By Susan Zehnder, Education Director
Do you remember Mohawk Airlines? The “Route of the Air Chiefs” airline carried passengers all around New York State.
It was one of the first feeder airlines to take advantage of the 1944 Civil Aeronautics Board’s (CAB) push to increase access to regions previously not served. A decade later, Mohawk Airlines increased another kind of access, by hiring the nation’s first woman of color as a stewardess.
In 1951, her father died and her mother moved back to New York City. Taylor then transferred to Bellevue School of Nursing in NYC. She graduated and practiced nursing for three years before applying to be a flight attendant. At that time, airlines hired nurses to reassure the flying public, so that was a good fit. However, no airline had hired anyone of color. Taylor, interested in flying, applied to Trans World Airlines (TWA) and was interviewed three times, but was not selected. Determined, she filed a complaint with the New York State Commission on Discrimination. About that same time, Peach, perhaps realizing that things needed to change, instructed his company to look for good candidates. Almost 800 women of color applied and were interviewed to be a Mohawk hostess. The company only hired one, Ruth Carol Taylor. Her first flight was February 11, 1958, and generated so much publicity that TWA quickly hired Margaret Grant and declared her as their first African American flight attendant.
Ruth
Carol Taylor was an activist all her life, fighting for racial equality. She
participated in the Civil Rights Movement, co-founded the Institute for
InterRacial Harmony, and after her son was mugged, wrote The Little Black Book: Black Male Survival in America or Staying
Alive and Well in an Institutionally Racist Society.
Being
the first of anything isn’t always easy, but seeing Taylor in her uniform
certainly encouraged other young women to consider the profession. When
interviewed for an article in JET magazine, Taylor shared that she “…didn’t
take the job because she thought being a flight attendant would be so great...I
knew better than to think it was all that glamourous. But it irked me that
people were not allowing people of color to apply…Anything like that sets my
teeth to grinding.”
An activist to the end, Taylor
was 92 when she died in May 2023.