Charles Ward Chappelle (July 11, 1872 – February 28, 1941)[1] was an early 1900s African-American aviation pioneer and medal winner, electrical engineer, and businessman who was president of the USA's African Union Company, Inc., whose mission in the early 1900s was to create small, modernized African cities for blacks with leased land from the Gold Coast of West Africa.
[2] Several hundred thousand dollars in capital was raised during that time period for construction and modernization on the Gold Coast through the stock market, and infrastructure metal deals were made with companies such as U.S.
(African Union Company officials included Charles W. Chappelle, president; Joseph L. Jones, secretary; John T. Birch, Treasurer; Directors Gilchrist Stewart, Emmett J. Scott, D. W. Roberts, M. D., George W. Robber, and R. R. Jackson)[4][5] Additional funding came from minerals such as silver, tin (and other commodities such as mahogany found on the leased African lands) that were exported to the US and Europe.
[7] After Chappelle moved back to Pittsburgh in the 1920s, he was still an active president of the African Union Company, and its Chairman of the Board was Dr. Jay Emmett Scott of the USA's Howard University, Washington, D.C.[8] It was reported in the Savannah Tribune in 1922 that "Charles W. Chappelle has made connections with the U.S. Steel Corporation [year 1922] to the extent of a contract of 100,000 tons of manganese a year for use in their extensive plants.
$8,000,000 worth of the finest grades of mahogany [year 1922] are now awaiting shipment to the United States and Europe" and that business was thriving requiring two steamships.
[3] Later, while Jay Emmett Scott was chairman of the board of the African Union Company, it was "unable to arrange for shipment of the cocoa to the United States.
[10] The event had a host of the well-established attending and speaking, and was covered by the media for two weeks, and his airplane invention was an excitement for the African-American community.
In a May 1911 issue of The Crises: A Record of the Darker Races, Social Uplift (p. 7) published by the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) in New York City, there is a brief mention of C.W.