Soaring to Glory

A Tuskegee Airman's Firsthand Account of World War II

Philip Handleman, Harry T. Stewart

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781621579519
• eBook ISBN: 9781621579526
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"This book is a masterpiece. It captures the essence of the Tuskegee Airmen's experience from the perspective of one who lived it. The action sequences make me feel I'm back in the cockpit of my P-51C 'Kitten'! If you want to know what it was like fighting German interceptors in European skies while winning equal opportunity at home, be sure to read this book!"— Colonel Charles E. McGee, USAF (ret.) former president, Tuskegee Airmen Inc. "All Americans owe Harry Stewart Jr. and his fellow airmen a huge debt for defending our country during World War II. In addition, they have inspired generations of African American youth to follow their dreams." — Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University He had to sit in a segregated rail car on the journey to Army basic training in Mississippi in 1943. But two years later, the twenty-year-old African American from New York was at the controls of a P-51, prowling for Luftwaffe aircraft at fivethousand feet over the Austrian countryside. By the end of World War II, he had done something that nobody could take away from him: He had become an American hero. This is the remarkable true story of Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr., one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen pilots who experienced air combat duringWorld War II. Award-winning aviation writer Philip Handleman recreates the harrowing action and heart-pounding drama of Stewart's combat missions, including the legendary mission in which Stewart downed three enemy fighters. Soaring to Glory also reveals the cruel injustices Stewart and his fellow Tuskegee Airmen faced during their wartime service and upon return home after the war. Stewart's heroism was not celebrated as it should have been in postwar America—but now, his boundless courage and determination will never be forgotten.

Chapter One

“THE GUTS TO FLY THIS THING”

Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight, And through each break thou sendest down thy light.

—James Weldon Johnson, “Prayer at Sunrise”

On the morning of May 8, 1939, a rickety red-and-cream Lincoln-Page biplane, propitiously yet incongruously nicknamed Old Faithful, rose from Chicago’s Harlem Airport on a mission to change the world. The send-off was hopeful, even joyous. The biplane’s two African American pilots, Chauncey Edward Spencer and Dale Lawrence White, brimmed with high expectations, too rapt by the audacity of their project to entertain its probable limits.

Both Chauncey and Dale belonged to a fledgling group of flying enthusiasts who, despite stinging setbacks, held to the notion that aviation was the means to an emancipatory realm. The members of the mostly black National Airmen’s Association of America (NAAA) and its precursor, the Challenger Air Pilots Association, saw the sky as a medium inherently devoid of the artificial barriers erected by one class of men to block another. The law of the air, their thinking held, is fair and equitable; it applies uniformly without exception to all people regardless of race, color, creed, gender, ethnicity, ancestry, and national origin—for it is not man’s law but nature’s law.

The sky as a metaphor for freedom was not a new idea. Mythology, poetry, and liturgy had long celebrated the kingdom where the birds sing as an idyllic oasis, a place of unfettered freedom, where the enslaved could escape oppression and the soul could find fulfillment. Up high enough and you were in heaven, utopia, the Elysium.

For dreamers, the airplane was the symbol of ascension come true, the real-life “sweet chariot” in the melodic Negro spiritual that sustained African American congregations at Sunday services with the promise of “coming for to carry me Home.” Chauncey and Dale, riding high on the enthusiasm of their supporters, believed that flight portended great things, not just entry into the previously denied domain of the open air but fruition, wholeness, equality. If only the gateway, the staircase to this near but distant nirvana, could be pried open, all the way open—for everybody.

As described by Chauncey in his 1975 autobiography and as reported by Michael Laris in a 2003 feature in the Washington Post, the Spencer-White flight, formally known as the Goodwill Flight, set out to demonstrate that blacks could fly as well as whites, if given a chance. With the government about to roll out the Civilian Pilot Training Program to prevent a pilot shortage in case of war, blacks did not want to be left out. If barriers were going to be shattered, why not the one prohibiting blacks from flying the hottest planes of all—those of the Army Air Corps? Aviation, already well out of its infancy and maturing now into a big and enduring enterprise, ought not to be tainted by the prejudice enforced with unwavering certitude in every other part of daily life for African Americans.

The flight plan, such as it was, called for the biplane to wend its way from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Several stops along the way would serve as warm-ups for a triumphal arrival in the nation’s capital. The flight was a unifying event in the black community, a cause to trumpet. Backing came from the black press, starting with a powerful endorsement from the pilots’ hometown newspaper, the Chicago Defender, whose city editor, Enoch P. Waters Jr., knew the key members of the NAAA and had championed the idea of a flight to Washington at one of their meetings.

Chauncey and Dale were breaking new ground, going where black pilots hadn’t gone before. Yes, as chronicled by historian Von Hardesty, there had been other famous long-distance flights by African Americans, like the 1932 transcontinental flight of James Herman Banning and Thomas Cox Allen and the 1934 Caribbean island-hopping flight of Charles Alfred Anderson and Albert Forsythe. But this time the pilots’ destination was the seat of government, the center of political power. Moreover, this would not be symbolism alone; if the flight unfolded as contemplated, the pilots would roam the halls of Congress pleading the cause of black aviation to any lawmaker willing to lend an ear.

Because the white press reported nary a word on the Goodwill Flight, the flyers’ progress was known only to African Americans who read black newspapers or who heard about it by word of mouth from those who did. News of each waypoint reached and each leg completed infused blacks who were paying attention with feelings of pride, hope, and inspiration. As the biplane plodded ahead ever so determinedly, its followers were moved to prayer for the two Chicago pilots, frontiersmen on the cusp of a new destiny.

The fact that the flight was underway constituted a near miracle. It almost never happened, for the costs of aircraft rental, fuel, lodging, meals, custom khaki flight suits, and assorted other expenses were considerable by Depression-era standards. To help finance the flight, Chauncey’s father Edward reportedly took out a small loan and forwarded the monies to his son, but the amount represented less than half the projected budget.

Chauncey, discussing the lack of funds with a friend, became so worked up that he broke down and cried—just as he had as a youth back home in Lynchburg, Virginia, when denied flying lessons on account of his race. The sight of the usually self-assured flyer with tears streaming down his cheeks was too much for his friend to bear. She directed him to the Jones brothers, black businessmen in Chicago whose varied ventures were said to include the city’s numbers racket.

The hardened entrepreneurs of the city’s South Side were unable to resist Chauncey’s pitch. The Joneses chipped in $1,000. According to Janet Harmon Bragg, a licensed pilot and enthusiastic supporter of the planned flight, members of the NAAA “drained their pockets” to make up the rest of the budget.

While money was tight, Chauncey had an inexhaustible supply of the other ingredient indispensable to the flight: gumption, the moxie to believe that the status quo could be overturned. Chauncey’s belief that conventions could come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho had been planted by his brilliant, compassionate, and tenacious mother, Anne. A school librarian, Anne was also the founder of the Lynchburg NAACP chapter and spent many waking hours laboring for equal rights.

Significantly, she had developed close relationships with the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance and, writing in a room of her Lynchburg home that overlooked her meticulous flower garden, had proven herself a respected poet. Her verse was first published in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, in February 1920. Leading black poetry anthologies edited by Countee Cullen and other distinguished literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance would include her poems. Anne’s parlor became a magnet for black intellectuals, entertainers, and activists like James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Thurgood Marshall, and, later on, Martin Luther King Jr.

The guest list at the Spencer home was a veritable who’s who of the African American cutting edge, the black leaders forging change in the larger society. Growing up in the company of these luminaries, Chauncey felt the power of the movement for expression, self-determination, and dignity. When a barnstormer passing overhead in his youth kindled a passion for flight, he was primed to make his own contribution to the cause of freedom—in the arena of the sky.

Chicago was the natural launchpad for the Goodwill Flight because in the interwar years it had evolved into a hotbed of black aviation. The history of African American flight in Chicago started to build shortly after World War I, when a young hairstylist and manicurist on the South Side felt impelled to learn to fly. Twenty-three-year-old Bessie Coleman had arrived in Chicago’s so-called “Black Belt” in 1915 as part of the Great Migration of blacks from the South. Fixing people’s hair and painting their nails was more lucrative and less strenuous than sharecropping in the cotton fields of Texas, but Bessie felt there had to be more to life.

When her brother John returned from military service in a segregated infantry unit at the end of World War I, he had trouble readjusting to civilian life and regularly snapped at Bessie that women in France were far ahead of the women of the South Side. In one particularly humiliating tirade at Bessie’s workplace, exacerbated by his drinking, he added that French women could even fly. According to Bessie’s biographer Doris L. Rich, Bessie took it as a dare. Even when all the flight schools in Chicago refused to give her lessons, she would not be deterred. Her cause was championed by the Chicago Defender, and in late 1920—with donated funds helping to cover the tab—she traveled to France for flight training.

On June 15, 1921, Bessie was issued a pilot’s license by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, affording the ambitious beautician the distinction of being the first officially certified African American female pilot. After further flight training in France and Germany the next year, she embarked upon an exciting career as a barnstormer and air show performer in a war-surplus Jenny. For her flying exhibitions, she regularly appeared in a tailored military-style jacket with a Sam Browne belt, jodhpurs, knee-high boots, silk scarf, and an officer’s cap decorated with custom wings incorporating her initials.

In connection with her roving aerial displays, she made a point to appear at black schools and churches to encourage students and parishioners to consider flight as an avenue of advancement. Her ultimate aim was to establish a flight school for African Americans, so that black women in America wanting to learn to fly would not need to travel abroad to get their training.

Bessie settled into the groove of the air show performer’s life, perfecting her display routine and her public relations acumen. She thrilled crowds with her flying prowess and inspired children with her lectures. The newspaper that had promoted her aviation aspirations embraced her as a role model and bestowed on her the exalted title “Queen Bess.”

Three and a half years into her air show career, Bessie’s goal of opening a flight school seemed within reach. But during a practice flight at Jacksonville, Florida, on April 30, 1926, her airplane turned upside down when a loose wrench jammed the controls. Not buckled in or wearing a parachute, Bessie fell five hundred feet to the ground and died on impact.

It was a tragic end to a gifted life. Bessie’s flight school never opened. But like the mythical phoenix that rose renewed from the ashes, Bessie’s memory lived on, giving succor to those of her race seeking to enter the domain whose door she had cracked open against insuperable odds.

Bessie was buried in Chicago’s Lincoln Cemetery at Kedzie Avenue and 123rd Street. The black press eulogized her rhapsodically. Soon aviation clubs named after Bessie started to sprout up in black communities around the country. In death as in life, the trailblazing pilot caused African Americans to look to the skies.

A year after the fatal accident, a memorial stone was unveiled at her grave. The inscription aptly described Bessie as “one of the first American women to enter the field of aviation.” The absence of any reference to her race spoke volumes about the ideal dear to her heart—that the world of flying should be color-blind.

The grave became a shrine of the city’s black community, especially the flyers and would-be flyers within it. In 1931, African American pilots in Chicago began an annual tradition of flying their aircraft over the cemetery for the express purpose of dropping flowers on Bessie’s grave to commemorate her life. Three years later, William J. Powell, a former Chicagoan, published a landmark book to spark interest in aviation among blacks and, fittingly, dedicated it to the memory of Bessie.

Powell, like Bessie’s brother, was a veteran of one of the segregated infantry regiments that had seen action in World War I. During an August 1927 reunion of veterans in Paris, he visited Le Bourget Airport, where Charles Lindbergh had been swarmed by tens of thousands of fans at the end of his solo transatlantic flight only a few months before. Caught up in the lingering excitement while at the airport, Powell purchased a plane ride over the city and instantly became hooked on flight.

Upon his return to Chicago he sold his chain of successful gas stations and packed up for California to launch a new career in aviation. He knew the Golden State’s weather would be more conducive to his new ambitions, and he could only hope the racial climate would also be an improvement. Soon after he reached the West Coast, he set up a Bessie Coleman Aero Club.

Powell saw aeronautics as ripe for participation by African Americans. He believed that compared to established industries like oil and steel, the aviation industry was new and its major growth lay in the years ahead. He argued that by getting in on the ground floor blacks would be able to play prominent roles.

A full-time proselytizer, he organized the first all-black air show in southern California for Labor Day 1931. Powell was encouraged by the results and sought to build on that success. As aviation writer Phil Scott related in AOPA Pilot, Powell scheduled another air show for December 6 and endeavored to boost attendance by fielding an air-demonstration team comprising five black pilots.

The team, called the Five Blackbirds, flew different light aircraft of varied paint schemes. One of the pilots was a woman, Marie Dickerson Coker. The Five Blackbirds performed to boisterous approval from the audience of forty thousand and to rave reviews in the black press, but funds simply dried up. Powell’s formidable plan for a hundred-city national tour was shelved, and the Five Blackbirds faded into a historical footnote.

In 1934, when Powell came out with his book, titled Black Wings, those who knew him could easily see that it was a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his own introduction to flight. More important, it served as a manifesto calling for blacks to enter careers in aviation or, as he phrased it, “to fill the air with black wings.” By carrying forward and refining Bessie’s message and putting it into printed form, Powell’s book represented a milepost in the espousal of aviation for African Americans.

The book made clear that Powell saw flight as possessing the intrinsic power to liberate those who engage in it. He asserted that for blacks to get into the sky they had to be bold in both thought and deed. He predicted that black involvement in aviation could produce “one million jobs for Negroes.” His outlook was encapsulated in this statement: “Negroes will never ride as free men and women below the Mason and Dixon Line . . . until they ride in airplanes owned and operated by Negroes.”

Despite Powell’s unstinting optimism, the Depression was in full swing, and nothing he did, including publishing a newsletter and offering classes, attracted the financial support he needed to actualize his objectives. In the late 1930s, heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis visited Powell’s modest aviation workshop in Los Angeles, but even the endorsement of such a celebrity made little difference given the extent of economic hardship.

By 1942, Powell was in failing health from complications of a poison gas attack he had suffered in World War I. He died that year, only forty-three years old. Like Moses, he did not reach the Promised Land, but he got to glimpse some of his adherents crossing into a more hopeful sphere, as barely a year before his death the long-intransigent War Department finally opened the Army’s flight training to blacks.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, the strongest advocate of Bessie’s vision in the 1930s was pilot and mechanic Cornelius R. Coffey. Bright and industrious, Coffey graduated from the first all-black class at the city’s Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical School, a trade school noted for its instruction in aircraft maintenance, which before 1931 had excluded blacks. As a measure of his raw smarts and mechanical aptitude, he ranked at the top of his class.

The early 1930s brought an existential threat to black aviation in Chicago, when the one airport in the area that had allowed flying privileges to blacks permanently shut its doors. In 1933 Coffey and his friend John C. Robinson, who had graduated second in Coffey’s class at the Curtiss-Wright school, led the fledgling Challenger Air Pilots Association in the purchase of land for an airport in Robbins Township, southwest of the city.

But their hopes were dashed when, within a year, a severe storm with fierce winds tore through the property, collapsing the hangar and wrecking the light planes based there. It was a devastating setback. Yet, according to information reported by Air & Space/Smithsonian contributor Giles Lambertson, in the wake of their despair, the group’s members were given a new home on the south end of Harlem Airport, a few miles to the north of Robbins at Eighty-Seventh Street and Harlem Avenue in Oak Lawn, thanks to the airport’s enlightened operator. Coffey, who had led the first flower drop over Bessie’s grave, opened his own flight school at the new location. He had never met Bessie, but his school represented the fruition of her dream.

It was only logical that Chauncey Spencer, seeking to realize his long-repressed dream of fl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Prologue: Dogfight
• Chapter One: “The Guts to Fly This Thing”
• Chapter Two: The Sky Beckons
• Chapter Three: Aiming High
• Chapter Four: Saving the Experiment
• Chapter Five: Trains before Planes
• Chapter Six: The Quest for Silver Wings
• Chapter Seven: “Your Friends of the 332nd Fighter Group”
• Chapter Eight: “A Sight to Behold!”
• Chapter Nine: Showdown at Five Thousand Feet
• Chapter Ten: At the Mercy of the Winds of Fate
• Chapter Eleven: The Best of the Best
• Chapter Twelve: Harry Truman Keeps His Promise
• Chapter Thirteen: A Dream Deferred
• Chapter Fourteen: An Everlasting Beacon
• Chapter Fifteen: A Grateful Nation
• Chapter Sixteen: Keeping the Dream Alive
• Epilogue: Affirming the Legacy
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright