Passengers boarding aircraft today are mostly greeted by smiling cabin crew made up of all races, nationalities, genders and backgrounds. But it was not always such a rosy scene.

Up until the 1950s and ‘60s, the flying world was very homophobic, with Blacks and other visible minorities not being hired in any large numbers for the globe-trotting, good-paying airline jobs held by whites.
All that changed in 1958 when a feisty Ruth Carol Taylor broke the colour barrier to become the first Black woman to work as a flight attendant for a major U.S. air carrier. And that was big news in a time of famed CBS newsman, Walter Cronkite.
Taylor, who is still alive, was born in 1931 in Boston. She was studying to become a nurse like her mom, when she decided to switch to become a flight attendant, a field she felt was dominated by whites.

She was rejected for a position with Trans World Airlines (TWA) because of the colour of her skin. This angered Taylor and she was determined to fight back. She filed a complaint against TWA with the New York State Commission of Discrimination. No action was brought against the airline, but other companies began to re-think their policies on hiring ‘minority’ crew members.
Through luck and hard work she managed to land a job with Mohawk Airlines after being selected from 800 Black applicants.
Taylor made history in February 1958 when she became the first African American flight attendant on a flight from Ithaca to New York City.
“It irked me that people were not allowing people of colour to apply,” Taylor recalled to JET Magazine in a 1995 interview. “Anything like that sets my teeth to grinding.”
She admitted that she had never actually wanted to become a stewardess, but did it to break the racial barriers that existed in the industry.

It was a ground-breaking moment in both American and civil aviation history, as three months later, Margaret Grant was hired by TWA as their first African American flight attendant. She was let go after disclosing she suffered from sickle cell anemia, which the airline falsely concluded can cause “Negroes to develop damage of the spleen at great altitudes.”
She was forced to resign six months later as she was about to marry another Mohawk employee, which was banned. Being a married woman was forbidden by all carriers in the 50’s and 60’s and Taylor was forced to leave the job she loved.
Her flying career, according to the press, had not only changed the aviation industry forever, it had also been a major coup in the fight for civil rights in America.
Shortly after Taylor and her husband moved to Barbados, where she founded the country’s first professional nursing journal and became active in civil rights.

She returned to the U.S. and in 1963 covered the ‘March On Washington,’ as well as becoming an activist for consumer affairs and women’s rights. In 1977, she co-founded the Institute for Inter Racial Harmony, which developed a test to measure racist attitudes known as the ‘Racism Quotient.’
Still very busy, Taylor In 1985 wrote ‘The Little Black Book: Black Male Survival In America,’ a guide for young Black men living in the U.S.
Taylor’s accomplishment was formally recognized by the New York State Assembly in 2008, some 50-years after her historic flight that broke the color barrier and paved the way for other women of color to join the industry.
The life-long activist lives in New York City where she is still active. It has been a far cry from the days when passengers hailed the ‘coloured’ attendants as “Trolley Dollys” or “Angels of the Sky.”

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