Jesse Leroy Brown and Tom Hudner might have seemed like unlikely friends. Hudner was the son of a wealthy New England family. Brown was the son of African American sharecroppers. At age six, Brown wrote a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt asking him why there weren’t any black pilots in the military. Roosevelt wrote back and told him it would change one day. Jesse changed it. People told him the Navy would never accept a black pilot, but Jesse didn’t listen. He went to Ohio State and...