Description

Ensign Jesse Leroy Brown, the first African American to complete flight training in the United States Navy, was also the first African American naval officer killed in the Korean War. Born October 13, 1926 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he was one of six children; his father, John Brown, was a sharecropper, and his mother, Alice, was a teacher. In high school, Jesse Brown was a three-sport athlete. He graduated from Hattiesburgs racially segregated Eureka High School, where he was the salutatorian, in 1944. He studied engineering at Ohio State University and supported himself by working off campus as a janitor and boxcar loader.