The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the U.S. effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly. This struggle involved pioneers like Bessie Coleman, who traveled to World War I-era Paris in order to gain piloting skills that she was denied in her U.S. homeland; and John Robinson, from Chicago via Mississippi, who traveled to 1930s Ethiopia, where he was the leading pilot for this beleaguered African nation as it withstood an invasion from fascist Italy, became the personal pilot of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, and became a founder of Ethiopian Airways. Additionally, Horne adds nuance to the oft told tale of the Tuskegee Airmen and goes further to discuss the role of U.S. pilots during the Korean war in the early 1950s. He also tells the story of how and why U.S. airlines were fought when they began to fly into South Africa-and how planes from this land of apartheid were protested when they landed at U.S. airports.

Acclaimed historian Gerald Horne troubles America’s settler colonialism’s “creation myth”.
August 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying such illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed. Here, Gerald Horne argues forcefully that, in order to understand the arrival of colonists from the British Isles in the early seventeenth century, one must first understand the “long sixteenth century”-from 1492 until the arrival of settlers in Virginia in 1607.
In retelling the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas, Horne recounts how the fierce resistance by Africans and their Indigenous allies weakened Spain and enabled London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607. These settlers laid the groundwork for the British Empire and its revolting spawn that became the United States of America.