Honors for Men With a Mission : The Tuskegee Airmen’s Biggest Battle--Against Racism--Was Fought on the Ground

In the air, everybody loved them.

They flew in the tightest formations, hit their targets, and never, ever strayed from the bombers they were protecting. During 200 missions these fighter pilots escorted, not one bomber was lost to enemy fire.

In the bargain, they destroyed or damaged 409 enemy aircraft and earned a Presidential Unit Citation and 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses.

They were the Tuskegee Airmen, the famous black fighter pilots. And in the air, they were in their glory.

But on the ground, they were patronized, shunned, even hated. They were turned out of hotels and restaurants, harassed by local police and taunted by nearby residents whose eyes never looked past their black faces to see the wings on their chests.

And when 61 of them, all uniformed officers, dared to walk into the officers club at Freeman Field in Seymour, Ind., they were arrested.

There are more than 2,300 Tuskegee Airmen still living throughout the country, and the 143-member Los Angeles chapter of their unique veterans’ organization will be honored Saturday and Sunday at Van Nuys Airport’s Aviation Expo-90 “Salute to the Pilots of World War II.”

The story of the Tuskegee Airmen (so called because they all trained at the Tuskegee, Ala., Air Field) is a story of men with a special mission. Committed not only to winning a war, these pilots also were in the air to prove “that black men could fly airplanes,” as one of them put it.

According to the history books, they flew brilliantly. But more significantly, they were among the vanguard of black servicemen who not only raised the status of black military personnel from menial enlisted jobs to the corps of officers, but played a key role in destroying the American military’s segregation policies.

Until 1939, the Army Air Corps (later to become the U. S. Air Force) refused to accept blacks into its ranks, and it took an act of Congress to change that policy.

As a result of that legislation, a training base specifically for black pilots and support crews was established at Tuskegee near the famous black college, Tuskegee Institute.

Still, cracking the color barrier was difficult. Although blacks were accepted for training, quotas were established, and many were rejected on the flimsy pretexts.

“One (recruiter) told me, ‘Hey, you don’t have enough math,’ ” recalled Alexton Boone of Northridge, a retired aerospace project engineer who eventually operated the control tower for the first black fighter squadron in the U.S. Air Force, the 99th. “I said, ‘How about differential calculus? Is that enough for you?’ I told him he was giving me a song and dance, because at that time, that’s what you got.

“But I had to have it. I had to have it.”

Lowell Steward, a retired real estate broker who lives in Los Angeles, was captain of the basketball team at Santa Barbara State College (now UC Santa Barbara) when the United States entered the war.

“I decided to go down and join up in the Air Force right after Pearl Harbor,” he said, “I tried to join the white Air Force, but they didn’t allow me as a black boy to go with the white boys. They didn’t call me until 10 months later. They didn’t know what to do with me.

“The powers-that-be seemed to be saying that Negroes couldn’t fly an airplane. They didn’t believe that Negroes had the mental capacity to do anything other than menial jobs. That kind of inspired me to prove that I could,” Steward said. “I had never touched an airplane, but that so incensed me that I said, ‘Hell, I know I can fly.’ ”

He became a fighter pilot with the 100th Fighter Squadron and fought in Italy.

Before he left for Europe, however, he gave his wife a pair of his wings to wear. It got her a grilling by the FBI, which wanted to know where she had gotten them, he said.

“My wife said, ‘Well, my husband’s a pilot,’ ” recalled Steward. “And they said, ‘There are no black pilots.’ ”

It was a misconception that died hard. While the pilots’ initial training at Tuskegee Army Air Field came from black civilian pilots, the more advanced training fell to white pilots who, in some cases, had even less flying experience than their black students.

Often, the white instructors used their time at Tuskegee as a quick springboard to promotion; others were assigned there as punishment, said Steward.

“We were the cream of the crop,” he said. “We were college presidents, doctors, lawyers, preachers, All-American athletes, intellectual geniuses. Can you imagine all these people being trained by instructors who didn’t want to be there?”

The fliers’ treatment could be even worse off-base, said Oliver Goodall, who flew with the 477th Bombardment Group, an all-black bomber unit.

“They’d tell you to get back across the tracks,” said Goodall, who lives in Altadena. “It didn’t matter that you were an officer in uniform. They would refuse you service in restaurants. In the first place, they didn’t believe you were an officer. You could have wings on and they’d say, ‘No, no. No black man flies an airplane.’ ”

Matters improved--sometimes--after the men were sent overseas. Europeans in Allied-occupied territories showed little or none of the prejudice the airmen were accustomed to at home.

“After you got overseas, you realized what it meant, really, to be free and to be accepted,” said Ted Lumpkin, a former intelligence officer for the 100th Fighter Squadron who lives in Inglewood. “But after the (white) Americans got there, you could feel the difference.”

But in the air. . . .

“They loved us,” said Steward. “We were setting an example. We flew very tight formations and we’d fly right over the bombers, so close we could see the guys’ faces and they’d be waving.”

“The other (fighter) pilots were up there to get a kill record, to score victories,” said Steward. “We were up there to prove that we could fly.”

But once they were earthbound again, no amount of skill or courage or intelligence could budge the rigid policy of segregation on the bases, where white and black officers and enlisted men were strictly separated in almost all activities. That is, until April 5, 1945.

It was on that day--and during part of the following day--that 61 black officers of the 477th Bombardment Group, stationed at Freeman Field and angered by their second-class status at the base, brushed past the base provost marshal and, in full-dress uniforms, walked into the all-white officers club.

Within 24 hours, all were placed under arrest.

“Sure, we were patriotic as hell, but we were also hostile as hell because of the way we were being treated,” said Bill Ellis, a former instructor pilot with the bombardment group and one of the men (Goodall was another) who entered the club.

“We decided that if we had to fight the war over here, then that’s where we were going to fight it. We were not going to be pushed into something we knew was wrong,” said Goodall.

All but three of the men who walked into the club were quickly released, but all black officers on the base were ordered to sign a statement indicating that they understood the regulation that officially barred them from the club. All but eight of the officers, a total of 101, refused. They were arrested.

The officers were not released until April 19. But by then, word of the incident had flashed around the country.

The furor prompted the War Department to establish the McCloy Committee to investigate illegal segregation in the Army. It was the first step toward the official desegregation of all U. S. armed forces worldwide in June, 1949.

Ellis called the officers club incident “the single most socially significant thing to come out of World War II.”

Still, it would be years before similar color barriers eroded in civilian life. Mitch Higginbotham, a B-25 pilot and one of the 101 officers who refused to sign the segregation statements at Freeman Field, hoped to become an airline pilot after the war.

“But all those hopes and dreams crashed when I found out they still weren’t accepting black pilots in civilian aviation,” he said.

He eventually found a position as a Los Angeles County probation officer. He is retired today and lives in Inglewood.

A total of 992 pilots were graduated from the base at Tuskegee; 450 were sent overseas; 66 were killed in action. They flew nearly 1,600 missions and all the bombers they protected made it home. Five of their number are now Air Force generals.

In the book “Lonely Eagles,” a history of the Tuskegee Airmen by Southern California writer Robert Rose, the former commander of the base at Tuskegee, Col. Noel Parrish, said “Our men were good enough to graduate from any flying school in the country. We made sure of that, and working together we proved it. We emphasized that any pilot or a man of whatever color, size or shape is just as good as he proves himself to be . . . When the test came, they had to fly and fight just as men, Americans against a common enemy.”

Ceremonies honoring Southland Tuskegee Airmen begin at noon Saturday and Sunday at the Van Nuys Airport. The Aviation Expo-90 also will feature a large ground display of aircraft, vintage and modern. Admission is free, as are airport tours being conducted throughout the weekend.

The Van Nuys Airport is located at 8030 Balboa Blvd. For more information, call (818) 773-1656.