07/16/2025
DID YOU KNOW….The Columbia Air Center was an airfield in Croom, Maryland from 1941 to 1958. It was started by African American pilots who were not permitted to use other airports, but was also open to whites. It had an all black staff and a number of the trainers had served in World War II as Tuskegee Airmen.
John R. Pinkett founded the airport in Croom, Maryland, in Prince George's County on leased land near the Patuxent River. Originally operating as Riverside Airport, it was renamed Columbia Air Center in December 1944. It was largely known as Croom Airport or Columbia Airport.
It housed up to five runways, three hangars, ten planes, and an all-black chapter of the Civil Air Patrol. The airport was operated from 1941–1954 by John William Greene Jr, and also by Tuskegee Airmen, Herbert Jones Jr., who would later form International Air Association, the first African-American owned airline.
In 1959, the property was purchased by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission and became the first part of the Patuxent River Watershed Park.
The pilots, members of a local aviation organization called the Cloud Club, had recently been kicked off a white-controlled airport in Virginia, so in 1941 they began leasing for $50 a month the 450-acre lot along the Patuxent River. Historical records show that it was among the first black-operated...
