The Education of Jesse Leroy Brown

Jesse Leroy Brown, the third son of John “Papa” Brown, came of age during the Jim Crow Era. Racism clung to Jesse’s childhood experiences like the oppressive humidity of a Mississippi summer afternoon. Despite many obstacles, Brown eventually attended Ohio State University. He became the first African American to complete the U.S. Navy’s basic flight training. In the closing months of 1950, Ensign Jesse Brown participated in twenty “strike missions” during the early stages of the Korean War. On the fourth of December, Brown’s Corsair was shot down in enemy territory, and the twenty-four-year-old pilot died of his injuries. 
 

How did Jesse Leroy Brown achieve such remarkable success in the face of stifling adversity? How was this young man able to fulfill his childhood dream to fly? Jesse Brown's education—both his formal and informal schooling—offers some answers.

The Brown Family
Papa John, Jesse’s father, was a powerfully built man who stood five feet ten inches and weighed 250 pounds. He served in an all-Black cavalry unit during World War I. During the tumultuous years of Jesse’s childhood, he was a laborer and sharecropper as well as a Baptist deacon. Brown had a stint working in a grocery warehouse before being hired by the Dixie Pine Products company. Papa John made fifteen cents an hour at the turpentine plant, and the family lived in a workers’ cabin. 

Jesse’s mother, Julia Lindsey Brown, valued education. Julia was a schoolteacher before marrying John Brown in 1918. After leaving the teaching profession, Julia remained the educational force in the Brown household, which included six children: Marvin, Johnnie, William, Jesse, Lura, and Fletcher. Julia encouraged them to master reading, writing, grammar, and spelling. She stressed the importance of correct English usage as both a survival skill and a marker of dignity.

After supper, Papa read the newspaper while Julia and the boys often played the word game. Jesse, Lura, and Fletcher passed around a dictionary. Each child selected a word and read its definition, which preceded a challenge: Provided with this information, could their mother spell the word? “The boys groaned time and again as she spelled every word correctly.” Irreverently, one of the boys diagnosed his mother as being “education crazy.” Julia monitored her children’s homework, correcting errors in red and requiring repeated pronunciation of misspelled words.

Shows
Jesse had a boyhood fascination with airplanes, but his early experiences with aviation were clouded by bigotry. In 1932, Papa Brown took Jesse to his first air show in Hattiesburg, which featured several airplanes performing acrobatic maneuvers. Many onlookers took their first plane rides that day, but his papa could not afford the fee. Father and son stood a respectful distance from the White spectators.

Recognizing Jesse’s love of flight, Marvin, a freshman at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, gave his kid brother a dime so he could go to the Saenger Theater. The 997-seat and air-conditioned movie palace featured the most popular, first-run films. Not surprisingly, Jesse was drawn to an aviation war movie, “Hell’s Angels.” In January of 1931, this motion picture, produced and directed by Howard Hughes at a cost of $4 million and starring Jean Harlowe, made a three-day run in Hattiesburg. Jesse sat in the segregated balcony to watch the movie, which depicted dogfights between American and German biplanes.

Jesse frequently visited an airfield near his home in Palmer Crossing. He was mesmerized by the antique red biplane and the dashing pilot who flew it.  Clad in helmet and scarf, the pilot offered a “thumbs up” followed shortly by the plane roaring down the strip and into the sky.

Corby Yates, the boss of the airfield, reflected the common racial views of the era. He held African Americans in contempt; his attitude toward Jesse was no exception. Whenever the mechanic caught sight of Jesse, he chased him from the airfield, often hurling vile epithets, profanity, and the occasional wrench. Nevertheless, Jesse’s love of aviation was undeterred.

Life in Lux
Following his layoff from the turpentine plant, Papa Brown turned to sharecropping. He moved his family to Lux, a hamlet outside Hattiesburg with an old-fashioned general store and a one-room church in the piney woods. The Browns grew corn, cotton, and sugarcane. They lived in a pineboard and tin-roofed house, which rested perilously on cinder blocks. The feeble structure shook when trains passed on the nearby Gulf and Ship Island Railroad.

Papa John and his sons worked in the fields from “‘cain’t see’” to “‘cain’t see’” (pre-dawn to dusk). One day, their grueling labor was interrupted by a plane passing overhead. Jesse remarked, “‘I’m sure gonna fly one of those things.’” Good-natured sibling laughter followed this bold declaration. However, Jesse, then eight-years-old, held tightly to this conviction despite societal norms.

Jesse Brown and his siblings walked three miles to school. The building was jarringly primitive, but typical of rural, segregated Mississippi. The schoolhouse was one room with a tin roof, glassless windows, and heated by a kerosene stove. It was furnished with eight roughhewn benches each occupied by students of a single grade level. Thirty students, eight grades, and one teacher, who had a high school education.

Settling Accounts
In his seventh-grade year, Jesse got a job selling and delivering the Pittsburgh Courier, the only African American newspaper distributed in that part of Mississippi. For Jesse’s customers, the newspaper was their connection to the outside world. The Courier sold for a nickel and Jesse got two pennies. A bus would dump the bundle of newspapers at the General Store. Jesse delivered the papers by trapsing through fields and woods in all kinds of weather. As one of the job’s perks, he got a free copy of the newspaper.

In one issue, Jesse noticed a front-page photograph of C. Alfred Anderson, an African American, who successfully navigated racism’s headwinds. Anderson bought his first airplane, maintained it, and obtained a pilot’s license. There was a widely held belief that Black men didn’t have the capacity to fly planes. Jesse knew this was untrue and Anderson’s inspirational example refuted it. Jesse clipped the Anderson article and nailed it to the wooden wall by his bed.

In September 1939, Jesse was thirteen when Mr. Ingram, the landowner, paid a visit to the Brown homestead. It was time to settle accounts. Jesse heard his papa and mama talk about it. They figured to have earned somewhere between $900 and $1,500 for their yearly labors, which yielded eighteen bales of cotton, corn, potatoes, and sugarcane.  Papa John was on an errand when Mr. Ingram spoke with Julia, “‘Well … the way we figure it, you owe us fifty dollars.’” When Julia attempted to speak, she fainted. A year of arduous work left the family in debt.

Eureka!
In October of 1942, Jesse transferred to the Eureka School, a modern two-story brick building in Hattiesburg, for his junior year. In this era, Hattiesburg provided some of the state’s best educational facilities for African Americans. Jesse’s parents arranged for him to stay in the city with an aunt and uncle so he could attend Eureka. Jesse performed admirably in the classroom. He had a facility for mathematics, and he was one of the top three students in his class. He also played football in the fall and excelled in track during the spring. Every evening, he worked in a honky-tonk outside of Hattiesburg, the Holmes Club, serving beverages to boisterous soldiers from nearby Camp Shelby. On Saturday mornings, he made the trek home to help his family; Sunday night, he made the return trip to the city.

Jesse longed to attend the school of his idol, “another Jesse [Owens],” Ohio State University. His principal, Dr. Nathaniel Burger, tutored Brown in mathematics and helped him gain admission to his preferred school. For two years, Jesse studied architectural engineering at Ohio State. He paid his way by working as a janitor and unloading boxcars. He also got support from some “unlikely friends.” On Jesse’s last night at the Holmes Club, the owner passed the hat around. The White soldiers of Camp Shelby tossed in bills, and the bar owner emptied his wallet. The hat—filled with $700—paid for a year of Jesse’s tuition.

While at Ohio State, Jesse saw a naval aviation recruiting poster. He had completed two years of college, which met the navy’s minimum requirements for flight school. Jesse decided to apply!

In Navy flight school, several flight instructors refused to work with Jesse Brown due to his race, but not Roland Christensen. Both men were from rural backgrounds, Christensen was a farm boy from the Midwest. He volunteered to train the young man from Mississippi. Before their first flight, Christensen challenged Jesse, “‘Convince me you have what it takes.’ He saw Jesse as a man, not as a black man.” In that moment, the lessons of Jesse Leroy Brown’s years of schooling fortified him as he soon took flight at the end of the runway.

Afterword
Posthumously, Jesse Leroy Brown was awarded the Purple Heart, the Air Medal, and the Distinguished Flying Cross. In 1972, a destroyer was christened the USS Jesse L. Brown. Two biographies have featured Jesse’s remarkable life. The most recent, Devotion, became a full-length film released in 2022.