More welcome on planes than trains, many early Black flyers took to the air with enthusiasm. “Breakfast in Kansas; dinner in Los Angeles!” reported J. A. Rogers, a novelist who worked as staff correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, in 1936. “Colored youth take notice! The airplane will someday supercede the railroad as the latter did the covered wagon.” But flying would prove less ideal than many hoped, at least when it came to avoiding Jim Crow.
[I]n 1945 the Chicago and Southern Airline (one of Delta’s precursors) admitted that it practiced Jim Crow seating on its Dixie-bound flights.
“It is true that Negro passengers are requested to assume the forward seats on the airplane,” an official for the airline wrote to Theodore Allen, a Black federal government employee who protested when one of the airline’s stewardesses made him reseat himself in the front of the plane, after he and the white man with whom he was traveling had taken seats in the middle of the plane. The airline’s representative was unapologetic about the practice and suggested that “from the standard of personal comfort, these [forward seats] are the most desirable seats in the aircraft. Thus it should be made clear that the practice rather than one of discrimination is one of offering Negro accommodations and facilities which are equal or superior to those offered other passengers.”
In the fall of 1951, however, some of the airlines’ Jim Crow tricks would be revealed in a criminal complaint filed against American Airlines. Gabriel Gladstone, a twenty-two-year-old Jewish New Yorker, had begun a job as a reservations agent in the American Airlines office at LaGuardia earlier that year. But after working there for two months, he was dismissed for refusing to follow the Airlines “special instructions on how to handle Negro passengers.” As a trainee, Gladstone “was instructed to mark reservations with a symbolic E111, if the passenger was a Negro, or in the case of a telephone reservation, was presumed to be Negro.” These codes, he was informed, would be used to implement the airline’s policy of “segregating Negro passengers on flights and preferring white applicants for airplane accommodations on waiting lists.” When Gladstone began taking reservations, a supervisor observed him failing to mark “a reservation with a code even though the applicant had a southern accent,” and fired him on the spot. Gladstone reported his experience to the American Jewish Congress, which helped him file a complaint charging American Airlines with violating New York civil rights law.