Where Croom Learned to Fly: The Story of Columbia Air Center

In the late 1930s, Black pilots in the Washington region faced racial exclusion at nearby airports. Students of aviator Charles Alfred Anderson formed the Cloud Club, a Black flying club, and looked for land where they could operate on their own terms. They found a fallow field along the Patuxent River in Croom, leased about 120 acres from Rebecca Fisher, and opened Riverside Airfield in 1940. By January 1941, it held a Civil Aeronautics Authority license—the first licensed Black-owned and operated airfield in the United States, according to the College Park Aviation Museum’s Columbia Air Center history project.

John W. Greene Jr. became the field’s manager and a central figure in its early years. The site supported Howard University’s Civilian Pilot Training Program, private lessons, air shows, and community gatherings. It was not only a runway: it was a place where Black aviators could develop skills, share knowledge, and make aviation part of everyday possibility.

World War II interrupted that beginning. In February 1942, the Navy commandeered Riverside Airfield for training and expanded the runways. After the Navy stopped using the site, Greene and others reclaimed the field; it reopened in December 1944 as Columbia Air Center. The Maryland Historical Trust’s National Register documentation records the center’s instruction in navigation, meteorology, instruments, civil air regulations, flight theory, parachute training, and aircraft maintenance.

The airfield also became home to the Columbia Squadron, identified by Maryland’s official tourism office as the first Black Civil Air Patrol squadron in the Washington area. Later operators and names—including Croom Airport and Columbia Airport—make the end date more complicated than a single line on a timeline. The College Park Aviation Museum’s project documents aviation activity in Croom through 1962, while the National Register account says the Columbia Air Center facility operated until 1956 and that the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission acquired the field in 1959. Today, the former airfield is part of Patuxent River Park.

For Croom neighbors, this is a local story about more than a first. Columbia Air Center shows how Black Marylanders answered exclusion by building an institution that connected instruction, employment, recreation, and civic life.

The landscape remains a prompt to remember the people who organized, taught, maintained aircraft, welcomed students, and kept flying. Its history changes how we see Croom: not as a quiet edge of the map, but as ground where a determined local community opened the sky.