While most people consider flying via an airline to be a pretty routine experience, such was not the case, when passengers first began to travel from city to city back at the inception of commercial airline passenger travel. Not too surprisingly, the government made it a point to regulate this nascent business and therefore passed a considerable number of rules and regulations to address this form of travel. One of those legislative acts so passed, was the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, of which, it is important to consider, that traveling in America, meant flying over various States, and into the various cities of those States, in which, some of those cities and States were located in the segregationist South. In a time, in which “separate but equal” was the implicit law of the land, and of which, those of color, were doomed to take the back seats of the bus, or to stand, when such a bus was fully occupied; this thus signified that the airline industry, could ill afford to take a wrong step, as their business model, depended upon being accommodative to all those that had the money to afford such travel and to therefore not to be discriminatory or to get caught up in Southern practices and traditions which meant little to nothing to these airlines and clearly represented no material advantage to their business. So too, in consideration of the fact that the Southern States were outnumbered by all the other States, this made such an Act eminently sensible, along with the salient fact that the administration so led by FDR was progressive and not regressive.
As much credit as we give to those that wrote, debated upon, and passed the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, it is important to take to heart, that the people so traveling through commercial airlines at that point of time, were almost exclusively people from the business world, or of some real material success, education, and means; because airline travel back then was not for those on some sort of strict budget. This therefore meant that to a very large extent, the people so traveling on domestic airlines weren’t people of color, and quite obviously those of color on the airlines in that day and age, were for the most part, primarily going to be representatives of the so-called “better” type.
So then, those airports in the South, were pretty much out of luck in regards to segregating those of color from the privileged race on the actual flights, though they did what they could do to make the Southern airport terminals, segregated and uncomfortable for those that were not white; but were at the same time somewhat cognizant that the “times were a-changing,” along with the somewhat ominous fear that the Federal government seemed on the pathway to trumped more and more of so-called State’s rights. Indeed, the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 proved the point that with a fresh start on a new form of transportation that America was forward enough looking to discard that which was not in keeping with equality and opportunity, so as to embrace that which was in harmony with that of a meritocratic country, representing fairness, liberty, and hope, for all.