Photo credits: Ruth Carol Taylor for Mohawk Airlines

Ruth Carol Taylor (pictured left) was born on December 27, 1931. She was the first African-American flight attendant in the United States.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts into a family of black, white, and Cherokee heritage, Taylor attended Elmira College and graduated as a registered nurse from the Bellevue School of Nursing in New York City.

Hired in December 1957, on February 11, 1958, Taylor was the flight attendant on a Mohawk Airlines flight from Ithaca to New York, the first time such a position had been held by an African American. She was let go within six months as a result of Mohawk’s then-common marriage ban.

Taylor was later significantly involved in covering the 1963 March on Washington and as an activist for consumer affairs and women’s rights. She wrote The Little Black Book: Black Male Survival in America (1985), whose purpose is to “save lives – the lives of Black African Males who are on the Endangered list” – in view of the endemic racism in the United States towards African-Americans.

In 2008, fifty years after her historic flight, her accomplishments were formally recognized by the New York State Assembly.

A portion of this page’s content was sourced from a Wikipedia article. The contents are publicly available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

*BlackThen.com writer/historian Victor Trammell edited and contributed to this report.