Breaking The Barrier: Ruth Carol Taylor Becomes First African American Flight Attendent

 

Feb. 11, 1958, Ruth Carol Taylor broke the color barrier as a flight attendant. when she joined Mohawk Airlines. Her previous attempt to do so a TWA failed but, her position at Mohawk created public pressure on TWA forcing them to hire Margaret Grant later in 1958, shattering the color barrier. While she is best known for her achievement in the airline industry, she spent much of her nursing and journalism career as an activist for minority and women’s rights She continued breaking barriers, and in 1963, she covered the March on Washington as a journalist for a British magazine, Flamingo. She co-founded the Institute for Inter-Racial Harmony Inc. in 1982, for which she developed testing designed to measure racial bias in educational, commercial, and social settings.