DEFYING GRAVITY ROSCOE BROWN ’43 SOARS AT 90 By Marty Dobrow
THE WINGS WERE NEVER GIVEN TO ROSCOE BROWN. HE HAD TO EARN THEM. AND AT AGE 90, THE INDEFATIGABLE BROWN ’43 CONTINUES TO EARN THEM EVERY DAY.
His background did not exactly place him on the runway. His parents were born before the Wright brothers lifted off in North Carolina in 1903. He was born before Charles Lindbergh became a national hero flying across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. And as a young African-American, he quickly learned that gravity was not the only force pulling him down.
But even as a child, he believed in flight. He also believed in America, and its national symbol, the bald eagle, proud and soaring. He believed in the iconic, if clichéd, American dream. If you worked hard, you could rise above, in every sense. He believed it, despite the prevailing views in the culture. Despite, for instance, the report from the Army War College in 1925, words that would almost nine decades later begin George Lucas’s film about the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails: “Blacks lack intelli- gence, are cowardly under combat condi- tions, and will never have what it takes to fly aircraft of any type.”
Even after laying waste to such bigotry by flying 68 missions in World War II, when his application to be a pilot for Eastern Air Lines was dumped in the trash, Roscoe Brown continued to stubbornly not just believe in the possible, but work to make it happen.
“If you have the ability and you have the opportunity, you have a moral responsibility to use it,” he says. “Do the best you can with what you’ve got. Social injustice such as racism and prejudice is something that needs to be opposed. All you’ve got to do is stand up and be heard.”
“If you have the ability and you have the opportunity, you have a moral responsibility to use it,” he says. “Do the best you can with what you’ve got. Social injustice such as racism and prejudice is something that needs to be opposed. All you’ve got to do is stand up and be heard.”
Brown is not
naïve. He is a clear- eyed realist who
chooses optimism, who accepts the hard work that is always necessary for positive change. It’s all about aviation, really, about overcoming the forces that weigh us down through lift and thrust. He has always believed that the jet fuel comes from education. That is what is needed to elevate us all to what Martin Luther King called “the beloved community,” to a place where America, for all its historic contradictions (the land of the free built on slavery), approaches our grand national rhetoric about liberty and justice for all. It is then, he believes, only then, when we truly begin
to fly.
Roscoe Brown ‘43 Brown, at left, with lacrosse teammates 6 TRIANGLE 1 Vol. 83, No. 3
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