The real story behind the black pilots in ‘Masters of the Air’
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt overruled his top generals in 1940 and established a unit for African-American airmen, it had more to do with his wife, Eleanor, than the US president.
The US first lady was the driving force behind the plan, says Donald Miller, a professor of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania and author of the book on which the TV series Masters of the Air is based. She was supported by black pressure groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the black press.
Eleanor travelled widely in the US and one of her regular pilots was Alfred “Chief” Anderson, a black man who qualified as a pilot in 1929 and in 1932 became the first AfricanAmerican to receive a commercial pilot’s licence. He was also the first black pilot to fly across the American continent.
Once he had convinced Eleanor, and she her husband, the Tuskegee Institute (before it became a university), in the heart of the US’s segregationist south, became the place to go to for recruits. In the 1930s, the university had set up a programme to train civilian pilots. When the town was awarded a government contract for an army air field, the Tuskegee Institute’s students were among the first in the queue for FDR’s flying plan. Others came from Howard University in Washington DC and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
“All the first recruits were graduates,” says Miller. “Smart people who were easy to train to be pilots.” Just how smart and how good those pilots were would be proved in the closing days of World War 2 when Tuskegee pilots shot down three Messerschmitt ME 262 jet fighters in a single day. (A model of the ME262, a plane ahead of its time, is an exhibit in Joburg’s war museum.)
The Tuskegees would go down in history and legend, but it took a long time to achieve the veneration of their Caucasian counterparts. Only in 2007 was a group invited to the White House to be awarded congressional gold medals by president George W Bush.
This year, on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France, the few survivors are to be celebrated in their lifetimes. Lt Alexander Jefferson, who is played by Branden Cook in Masters of the Air, died in 2022, aged 100. But Enoch “Woody” Woodhouse, 97, plans to be at the unveiling of a special mural at Logan airport in Boston on
June 6. The mural will carry his face as a young airman and as he is today. He told a local news station that he had kept in touch with his old comrades since the war. Now, he said with slight exaggeration “we meet in a phone booth”. There are said to be 15 or 16 still around.
The Tuskegee Institute was founded on July 4 (Independence Day) in 1881, just 16 years after the end of the American Civil War. It is a private university, having been granted land by the Alabama state legislature, and began as the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers. Its creation was part of an election ploy by WF Foster, a former colonel in the Confederate army of the slaveholding southern states.
Foster was a candidate for the Alabama senate in the 1880 elections in Macon County. Since black men risked being lynched if they stood for public office, Foster made a deal with a local black leader, Lewis Adams, promising a college for black people if they voted for him. In Macon, which was cotton country, most people were black and gave Foster their vote. He carried out his side of the bargain with the school.
By the time those future airmen arrived at Tuskegee, the place had been well established. New buildings had been designed and built by architect Robert Robinson Taylor, the first African-American to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taylor’s boss had been Booker T Washington, who was born a slave, freed in the Civil War, and became an educator and a revered figure among the black elite between 1890 and his death in 1915, aged 59.
The entire Tuskegee operation in what officially became 332nd Fighter Group of the 15th US air force was made up of African-Americans, from the mechanics to the cooks, the clerks, the pilots and the squadron commander, Lt-Col Benjamin Oliver Davis, played by Jerry MacKinnon in
IN THE CLOSING DAYS OF WORLD WAR 2, TUSKEGEE PILOTS SHOT DOWN THREE MESSERSCHMITTS IN A SINGLE DAY
Masters of the Air.
Davis was an army brat, his father serving in a segregated cavalry regiment in Wyoming. He was also the first black man since 1889 to graduate from the military academy at West Point. Miller says he believes —“and I have never seen a denial of this”
that in his four years at the Point, no white officer ever spoke to Davis.