The Tuskegee Airmen

In 1941, after sustained pressure from the Black press, the NAACP, and the threatened March on Washington Movement led by A. Philip Randolph, the War Department established a training program for Black military pilots at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama. The program was segregated by design — conceived, in part, by skeptics who expected it to fail and thereby close the question of Black military aviation permanently. It did not fail.

Between 1941 and 1946, approximately one thousand men completed the program's flight training. The first combat unit, the 99th Fighter Squadron, deployed to North Africa in 1943. The larger 332nd Fighter Group — the "Red Tails," named for the distinctive red tails of their P-51 Mustangs — conducted bomber-escort missions over Germany, Austria, and the Balkans for the remainder of the war.

Their record was extraordinary. The 332nd flew roughly 1,500 missions and lost 66 airmen killed in action. The widely repeated claim that they never lost a bomber under their escort has been revised by more recent historical scholarship — they did lose a small number — but their loss rate remained among the lowest of any Fighter Group in the Fifteenth Air Force. Bomber crews requested them by name.

The ground crews, support personnel, and training staff — roughly 14,000 people in total, nearly all of them Black — were equally indispensable and equally overlooked at the time. Segregation structured every aspect of their service; white officers outranked Black officers regardless of experience; a 1945 attempt by Black officers at Freeman Field, Indiana, to integrate their segregated officers' club resulted in 101 arrests (the Freeman Field Mutiny).

The Tuskegee Airmen's combat record was a principal argument for President Truman's 1948 executive order desegregating the United States military. In 2007, surviving Tuskegee Airmen were collectively awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Only a handful remain alive today. Their record was, as one historian has written, "the proof that no one should have needed."