In the Persian Gulf War, Americans of all races fought in integrated units under the leadership of the first African-American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Indeed, the United States armed forces of the 1990s are arguably the most integrated institution in American society. But it was not always so.
In the Persian Gulf War, Americans of all races fought in integrated units under the leadership of the first African-American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Indeed, the United States armed forces of the 1990s are arguably the most integrated institution in American society. But it was not always so.
The Divided Skies: Establishing Segregated Flight Training at Tuskegee, Alabama, 1934-1942
432
The Divided Skies: Establishing Segregated Flight Training at Tuskegee, Alabama, 1934-1942
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Overview
In the Persian Gulf War, Americans of all races fought in integrated units under the leadership of the first African-American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Indeed, the United States armed forces of the 1990s are arguably the most integrated institution in American society. But it was not always so.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817392154 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 09/24/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Robert J. Jakeman is Assistant Professor of History at Auburn University.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Aviation and Tuskegee Institute
The Early Years
On 22 May 1934 the first airplane to land on the grounds of Tuskegee Institute touched down in an oat field near the edge of the school farm. John C. Robinson, an aspiring Chicago aviator, had chosen the occasion of his ten-year class reunion to make a dramatic aerial return to his alma mater. Alvin J. Neely, registrar of the institute, welcomed the young pilot as he stepped from a small, single-seat monoplane before a cheering crowd gathered on the campus for spring commencement exercises. An airplane landing on the grounds of the rural Alabama vocational school and college would have attracted a good deal of attention under any circumstances, but an airplane piloted by a former Tuskegee student was a newsworthy event indeed, especially when it coincided with spring commencement. Many black newspapers and at least one white paper took notice of the event and carried a photograph of Robinson seated in his cockpit shaking Neely's outstretched hand.
Robinson's flight to Tuskegee was more than just a colorful adjunct to the commencement exercises of 1934; it marked the beginning of Tuskegee's first attempt to enter the air age. The young aviator used the occasion to urge the school's officials to build an airport that could serve as a site for an annual air show. He met with G. L. Washington, director of the Department of Mechanical Industries, who confided that the inauguration of a course in aviation was under consideration. During the next two years, Tuskegee exhibited a growing interest in aeronautics, and in 1936 the black and white press reported that Tuskegee planned to offer courses in aviation with Robinson, lately returned from duty in the Ethiopian air force, serving as instructor.
Tuskegee Institute had much to recommend it as an aviation training center for blacks. Situated in the Deep South, it could offer excellent year-round flying weather, and its rural setting promised ample undeveloped land for an airfield. Moreover, aviation training, especially in aircraft mechanics, would complement the school's traditional emphasis on practical, task-oriented vocational education. Tuskegee also enjoyed substantial philanthropic support from northern industrialists and these connections might well prove useful in securing adequate funding for an aviation training center open to blacks. And most importantly, Tuskegee's reputation as a leading black educational institution could lend credibility to the idea of training blacks to enter a field that many whites believed them inherently unable to master.
Aviation was only a fantastic dream in 1881 when Booker T. Washington, a young graduate of Hampton Institute, arrived in Tuskegee, Alabama, to organize a normal school for the training of black teachers. The sixty years between Tuskegee's founding and its emergence as the center of black aviation were years of growth and development.
Tuskegee was chartered by act of the Alabama legislature in early 1881, and three trustees — one black and two whites — were appointed to select a principal. They wrote Samuel C. Armstrong, a former Union general and the founder and principal of Hampton Institute, asking him to recommend a white candidate to organize and lead their new school. Armstrong told the trustees he had no qualified white candidate, but strongly endorsed Booker T. Washington as a capable and willing candidate for principal. The trustees had no other prospects, trusted the judgment of Armstrong, and selected Washington as their new principal.
Washington made his way to Alabama and quickly went to work. Despite extremely limited resources he managed to open the school on 4 July 1881. His ambition and resourcefulness became apparent as he steadily worked to place the school on a firm educational and financial footing. Although Tuskegee was founded as a normal school for training elementary school teachers, Washington soon added industrial training courses — similar to those at Hampton — such as carpentry, masonry, blacksmithing, and housekeeping. He envisioned Tuskegee as "a veritable cathedral of practical learning and black self-help, a Hampton run entirely by black people."
The school was well established by 1895, the year Washington made his famous speech at the Atlanta Exposition, an address which catapulted him to national prominence and made him the leading black spokesman of his day, a role that had been filled by Frederick Douglass until his death earlier that year. Speaking before a racially mixed crowd, Washington urged blacks to stay in the South, to "cast down your bucket where you are," and to accept social segregation as a necessary condition for economic cooperation between the races. Washington's speech, now known as the Atlanta Compromise, cast him in the role of a race leader for black America. In the years that followed, Washington's reputation and political influence grew; Tuskegee Institute shone in his reflected light and was acclaimed as a model for black education. Moreover, Tuskegee functioned as the headquarters for Washington's vast network of political influence and patronage, which came to be known as the "Tuskegee machine."
When Washington died in 1915 the trustees selected another Hampton graduate as principal, Robert Russa Moton. Moton, a close associate of Washington, had served for twenty-five years as commandant of cadets at Hampton. Although well qualified for the position, Moton was unable — and unwilling — to step into the broader leadership role that had been filled by Washington. Still, the position necessarily brought with it an implicit leadership status that extended beyond the Tuskegee campus, a reality Moton could not ignore. He brought to the job, however, a different set of priorities. While Washington had functioned primarily as a race leader and political boss and only secondarily as the head of Tuskegee, Moton saw himself first as principal, occasionally as a race leader, and only rarely as a political boss.
When Moton took over in 1915, Tuskegee's reputation was well established as a vocational school that trained teachers, farmers, and tradesmen, while providing academic courses at the high school level. As Washington told his students in 1896, "we are not a college and if there are any of you here who expect to get a college training you will be disappointed." By the mid-1920s Moton had introduced some college-level courses, but no degrees were conferred. Then in 1927 he organized a collegiate division, offering degrees in agriculture, home economics, and education. When some of the school's trustees opposed the change, fearing that it signaled a shift away from vocational training in favor of a liberal arts course of study, Moton pointed to the increasing demand for college-trained teachers and argued that the institute was simply responding to that need, thereby improving job prospects for its graduates.
Although Moton did not attempt to maintain the political aspects of the Tuskegee machine, he nevertheless sought to preserve Tuskegee's reputation and status. In 1925 he headed a joint fund-raising campaign with Hampton Institute and raised $10 million, tripling Tuskegee's endowment fund and permitting the construction of buildings for the new collegiate division. The closest Moton came to influence peddling was in the early 1920s when he played a key role in the selection of Tuskegee as the site for a veterans hospital for blacks. When he learned of plans to staff the hospital largely with white doctors and nurses, Moton once again used his position to see to it that the professional staff of the hospital was black instead of white.
During Moton's tenure, Tuskegee's decline as the center of black political influence continued. Instead of trying to keep the Tuskegee machine running, Moton concentrated on solidifying and enhancing the institute's position as a leading black educational institution. He improved Tuskegee's financial situation, elevated the level of study in response to a changing job market, sought to meet the needs of southern blacks through farmers' conferences and agricultural extension, and broadened professional opportunities for black doctors and nurses. Thus when he retired in 1935, Moton had brought a number of changes to the school he inherited from Washington two decades earlier. Although Tuskegee's political influence had declined, it was still highly regarded by both the black and white public for its efforts to foster black economic development while avoiding a direct challenge to segregation.
Tuskegee's third president, Frederick Douglass Patterson, differed markedly from Washington and Moton in both background and education. Born in 1901 into a middle-class black family, he took office in his midthirties. Unlike his predecessors, who were products of Hampton Institute, Patterson brought to the position impeccable professional and academic credentials from recognized white institutions of higher learning. He graduated from Iowa State College in 1923 with a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine and received his Master of Science from the same institution in 1927. In 1931 he entered graduate school at Cornell University and completed the requirements for a Ph.D. in bacteriology by the end of 1932. When not engaged in graduate studies, Patterson served as an instructor and academic administrator at Virginia State College and at Tuskegee Institute; prior to his election as president, he was serving as director of Tuskegee's School of Agriculture.
Despite these differences, Patterson subscribed to the racial and educational philosophies of Washington and Moton. Echoing the ideas of Washington, he urged blacks to train for and seek technical jobs in areas where they traditionally found employment: agriculture, the laundry and cleaning industry, and the food service industry. He cautioned against continuing the "alarming neglect of trades education by Negroes themselves in earlier years, now ably reinforced by the exclusion policies of the trades unions" with the support of "directors of vocational education in the several southern states that administer federal vocational funds." Patterson believed the exclusion of blacks from technical training and employment deserved "far greater concern by Negroes than it is now receiving as one of the important stifling and thwarting influences to the realization of economic competence by the Negro people." Like Washington, he advised against a frontal attack on segregation, urging instead a policy of "segregated opportunity":
If we are to attain the objective of a large participation in technical fields, we shall need to be careful that our wise insistence upon the elimination of undemocratic practices does not lead us to a point of stupid insistence upon unsegregated opportunity in such a way as to defeat the chance for the employment of specialists through failure to attain the ultimate in one fell swoop. To counsel patience with the Negro is bringing coals to Newcastle but it is sometimes easy to overlook the fact that 95% of the professional competence or technical standing which Negroes have attained has come through segregated opportunity.
Despite his ideological similarities to Washington and Moton, Patterson's election finalized a major change in the status and role of the president of Tuskegee. Washington had emerged from obscurity in 1895 to become a race leader and Tuskegee Institute served as his headquarters. Moton tried to strike a balance between race leadership and his role of chief executive of Tuskegee Institute. When Patterson came to office his age and background, together with the growth of organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, made it inevitable that his primary role would be that of a college president and not of a race leader.
When Robinson introduced Tuskegee to aviation at the spring commencement in 1934, there was no hint that Patterson, then director of the School of Agriculture, would be the school's next president and ultimately play a key role in the development of an aviation program at Tuskegee. The hopeful report of talks about an airfield and annual air show there, which appeared in the Chicago Defender, had no sequel and nothing in the records of the institute suggests that the administration did anything more than toy with the idea of entering the field of aviation.
The reasons why Robinson's visit produced no immediate results are unclear. He had suffered an accident en route, and perhaps the news of this incident made the administration cautious. Maybe Robinson's approach, personality, or background failed to inspire confidence. In retrospect, however, the most important mitigating factor was likely poor timing. Robinson flew to his alma mater in the midst of the Great Depression, a time when virtually all segments of the nation, including black colleges, struggled to survive. Moreover, he came in the waning months of Moton's administration; by 1934 Moton, almost seventy, in poor health, and nearing retirement, conducted what amounted to a caretaker administration. In short, Robinson's return for his tenth class reunion came at an inauspicious time for the inauguration of expensive and risky ventures such as aviation programs.
Nevertheless, Robinson's flight highlighted dramatically for the Tuskegee community the growing black presence in aeronautics. This recognition of black interest and participation in aviation was perhaps crucial to Tuskegee's support of a proposal that came shortly after Robinson's flight, an initiative from an entirely different quarter and of an entirely different nature.
In September 1934 the Moton administration agreed to support two black aviators' ambitious plans for a Pan-American air tour by arranging for an airplane, recently purchased by one of the fliers, to be christened the Booker T. Washington in ceremonies on the campus. For the first time the name of Tuskegee Institute was linked publicly to a major aviation initiative. The event attracted the support of the campus community, who rallied behind the fliers and launched a successful fundraising campaign. Moreover, institute secretary G. Lake Imes, a key member of Moton's staff, worked on the aviators' behalf in Washington and New York, and he subsequently proposed that Tuskegee Institute actively promote future international flights that the two pilots hoped to undertake.
The christening ceremony was part of a publicity and fund-raising campaign that was sponsored by a group in Atlantic City, New Jersey, known as the Interracial Goodwill Aviation Committee (IGAC). It was in anticipation of the third long-distance flight of Charles Alfred Anderson and Tuskegee alumnus Dr. Albert E. Forsythe. A year earlier Anderson and Forsythe earned a place in aviation history when they completed the first round-trip transcontinental flight by black aviators. Several months later they made a round-trip flight from Atlantic City to Montreal, becoming the first American blacks to plan and execute a flight across international borders. Plans for the third flight, touted as the Pan-American Goodwill Flight and the most ambitious of the series, called for a month-long, 12,000-mile circuit to more than twenty countries throughout South America, the Caribbean, and Central America.
The flights were the brainchildren of Forsythe, who came from markedly different circumstances than his fellow alumnus and aviator, Robinson. Born in Nassau in 1897, the son of a civil engineer, Forsythe spent his boyhood in Jamaica and then came to the United States to attend Tuskegee. He continued his education at the University of Illinois and McGill University in Montreal, where he earned a medical degree. By 1932, after establishing his medical practice in Atlantic City, he became an aviation enthusiast, giving unselfishly of his time, energy, and money to the promotion of aviation among his race. His flying partner, Anderson, described him years later as "a very, very aggressive and determined man and an ambitious person [who] wanted to advance aviation among the blacks." A practical man, Forsythe did not fly merely for the sake of flying. Rather, he considered airplanes efficient and useful transportation devices, once declaring to Anderson that he liked "to go places in an airplane. That's what an airplane is for, to travel, not just fly around the home field."
But Charles Alfred Anderson simply loved to fly. Ten years younger than Forsythe, Anderson spent his early years with his grandmother in the Shenandoah Valley near Staunton, Virginia, where he developed an intense fascination with airplanes and flying. His love of aviation remained strong after he returned to his parents' home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, near his birthplace. Unable to obtain flying lessons because of racial prejudice, he bought an airplane on borrowed money and taught himself to fly. In 1929 he became one of the first black pilots in the nation to earn a private license. Three years later he became the first black to qualify as a transport pilot; this was the highest rating then issued by the Department of Commerce, which authorized him to fly passengers for hire and teach others to fly. Forsythe, fifty miles away in Atlantic City, learned of Anderson's achievement from reports in the black press, contacted the young pilot, and asked for flying lessons.
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