Monday's Internet Edition, May 12, 2008.
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Such was a central theme of Leonard “Hawk” Hunter’s presentation on the Tuskegee Airmen Saturday morning at Baptist Children’s Home, delivered before an audience of just over 100 at the I.G. Greer Recreation Center. Hunter, Saturday’s featured speaker and one of three members of the Wilson V. Eagleson Chapter of Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. in attendance, spoke for 40 minutes on the Tuskegee Airmen’s battles against the Germans in World War II, and against racism and prejudice on the home front.
His lesson: that patriotism has never been the exclusive province of white men, and that men of all colors can and will sacrifice and die on the field of battle even while knowing that their country owes them better than it’s given.
Hunter — a Vietnam veteran, retired U.S. Air Force sergeant and historian for the Eagleson Chapter headquartered at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro — opened his lecture by recounting the conditions in America in late 1941, when Wilson Eagleson and countless other young black men wanted to enlist for military service as the United States entered World War II. This was the era of segregation and Jim Crow, when blacks were widely regarded as an inferior class unworthy of much notice or respect by their white neighbors. But still, said Hunter, there was a sense from blacks who wanted to serve that Americans were in this together.
“We wanted to fight for our country, because as I said, we are Americans, but they wouldn’t let us,” said Hunter, identifying with would-be black soldiers of that earlier generation. “We wanted to fly military aircraft, but they said we couldn’t do it.”
The U.S. Army Air Forces (the precursor of the modern Air Force established as a separate military branch in 1947) had in June 1941 begun a program to train black Americans as military pilots, with primary flight training conducted at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, the school founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881. Once the United States entered World War II, the stream of black pilot candidates headed to Tuskegee intensified; among the early graduates of the program was Benjamin O. Davis Jr., a 1936 West Point graduate who would go on to become the first black three-star general in the U.S. Air Force.
Even so, skepticism remained as to how well the Tuskegee aviators would perform. Hunter recounted a story in which Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, arrived at Tuskegee for a personal inspection and addressed one of the pilots, a Chief Anderson: “Can colored men fly?” asked the First Lady. Anderson’s response: “We sure can. Would you like to go for a ride?”
Shortly thereafter — partially due the prodding of Eleanor Roosevelt — the first Tuskegee graduates were shipped overseas and formed into the 99th Fighter Squadron for duty in North Africa. Three other all-black squadrons, the 100th, 301st and 302nd, were eventually formed; collectively known as the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee pilots flew over 15,000 sorties and conducted better than 200 escort missions, safeguarding bomber squadrons on bombing missions over Germany.
Another planned black squadron, the 477th bomber group, trained Tuskegee pilots to fly B-25 medium bombers but ended up never flying a mission; the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II before the 477th was ready for action. The 477th, though, ended up making history in another way; growing tired of the segregated facilities at Tuskegee, said Hunter, blacks of the 477th decided to integrate the white officers’ club — an act of civil disobedience that resulted in 100 arrests, though all were eventually cleared.
Due in part to the incident — what Hunter called the “first civil-right demonstration in the United States” — President Truman would in 1948 issue Executive Order 9981, formally desegregating the military. It would be a fateful first step in the dawn of the civil rights era, as black Americans came back from the war disinclined to go back to the old ways of separate but equal.
“In 1945, the Tuskegee Airmen came back to the United States. They were heroes, the greatest heroes their country had ever seen,” said Hunter. “But when they got off the ship, America told them, ‘colored to the left. All others to the right.’”
Hunter added that America had treated his own generation, the Vietnam veterans, the same way (“It had nothing to do with the color of our skin”) and closed by imploring his audience to honor Iraq veterans for their sacrifices, rather than dismissing them as agents of an unjust war.
“Don’t look at us as persons of color — as Martin Luther King said, you’re judged by the content of your heart, not the color of your skin,” said Hunter. “Don’t judge the Iraq veterans. Give them what America did not give us.”
R.J. Beatty can be reached at 472-9500, ext. 234, or at tvillesports@yahoo.com.