Azellia White, who said she found freedom in the skies, becoming one of the first African American women to earn a pilot’s license in the United States, died Sept. 14 at a nursing home in Sugar Land, Tex. She was 106. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″]
Her death was reported Nov. 18 in the London Daily Telegraph but had previously gone largely unnoted in the U.S. and international news media. A great-niece, Emeldia Bailey, confirmed her death and said she did not know the cause.
Mrs. White, the daughter of a sharecropper and a midwife, was drawn to aviation by her husband, Hulon “Pappy” White, a mechanic who served during World War II in Tuskegee, Ala., as a mechanic for the storied unit of black military pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen.
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