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TUSKEGEE AIRMEN - FIGHTER SQUADRONS

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps (AAC), a precursor of the U.S. Air Force. Trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama, they flew more than 15,000 individual sorties in Europe and North Africa during World War II. Their impressive performance earned them more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses, and helped encourage the eventual integration of the U.S. armed forces.

Segregation in the Armed Forces

There were young African Americans who aspired to become pilots met with significant obstacles, starting with the widespread (racist) belief that Black people could not learn to fly or operate sophisticated aircraft.

In 1938, with Europe teetering on the brink of another great war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced he would expand the civilian pilot training program in the United States.

At the time, racial segregation remained the rule in the U.S. armed forces—as well as much of the country. Much of the military establishment (particularly in the South) believed Black soldiers were inferior to whites, and performed relatively poorly in combat.

But as the AAC began ramping up its training program, Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier joined civil rights groups like the NAACP in arguing that Black Americans be included.

The Tuskegee Airmen are best known for proving during World War II that Black men could be elite fighter pilots. Less widely known is the instrumental role these pilots, navigators and bombardiers played during the war in fighting segregation through nonviolent direct action. Their tactics would become a cornerstone of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

The Tuskegee Airmen’s most influential moment of collective civil disobedience came in the spring of 1945, in what became known as the Freeman Field Mutiny. After enduring years of inadequate training facilities, discriminatory policies, and hostile commanders in the Army Air Force, 101 officers of the all-Black 477th Bombardment Group—who had initially trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama—were arrested at Indiana’s Freeman Field base when they refused to sign a base regulation requiring separate officers’ clubs for Black and white soldiers. The order came after 61 Black officers were arrested trying to enter the white officers’ club.

They weren’t alone. After the War Department ordered military bases to integrate all recreational facilities in 1944, Black officers across the country were eager to test the new policy. Most cases—including an earlier incident with the 447th—involved Black servicemen “entering post exchanges and asking to be served, or entering the theater and seating themselves in the white section,” said Alan M. Osur, a former history professor at the Air Force Academy and the author of Blacks in the Army Air Forces During World War II: The Problems of Race Relations. Nothing had yet occurred on the scale of the Freeman Field Mutiny.

Separate, but Not Equal, Facilities

Their actions sprang out of a long-simmering debate over the unequal treatment of Black and white officers and the integration of officers’ clubs. “The country is not ready to accept white officers and colored officers at the same social level,” said Major General Frank Hunter, the commanding general of the 477th Bombardment Group. “I base that opinion on the history of this country for the past 125 years.”

At Freeman Field, Hunter’s subordinate, Colonel Robert Selway, established two allegedly equal officers’ clubs—one for the white officers, who were designated as instructors and the other for Black officers, who were classified as trainees. But the two clubs were anything but equal. The white officers’ club had a large fireplace and game room with pool tables, table tennis and card tables, while its Black counterpart was heated by coal stoves and contained none of the aforementioned amenities. The Black officers nicknamed their officers’ club “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and refused to patronize it, according to Todd Moye, the author of Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II and the director of the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. “Selway attributed his decision to the belief that fraternization between instructors and trainees would have an ill effect on the group’s training,” Moye said. “In truth, the effort was a transparent attempt to circumvent both the letter and the law...which prohibited segregation of base facilities by race.”