Highlights Contributions From Prominent Black Personnel
As part of the National Museum of the US Air Force's celebration
of Black History Month, exhibits highlighting the accomplishments
of and contributions from America's black aviators are featured
throughout February.
Although their numbers are dwindling, many WWII veterans can
recall the US military segregating black Americans into separate
units during WWII.
Rob Barbua with the National Museum of the US Air Force tells
ANN the US Army Air Forces gave blacks a unique
opportunity even those bleak times: to conduct sophisticated
engineering work in (albeit segregated) Engineering Aviation
Battalions, or EABS.
These specially-trained
units constructed concealed, maintained, and defended airfields in
every theater, eventually disproving the belief at the time that
blacks could not do complicated construction or engineering work.
The museum's exhibit portrays a scene of black aviation engineers
working on an airfield in the China-Burma-India Theater.
The Air Force published regulations dismantling segregation on
June 1, 1949, becoming the first of all US military service
branches to complete integration of black personnel into all-white
units. This story is presented in an exhibit titled "Integration of
the USAF."
The exhibit features Gen. Daniel "Chappie" James Jr., the Air
Force's first black four-star general; Lt. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis
Jr., the first of the famous Tuskegee Airmen to become a general;
and the 332nd Fighter Group, a segregated black unit stationed at
Lockbourne Air Base near Columbus, OH, that won first place in the
conventional class category of the 1949 US Air Force Fighter
Gunnery Competition.
A celebration of this kind would not be complete without an
exhibit featuring the Tuskegee Airmen. On July 19, 1941, the AAF
implemented a program in Alabama to train black Americans as
military pilots. Primary flight training was conducted by the
Division of Aeronautics of Tuskegee Institute, the legendary school
founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881. The exhibit presents
uniforms, photos, and other mementos of the Tuskegee Airmen.
The museum is the largest and oldest military aviation museum in
the world. More than one million people annually visit the museum
to see its nearly 350 aircraft and aerospace vehicles and to walk
through more than 17 acres of indoor exhibit space.