Jesse LeRoy Brown was a United States Navy officer. He was the first African-American aviator to complete the U.S. Navy’s basic flight training program. He died in the Korean War after his F4U Corsair aircraft came under fire and crashed on a remote mountaintop on 4 December 1950.
About Jesse L. Brown in brief
Jesse LeRoy Brown was a United States Navy officer. He was the first African-American aviator to complete the U.S. Navy’s basic flight training program. He died in the Korean War after his F4U Corsair aircraft came under fire and crashed on a remote mountaintop on 4 December 1950 while supporting ground troops at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. His wingman Thomas J. Hudner Jr. intentionally crashed his own aircraft in a rescue attempt, for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor. The frigate USS Jesse L. Brown was named in his honor. Brown was one of six children born to Julia Lindsey Brown, a schoolteacher, and John Brown,. a grocery warehouse worker. He had four brothers, Marvin, William, Fletcher, and Lura, as well as an older sister known as Johnny. His ancestry was African American, Chickasaw, and Choctaw. The Browns also were committed Baptists and Jesse, William and Julia Brown sang in the church choir. In his childhood he was described as “serious, witty, unassuming, and very intelligent.” He was a member of the basketball, football, and field teams and he was an excellent student, graduating as the salutatorian in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He met his future wife, Daisy Pearl Nix, at Ohio State University in 1944, where he was a student and football star. He also worked in the fields of the farm harvesting corn and cotton in his spare time. Brown’s successes in the segregated and desegregated U.
S. military were memorialized in several books. He is survived by his wife and three children. He leaves behind a wife and six children. The family lived in a house without central heating or indoor plumbing so they relied on a fireplace for warmth. When Brown was six years old, his father took him to an air show, and afterward, was attracted to a dirt airfield near his home, which he visited frequently in spite of being chased away by a local mechanic. At the age of 13, Brown took a job as a paperboy for the Pittsburgh Courier, a black press paper, and developed a desire to pilot while reading in the newspaper about African- American aviators of the time including C. Alfred Anderson, Eugine Jacques Bullard, and Bessie Coleman. In 1937, he wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in which he complained of the injustice of African-Americans being kept out of the Army Air Corps. The White House responded with a letter saying that it appreciated the viewpoint. Brown enlisted in the Navy in 1946, becoming a midshipman. He earned his pilot wings on 21 October 1948 amid a flurry of press coverage. In January 1949 he was assigned to Fighter Squadron 32 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Leyte. He flew 20 combat missions before he was ordered to the Korean Peninsula, arriving in October 1950. After graduation, Brown sought to enroll in a college outside the South of the South.
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