After 50 Years, Cloud of Injustice Is Lifted : Race: Conviction lifted for black pilot’s protest at white officers club.

It was 1945, a time of war, and little was forgiven.

So when Army bomber pilot Lt. Roger C. (Bill) Terry, along with 61 other black officers, marched into a “whites only” officers club, he was court-martialed. Two of the others also were tried, and in the end 101 who were involved in one way or another were given reprimands after the incident at the ironically named Freeman Field, Ind.

Terry--charged with mutiny, treason, disobeying a direct order and conspiracy--was the only one convicted. His crime: “jostling,” as in brushing against a white officer as he went through the door.

For the next 50 years, the UCLA graduate would live his life as a convicted felon--until the Air Force set aside his conviction two months ago.

After half a century of waiting, it’s a little hard to get up and start cheering now, said Terry, 74.

Five decades of having to put on each loan application, each job application, yes, I am a convicted felon. It’s difficult not to be a bit bitter that it took so long.

“What we did was legal,” Terry said. “I’d have liked to have my name cleared 50 years ago. But you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

The incident that would hover over Terry for 50 years was a harbinger of racial changes to come, both within the military and outside it. The fliers who participated were all Tuskegee Airmen, a group started during World War II as the first unit of black military pilots. And a decade before Rosa Parks refused to take a seat at the rear of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., their actions became a call for civil rights.

Bill Terry, as he was known to all, was a pillar of his Compton community when he entered the Army Air Corps in 1942, drawn by the age-old romance of flight and the new, striking images of the first black fighter pilots shooting down Luftwaffe planes.

Those pilots--named for the airfield in Tuskegee, Ala., where they trained--opened the door for other all-black units.

The son of a postal worker and teacher, the 6-foot, 2-inch Terry had followed two older brothers to college, playing Bruin basketball with the soon-to-be baseball legend Jackie Robinson. Terry graduated from UCLA at the tender age of 19, and donned his first bomber jacket at 20.

After earning his wings, Terry, along with the other members of the 477th Bomber Group--the first black bomber unit--were transferred from Godman Field, Ky., to Freeman Field to prepare for possible deployment to the war in the Pacific. It was March, 1945.

What they found in the dusty fields and ramshackle barracks of Freeman was an apartheid system of white minority rule, and a divided force preparing to meet a common enemy.

Two years before, the War Department had issued a directive: All military recreation facilities were to be desegregated. Freeman’s commander, Gen. Frank O’Donnell Hunter, however, had found a way around that order, according to military historians. One of the base officers’ clubs, Hunter ordered, was to be used only by “supervisors.” The other was for “trainees.” All supervisors, it turned out, were white; all trainees black.

“Pilots with 100 missions were trainees,” Terry recalled with a shake of his head. “Our doctors were trainees. Our dentists were trainees.”

The newly arrived black officers of the 477th gathered in secret and decided to put Gen. Hunter’s policy to a peaceful test.

“The resulting plan, as with most great plans, was elegantly simple: Go to the club,” writes James C. Warren, one of the pilots, in his book “The Freeman Field Mutiny.”

The evening of April 5, 1945, Terry, like the others, made sure his fingernails were clean, his brass wings polished, his pleated pants pressed to a knife’s edge before heading to the club. The men didn’t want to give the guards a real reason to deny them entrance, he said. But a “mole” within their ranks, the airmen now believe, tipped off white commanders to the plan. And when the black officers arrived over the next two days, guards were waiting.

“The guard just said, ‘We don’t let niggers in,’ ” recounted Terry as he sat recently among the Tuskegee Airmen memorabilia that adorns his home. “So I just went . . . around him.

“The damn order was illegal,” he continued. “The whole point was not to have a revolt but to bring it to a legal conclusion. Are we first-class or aren’t we?”

The military’s disturbing answer to that question came during the next 87 days, which Terry spent in solitary confinement.

Sixty-one officers were initially arrested, with a total of 101 eventually reprimanded for their involvement. Three would be court-martialed, including Terry.

African American communities in the South were shocked by the arrests. Flush with the success of the first black fighter pilots--who, in 200 escort missions over Germany, never lost a bomber--some blacks had begun to believe that systematic racism in the military was beginning to die.

Before Terry, Lt. Marsden Thompson and Lt. Shirley Clinton--known collectively as the “Freeman Field Three”--went to trial three months later, their case had become a cause celebre in early civil rights circles.

Thurgood Marshall, later a Supreme Court justice, then headed the legal defense department of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. He sent a collection of top civil rights attorneys to defend the group.

Clinton and Thompson were quickly acquitted on charges of disobeying a direct order.

So, too, was Terry. But even his prominent attorneys could not convince the panel that Terry had not brushed against a superior officer on his way through the door. He was convicted of jostling, fined $150 and released.

Black pilots did gain access to the club after the case--but only because all of Freeman Field was turned into a facility for African Americans. Then, in 1948, President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the military nationwide, a decision that most civil rights experts say was hastened by the Tuskegee Airmen.

But Terry’s lifelong dream of flight had crashed and burned by the time the verdict was read.

“When he had a conviction like that, he could never have a successful [military] career,” said Warren, one of those reprimanded, but who nonetheless stayed in the military and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Indeed, all 104 involved had a “time bomb ticking in [their] records.”

Terry lost his command of a B-25 bomber. He sought out Air Corps buddies who might be able to get him airborne again, he said, eventually landing in the co-pilot’s seat of another bomber. But before the year was out, the war was over, and Terry was reluctantly, but honorably, discharged, never having flown in combat.

There was nowhere left to go but home.

He graduated from the USC School of Law. But he could not seem to pass the bar exam, even after taking it “four, five, six, maybe 10 times,” he said, and tutoring other students, all of whom did pass.

“No one could understand why he never passed, because he was such a good student,” said Anna Terry, his wife of 46 years. “But one of the questions on the application was: ‘Have you ever been arrested or court-martialed?’ ”

It was a question Bill Terry would answer truthfully every time it was posed--and one the State Bar says it looks at carefully in deciding whether to admit someone to its ranks.

After several tries, it was time to move on, find a job, support a family. The Terrys raised two sons--one of whom is now an attorney.

Bill Terry worked for several years as an investigator for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, and then went on to spend most of his career as a probation officer, also for the county, retiring in 1984.

It was a proud profession, but not the one he’d gone to law school for. And not the one he’d dreamed of--flying.

Mitchell Higginbotham, whose reprimand was among those overturned, is a longtime friend of Terry’s and a colleague from the Probation Department. Terry has never spoken much of his conviction, Higginbotham said, but its lingering effects were clear.

“He paid,” Higginbotham said.

“The crux of it was, I was a felon,” Terry said. “It didn’t matter at first--they didn’t shoot me or anything. But when you went to get a job, they’d ask. Year after year, it really did cost.”

A few of those involved in the mutiny, with help from a San Diego congressman, had tried over the years to have their reprimands and Terry’s conviction overturned. But many of the documents, including transcripts of telephone calls made by commanders at Freeman Field, were classified. And the statute of limitations for requesting a correction to military records is three years.

Then, earlier this year, Warren learned that many of the documents surrounding the episode had been declassified in the 1970s. He began writing letters.

No one at the August meeting of the Tuskegee Airmen Inc., a nonprofit scholarship-granting group Terry now heads, knew anything of Warren’s efforts. And the crowd in Atlanta was shocked when Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Rodney A. Coleman announced that 15 reprimands had been overturned, including Warren’s. (Those for many of the other 86 reprimanded fliers are being processed.)

As the wild cheers ensued, Terry--long past hoping--figured, “Damn, they forgot me again.”

They hadn’t, of course, and when Coleman announced that Terry had been the victim of a “terrible wrong” and no longer was a convict, Terry stood slowly and unsteadily, calling for his wife. Then the tears came.

Terry has had 50 years to think about his actions that April day in 1945, and to evaluate their costs. It’s a difficult equation, he said, weighing the good he may have done against the price he paid. The thing is, though, he had no choice. “I couldn’t do anything else,” he said. “We were young [and] we were right.”