After learning terrorists had flown jetliners full of people into the World Trade Center — and that their own plane had been hijacked for a similar purpose — a group of passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 decided they wouldn’t surrender. Their doomed charge toward the cockpit, Todd Beamer’s rallying cry, “Let’s roll,” became a defining act of American courage.
In the cockpit on that day, however, LeRoy W. Homer Jr. — the first officer of Flight 93, a military veteran, experienced pilot, and a Black man — already was resisting the hijackers.
Homer was sitting beside Capt. Jason Dahl when terrorists stormed the cockpit on that terrible day. Air traffic controllers heard a desperate transmission, most likely Homer, as the attack began: “Mayday! Hey, get out of here! Get out of here! Get out of here!”
No one knows precisely what happened next. Audio recovered from the flight indicates there was a struggle, and Homer’s family believes he and Dahl were the first people aboard Flight 93 to resist the hijackers. It was just minutes before passengers in the cabin organized the revolt that would become one of the most celebrated stories of 9/11. Overlooked
Overlooked but On the Record
Yet as the nation marks a quarter-century since the worst attack on U.S. soil, we don’t remember or honor Homer’s role, even though the rebellion on Flight 93 was the subject of two feature films. Indeed, it’s hard to find high-profile stories of Black first responders who saved lives, or heroically sacrificed their own, on 9/11.
It’s almost as if the infamous day has been whitewashed — metaphorically if not literally.
To be sure, the historical record includes Black people in photographs, on casualty lists, and in official histories of Sept. 11. They worked in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They were aboard all four of the airplanes. Black firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and other first responders ran toward the danger. Twelve Black New York City firefighters died at the World Trade Center.
At least 24 Black firefighters and law enforcement officers were killed on 9/11. Black people died who were working in the towers, serving at the Pentagon, and aboard the hijacked airplanes.
Nevertheless, when someone says “9/11,” our collective national memory and popular culture conjure up a familiar set of images and storylines. Office workers fleeing Manhattan beneath clouds of ash. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani striding through the rubble. Beamer fearlessly organizing passengers aboard Flight 93. Mostly white firefighters raising the American flag at Ground Zero.
Those stories and the courage they illustrate are real, but they aren’t the only stories.
An American Story
According to official records, at least 24 Black firefighters and law enforcement officers were killed on 9/11, including members of the city’s Department of Corrections staff. Black people died who were working in the towers, serving at the Pentagon, and aboard the hijacked airplanes.
Their stories, however, remain largely outside the narrative America constructed around that day.
Paul Washington, a former president of the FDNY’s Vulcan Society, the Black firefighters’ union, has written that the 12 Black firefighters who perished when the towers collapsed “didn’t seem to get the same recognition as the white firefighters” and weren’t represented proportionately in mainstream coverage.
Two and a half decades later, a staggering, unimaginable national tragedy has been compressed into a national narrative stocked with heroes, symbols and familiar faces. Some stories, like Beamer’s and those of his fellow passengers, became legend. Others became footnotes. Homer’s is one of them.
One of nine children, with seven older sisters, Homer grew up on Long Island, New York, obsessed with airplanes. He began flying lessons at 15, soloed at 16, and entered the U.S. Air Force Academy already holding a private pilot’s license.
He went on to fly military transport aircraft, supporting operations during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, as well as humanitarian missions in Somalia. He joined United Airlines while continuing to serve in the Air Force Reserve.
It is a distinctly American story. It is also a distinctly Black American one.
Shining a Spotlight
A generation after the Tuskegee Airmen battled racism simply for the right to fly military aircraft, Homer became an Air Force officer and commercial airline pilot. After his death, the Airmen posthumously honored him.
He left behind a wife, Melodie, and a 10-month-old daughter, Laurel, who grew up knowing her father largely through other people’s memories. Today, mother and daughter help keep that memory alive through the LeRoy W. Homer Jr. Foundation, which provides scholarships to young people pursuing private pilot licenses.
In recent years, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City has worked to bring greater attention to lesser-known Black victims, survivors, and first responders — an implicit acknowledgment that the story America remembers isn’t necessarily the complete one.
That doesn’t diminish the stories of firefighters we honor or the passengers who charged the cockpit of Flight 93; it enlarges it.
Because before “Let’s roll,” there was a Mayday call, a struggle in a cockpit, and a fight for control. And one of the first Americans to fight back on Sept. 11 was a Black man.
