Tuskegee Airmen
This report is to shed some light on the struggle of African American men who wanted to fight for their country by becoming air plane pilots. This report will try to show you at what great lengths these men and others went to for this right. This will focus more on the struggle and not the pilots and their individual battles. These men had to overcome racism from the public and military.
The US military had an unwritten rule that put very severe limitation on blacks. These limitations were in place since before the Civil War. They would allow black regimens but with white officers and like society they remained segregated for over fifty years later. In 1939 the government began to change and when congress ordered the Air Corp
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These men were college graduates, and some had R.O.T.C training in the infantry because that was the only way they were going to lead men and those men were going to be African American. The United States had a legal apartheid system of racial segregation this was also known as “Jim Crow” it was also included in the military. The War Department placed the training facility to the airmen in Tuskegee, Alabama. Many of the trainees came from northern states and had never been to the Deep South where they told stories of how the atmosphere changed from entering restaurants and changing from one location on trains to another. The men from the north had to rely on the men from the south to help them with adjustments to everyday living in the Deep South. One member told of how organized the segregation was in Tuskegee, and how aggravated the men were just being there. Pilot Roscoe Brown told of the time when training had been moved to Walterboro, South Carolina and the pilots went to a movie on base and there were “blacks in back” signs and pilot took a stand when they were confronted by MP’s and they were told they would court marital if they did not follow the rules, and they precede to tell the MP’s how much the War Department had spent on their training…the next day the sign was