Despite most efforts to honor BIPOC women being halted, there are encouraging signs that airport names in general are becoming more diverse. Over the past couple of decades, BIPOC men—in addition to Frederick Douglass—have slowly begun to receive more recognition in the airport sphere. Musician Louis Armstrong’s name was added to the New Orleans airport in 2001; in 2003, Atlanta amended its Hartsfield International Airport to include the surname of Maynard Jackson, the city’s first Black mayor; Honolulu’s airport honored late Hawaii senator Daniel K. Inouye, the son of Japanese immigrants, by establishing an eponymous hub in 2017; Louisville, Kentucky—hometown of Muhammed Ali—bestowed the world famous boxer’s name upon its airport in 2018.
BIPOC women, however, are still not being bestowed equal recognition. In 2014, the Oakland airport renamed with much fanfare part of its main roadway after Bessie Coleman, the trailblazing aviator who became the first Black woman in the U.S. to earn her pilot’s license. But port officials stopped short of naming the entire facility after her.
Aviator Bessie Coleman with her plane. Coleman learned French to get her pilot's license abroad after being denied in the U.S.
Michael Ochs ArchivesEven NASA renamed its Washington, D.C., headquarters building after Mary W. Jackson, the agency’s first Black woman engineer who was portrayed in the film Hidden Figures. The building houses offices and an archival library. The organization’s largest space centers in Texas and Florida—home to Mission Control and the rocket launchpad known as “America’s gateway to space,” respectively—are still named after presidents Johnson and Kennedy.
These gestures are a step in the right direction, but in the end, activists say they still fall short. Miller, too, was asked by the Port of Oakland’s Board of Commissioners and the director of the airport whether she “would be interested in pursuing having a road, terminal, or other lesser facility named for Maggie Gee instead of the entire airport,” she says. “These honors are great, but I would like wider recognition. Personally I think this is symbolic of what women and especially women of color and people of color are always asked to accept: less. Get less, be grateful you have more than nothing.”
But some are still optimistic that, eventually, this pattern will be broken. “These names do change over time,” Cochrane says. “That’s a good thing. It reflects what’s going on in the world in some respects. But they are temporary; they will change.”
Miller agrees that these type of honors need frequent reassessing. “History isn’t just set. You constantly have to be prioritizing and deciding what matters for each generation,” she says.
Although the pandemic has slowed down her initiative, Miller says she won’t give up until there is an airport with a BIPOC woman's name on it. “We are making progress,” she says. “But we need to keep pushing.”
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There Are Still No U.S. Airports Named After Women of Color - Condé Nast Traveler
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