Willa Brown was born in Glasgow, Kentucky in 1906, only three years after the Wright Brothers took to the air for the first time. She would graduate from high school in 1923 and go on to get her teaching degree at Indiana State Teachers College. After graduating she became the youngest high school teacher in the Gary, Indiana school system.
Drawing inspiration from Bessie Coleman, Brown would go on to start her flight lessons in 1934 at the Chicago Aeronautical University. She also did studies at Harlem Field in Chicago which was racially segregated with Cornelius R. Coffey, who was the first African American to establish an aeronautical school in the United States and future husband.
In 1935 Brown received her master mechanics certificate and joined two separate organizations, the Challenger Air Pilot’s Association and the Chicago Girl’s Flight Club. IN 1937 she would become the first African American woman to be licensed as a private pilot in the United States.
The Coffey School which she created along with her husband was the school the provided the aviators for the Tuskegee Airmen, training over 200 of them. She would go on to be a board member of the FAA’s Women’s Advisory Board and after her death would be inducted into the Aviation Musem of Kentucky’s Hall of Fame.