✈️ “He Built a Plane from Scrap Before the Wright Brothers — Then Racism Erased His Name from History”

 

Long before the Wright brothers took flight at Kitty Hawk, long before the history books began their story of human flight with two white men and a wooden biplane, there was another name — whispered, erased, nearly forgotten.

His name was Ezekiel Jones, and according to those who still remember, he was the first man to conquer the sky.

It happened in the shadows of Mississippi’s cotton fields, in a time when a Black man’s dream was often a crime.

Yet Ezekiel didn’t just dream — he built.

Out of scraps of wood, bits of iron, and a mind sharper than the tools he used, he fashioned something the world wasn’t ready to see.

They called him “Crazy Zeke,” the man who thought he could fly.

But history has a cruel way of mocking the visionaries it fears most.

Neighbors said they’d see him working through the night by the light of a lantern, sketching on parchment, muttering about “lift” and “drag” as if speaking in tongues.

He’d watch the hawks glide above the riverbanks for hours, then race home to adjust his contraption — a machine of pulleys, pedals, and canvas wings stitched from feed sacks.

“Man was meant to walk,” the preacher warned him one Sunday.

Ezekiel just smiled and replied, “Not me.

In the spring of 1892, when the air was heavy with rain and rebellion, Ezekiel Jones rolled his strange machine out of the barn behind his cabin.

A crowd gathered — curious children, skeptical farmers, a few who came just to laugh.

But Ezekiel didn’t care.

He climbed into the seat, gripped the handles, and whispered a prayer.

What happened next was witnessed by a dozen people and believed by almost none.

The machine lifted — not far, not high, but enough.

For six glorious seconds, the contraption rose above the ground, wheels spinning, fabric trembling, and Ezekiel’s laughter echoing over the fields.

It was the sound of a man touching freedom.

Then came the crash.

The left wing tore loose, and the machine spun, landing hard in the dirt.

Ezekiel crawled out bleeding but grinning.

“Told you man could fly,” he said, before collapsing beside his dream.

News of the event spread only as rumor — a footnote in a local paper that never reached beyond county lines.

No photographs, no patents, no proof.

Just the memory of a man who tried.

For years afterward, Ezekiel rebuilt.

He refined his designs, studied air currents, experimented with gears.

But he lived in a world that didn’t want him to succeed.

White men in town told him to stop.

His pastor called it blasphemy.

Even his own family begged him to let it go.

“They’ll kill you if you keep this up,” his sister warned.

And they nearly did.

In 1897, his workshop was found burned to the ground.

His machine — gone.

Witnesses claimed to have seen a group of masked men riding away into the night.

No arrests were made.The sheriff wrote it off as an accident.

But those who knew better said the flames were meant to erase something dangerous — the proof that a Black man had flown before the Wrights ever left the ground.

Ezekiel didn’t rebuild again.

He moved north to Chicago, taking work as a machinist in a factory.

He never spoke publicly of his invention again.

But those who worked with him said he’d often stare at the sky during breaks, his hands trembling, his lips moving silently — as if reciting the equations of lift he once carved into the walls of his barn.

In 1910, seven years after the Wright brothers’ historic flight, Ezekiel was found dead in his small apartment.

On his table lay a faded notebook filled with diagrams — a curved wing design almost identical to the one that would later define modern aviation.

But no one paid attention.

He was buried in an unmarked grave.

Decades later, a historian named Dr.Raymond Porter stumbled upon an article in a forgotten Mississippi newspaper archive.

The date: April 12, 1892.

The headline: “Local Negro Inventor Claims To Have Flown a Flying Machine.

” There was a sketch — crude, but shockingly similar to the Wright Flyer.

Dr.Porter spent years piecing together fragments of Ezekiel’s life: letters, church records, whispers from descendants who still carried the story like forbidden scripture.

He found one testimony from a woman named Hattie Williams, who was only ten years old when she watched Ezekiel lift off that field.

“I saw him fly,” she told an interviewer in 1938.

“The machine went up, and we all screamed.

It was like the Lord lifted him.

But then it fell, and they told us never to talk about it again.”

Even now, the Smithsonian refuses to list Ezekiel Jones among aviation pioneers, citing “insufficient evidence.

” But others know better.

They say the reason his name isn’t in the books isn’t because he failed — but because he wasn’t allowed to succeed.

A century later, a team of engineers reconstructed his sketches using modern modeling software.

The results stunned them: the lift-to-weight ratio, the wing curvature, even the rudimentary control surfaces — all theoretically functional.

“With a stronger engine, it could have flown,” said one engineer.

“Ezekiel was decades ahead of his time.

Today, in the town where he once lived, a rusted metal plaque stands in a field surrounded by silence.

It reads:

“Ezekiel Jones, dreamer, builder, aviator.He believed man could fly.

Tourists drive by without stopping.

Few know the name.

But every now and then, when the wind sweeps across the grass, the locals say you can hear the creak of wooden wings and the faint echo of laughter — the sound of a man defying gravity and the world that tried to keep him down.

History remembers the Wright brothers as the fathers of flight.

But somewhere in the unrecorded corners of America’s past, a Black man’s hands built a machine that touched the heavens first.

And while his name may have been buried, his dream — that unshakable belief that no one’s color should chain their sky — still flies.