‘Proud’ Tuskegee Airman was one of city’s last from historic force
Retired Air Force Senior Master Sgt. James Lee Bynum, one of two surviving Tuskegee Airmen in San Antonio who was known for telling its story to groups around town, has died in a local hospice.
He was 101.
Bynum’s passing left Dr. Eugene Derricott, 95, the only surviving local veteran of the allblack 332nd Fighter Group, which cracked the color barrier in the segregated U.S. military during World War II.
Until the Tuskegee Airmen battled the Nazis in aerial combat over the skies of Europe, Black servicemen were typically relegated to noncombat jobs, even in the war zone.
Bynum “was always eager to travel and wouldn’t turn down requests to speak,” said Rick Sinkfield, president of the Tuskegee Airmen chapter in San Antonio. “He was grand marshal at a parade in Schertz, he talked to the military, talked to the colleges, and he gave his story.”
Composed of the 301st, 302nd, 99th and 100th fighter squadrons, the fighter group is thought to have had as many as 14,000 airmen, about 1,000 of them pilots. It made history in Europe, making the case for an integrated military years before President Harry Truman’s order to desegregate the armed forces in 1948.
The group’s veterans were proud of its record — 15,533 sorties, 112 aerial kills, 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses and three Presidential Unit Citations.
But the passing of their generation has left fewer of them in the Alamo City. Sgt. Maj. Thomas Ellis, an administrator with the unit, died in 2018 at 97.
Bynum joined the Army in 1941. Assigned to the 95th Engineers Battalion at Fort Belvoir, Va., he worked on the 1,600-mile Alaska Highway that passed through the rugged mountains of
Canada. Other projects included a D-day training camp for invasion troops in Wales and road repairs after battle damage.
A few months after the war, Bynum left the Army to return to civilian life but quickly grew dissatisfied. He’d served in Gen. George S. Patton’s 3rd Army and recalled its segregated status when he was overseas. He also never forgot the treatment he received applying for a civilian job in Philadelphia, where he grew up the seventh of 10 siblings.
“‘He’s Black,’ ” Bynum remembered a secretary telling her supervisor. “I never did see the boss. He was always somewhere else.”
Given 90 days to reenter the military, he made the call on Day 89.
“That was a life-changing thing for him,” Sinkfield said.
In less than three months, he was back in uniform at Fort Meade, Md., and then was assigned to the 332nd Fighter Group at Lockbourne, Ohio, the last home of the
Tuskegee Airmen.
He initially was under the command of Col. Benjamin O. Davis, running the officer billeting office. He tracked the unit’s inventory, working with then-lt. Daniel “Chappie” James.
Both Davis and James would make history. The West Point-educated Davis eventually became the Air Force’s first Black one-star general. James became the first Black officer to reach the rank of four-star general.
Bynum had planned to be on a float made by the 433rd Airlift Wing in the Fiesta Flambeau parade, but couldn’t make it after falling ill, said his stepdaughter, Dolly Adamswillis, 62, a retired special education teacher and administrator in San Antonio.
“He was very proud to be a Tuskegee Airman,” she said. “He loved sharing his stories with youth, he enjoyed going to the events, being included at the Lackland AFB training graduation. He took an honor flight to the World War II Museum in Washington, D.C.”
“It’s like it gave him a sense of belonging and
honor in his later years because whenever they called, he went,” she said.
Bynum’s 30-year career took him from Japan and Washington to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, called SHAPE, in Paris. When he retired in 1971, he was the postmaster at Lackland AFB.
James Lee Bynum was born on a farm in Lexington County, S.C., on Jan. 6, 1921, but grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended elementary and junior high school. He began boxing as an amateur, rising through the Golden Gloves ranks as a light heavyweight.
Bynum worked in real estate in retirement, enjoyed golf, and traveled with his wife, Dorothy. Adams-willis said he outlived all his siblings, his wife and a daughter. His calm, level-headed demeanor “just seems to be a family trait; nothing rattles him,” Adams-willis said.
Services are set for 11 a.m. Friday at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, 1001 N. Walters St., with burial to follow at 2 p.m. in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.