Editor’s Note: The remarkable friendship between Jesse Leroy Brown, the Navy’s first black aviator, and fellow pilot Thomas J. Hudner Jr. is the basis for the new movie “Devotion,” in ...

This circa 1950 photo released by the U.S. Navy shows Jesse Brown in the cockpit of an F4U-4 Corsair fighter at an unidentified location. Brown, the first African-American naval aviator ...

It was the 1930s, though, and Brown was from a black sharecropper family in Mississippi. Nobody around him thought that there would ever be black pilots — or that, even if there were ...