonkers and raised in Harlem, Archer left New York University to enlist in the Army Air Corps in 1941 but was rejected for pilot training because the military didn't allow blacks to serve as pilots. He would ultimately serve with valor in World War I and inspire other. Brown estimated that about 50 or 60 of the 994 Tuskegee Airmen pilots are still alive.īorn on Sept. Born October 9, 1894, in Columbus, Georgia, to William Octave and Joyakee, a French-Caribbean freedman and a local Creek woman, Bullard became the first Black person and first mixed-race person, too to officially serve as a fighter pilot, as Aviation History relates. Bullard, who flew for France, was one of the few black combat pilots during World War I, along with William Robinson Clarke, a Jamaican who flew for the.

Black fighter pilot