Willa Brown Chappell, a Glasgow native, was the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license in the U.S. in 1937, and that year she also earned a masters degree from Northwestern Univ. She was the first African American officer in Civil Air Patrol in 1941 and the first American woman to hold both a mechanic’s license and a commercial pilot’s license in 1943. She was co-founder of the National Airmen’s Association of America, which worked to get African Americans into the U.S. Air Force. In 1940, she co-founded the Coffey School of Aeronautics, which trained black pilots, some of whom became part of the Tuskegee Airmen. She was influential in the integration of the U.S. military in 1948.