A fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen asked his audience on May 13 to connect the dots regarding the racial discrimination that all-African-American fighter squadron faced during World War II.
“Who were the Tuskegee Airmen?” retired Lt. Col. James H. Harvey III of Denver asked at a gathering of the Mountain Rendezvous chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. “We were highly educated college graduates who wanted to fight for their country, but we were told we didn’t have the ability, and we were nothing.”
Harvey, 95, said reports from the Army War College during World War II considered African-Americans incapable of flying planes because they were mentally inferior and didn’t have the initiative and resourcefulness of white men.
White pilots weren’t held to the same standards that African-American were, he said, and in fact, the Army washed out many African-American pilots for things that had nothing to do with flying.
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