a bit of history

Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, nicknamed the Black Eagle, the first African person to obtain a pilots licence in the United States was born in Trinidad on January 5th, 1897. In 1922, when he was 25 years old, he flew over parades in support of Marcus Garvey. He subsequently purchased a plane with the expressed purpose of flying to Africa. When he attempted to depart from Roosevelt airfield in July 1924, the plane crashed and burned. He survived and spent the next month in a Long Island hospital before trying again. In 1929, he succeeded in a Trans-Atlantic flight only two years later than Charles Lindberg.
In 1930 after flying to Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie granted him Ethiopian citizenship and made him a Colonel in the Army. One year later, in 1931, he became the first black man to fly coast to coast over the American continent and broke the world record for endurance flying with a non-stop non-refueling flight of 84 hours and 33 minutes.
In 1935, the Black Eagle commanded the small Ethiopian Air Force against the Italian invasion of that country by Benito Mussolini’s fascist forces. Four years later he wrote and produced the classic play, Lying Lips, which starred Robert Earl Jones, father of James Earl Jones. In 1965, in collaboration with John Bulloch, he wrote his autobiography, Black Eagle. Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the "Black Eagle," died in New York on 19th February 1983. His achievements go totally unrecognized in his native Trinidad and Tobago
Source: Virtual Museum of Trinidad & Tobago