The members of the mostly black National Airmen’s Association of America and its precursor, the Challenger Air Pilots Association, saw the sky as a medium inherently devoid of the artificial barriers erected by one class of men to block another. The biplane’s two African American pilots, Chauncey Edward Spencer and Dale Lawrence White, brimmed with high expectations, too rapt by the audacity of their project to entertain its probable limits.īoth Chauncey and Dale belonged to a fledgling group of flying enthusiasts who, despite stinging drawbacks, held to the notion that aviation was the means to an emancipatory realm. On the morning of May 8, 1939, a rickety red-and-cream Lincoln-Page biplane, propitiously yet incongruously nicknamed Old Faithful, rose from Chicago’s Harlem Airport on a mission to change the world. This section will look at the events that led to the presences of hundreds of black pilots in WW2.
The experience of black pilots in WW2 is the convergence of the long civil rights struggles of racial minorities in the United States and the national military’s grappling with how to integrate these groups into the armed forces, specifically the Army Air Corps, in the twentieth century. In 1943 the 99 th Pursuit Squadron joined the 33 rd Fighter Group in North Africa. The Tuskegee program began in 1941, at the Tuskegee Institute, when the 99 th Pursuit Squadron was established. The Tuskegee Airmen destroyed 251 enemy airplanes and were awarded a total of 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses for their service. Click here to see more articles in this category.
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