The Original Fly Guy: Marion Orr details activism of Black travel’s godfather

Seventy years ago this fall, Congressman Charles Diggs Jr. strode into a Southern airport and asked the manager a simple yet loaded question: “Where do Black passengers eat?” The answer: behind a wooden screen, in a corner, away from white eyes. That response launched a quiet revolution.

Over the next year, the freshman congressman from Detroit spent countless hours interviewing over 100 airport managers across 13 Southern states, systematically documenting what no federal official in 1955 had bothered to investigate. His findings revealed absurd contradictions at the heart of the jet age: Black passengers could board integrated airplane cabins—aviation was federally regulated—but once they landed, they entered a dehumanizing maze of Jim Crow segregation.

The variations were arbitrary and humiliating. In Norfolk, Virginia for example, the airport restaurant was segregated but the coffee shop wasn’t. In Chattanooga, the restaurant welcomed all passengers, but the bathrooms were divided by race. Black-owned taxi services were prohibited from waiting at airport curbs for fares, creating hours-long delays for Black travelers who had just flown across the country in minutes.

Now, Brown University political scientist Marion Orr has written the first comprehensive biography of this forgotten civil rights titan. House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr., released in September by the University of North Carolina Press, restores Diggs to his consequential place in American history.

Born in Detroit in 1922 to a prosperous funeral home dynasty, Diggs was elected to Congress in 1954, becoming Michigan’s first Black representative. When he took office in January 1955, he was one of only three Black members in a 531-person Congress. That summer, he made national headlines as the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till’s accused killers in Mississippi—where the sheriff forced him to sit at a segregated table with Black reporters despite his congressional status.

The humiliation sharpened his resolve. If a sitting congressman could be subjected to Jim Crow treatment, what were ordinary Black travelers experiencing?

His airport survey provided the answer. One Hot Springs, Arkansas airport manager told Diggs that the “class of colored people” who flew made segregation unnecessary—a telling assumption about who could afford air travel. Other managers defended seven-foot wooden screens that hid Black diners from white patrons, or separate-but-decidedly-unequal waiting areas tucked into corners and basements.

Drawing on Diggs’s rarely seen personal papers, FBI documents, and original interviews with family and associates, Orr argues that Diggs practiced “strategic moderation”—a coalition-building style more effective than the militant politics of contemporary Adam Clayton Powell or the machine politics of Chicago’s William Dawson. Rather than grandstanding, Diggs leveraged federal oversight to pressure local authorities. His survey became ammunition for civil rights advocates and federal agencies fighting to integrate airport terminals.

Washington National Airport had desegregated its restaurant in 1948 after pressure from President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, but most Southern airports remained stubbornly segregated throughout the 1950s. Diggs’s meticulous documentation helped change that. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum now features a permanent exhibit recognizing his contribution to commercial aviation—a legacy most travelers have never heard of.

But Diggs’s influence extended far beyond airports. He worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., founded the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971, and became the leading congressional voice on African liberation movements. As chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa, he earned the nickname “Mr. Africa” for his relentless criticism of South Africa’s apartheid regime—criticism so effective that South Africa banned him from the country. In 1973, he architected the home rule legislation that gave Washington, D.C. its first elected local government, paving the way for leaders like current Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Here’s how Orr describes his subject: “Dynamic, interesting, complex, frail, yet effective.” Orr’s biography doesn’t shy away from four marriages, gambling problems, and chronic financial woes that would ultimately unravel Diggs.

In 1978, he was convicted of mail fraud and payroll violations—salary kickback schemes that, while common in Congress at the time, became the focus of intense scrutiny. Freshman Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich would lead the charge to force his resignation. Diggs served seven months in prison and died largely forgotten in 1998.

House of Diggs arrives as debates rage over voting rights, police reform, and systemic racism continue. Orr’s portrait of strategic moderation—building coalitions, leveraging federal power, achieving incremental but lasting change—offers lessons for contemporary movements. Even today, Black travelers still report disparities in TSA screening, in who gets stopped for “random” searches, in who feels entirely comfortable moving through airports.

Still, seven decades after Charles Diggs, Jr. walked into airline terminal after terminal asking uncomfortable questions and documenting uncomfortable answers, Marion Orr has given us the biography Diggs deserved all along.

House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs Jr. is available now from the University of North Carolina Press.

This story was originally published November 25, 2025 at 9:00 AM with the headline "The Original Fly Guy: Marion Orr details activism of Black travel’s godfather."