Janet harmon bragg autobiography example

For the month of March, the Smithsonian Institution Archives will be posting about interesting women from our collections in honor of Women’s History Month.

 Over the past two years, I have had the privilege of watching the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ Video History Collection interviews while they were digitized.

One of my favorites is Black Aviators (RU 9545) because of the stories of perseverance and triumph that interviewees shared. In one particularly compelling interview, Janet Harmon Bragg, one of the first female black aviators, describes how she faced adversity nearly all her life not only because she was black, but also because she was a woman.

Bragg was born March 24, 1907 in Griffin, Georgia to Samuel Harmon and Cordia Batts.

She attended Episcopal boarding schools and after graduation, pursued a nursing degree at Spellman College in Atlanta, where she qualified as a registered nurse in 1929 before she moved to Chicago to work at Wilson Hospital. In 1933, having