Story of the Tuskegee Airmen Mutiny
By Willie Ruff
Professor, Yale University School of Music
Most Americans old enough to remember April 12, 1945, the day President Franklin Roosevelt died, will likely not recall a military insurrection that took place in southern Indiana that same day. In fact, few white Americans were aware of the insurrection at the time because it was reported almost exclusively in the nation's black press. The era of the "greatest generation," when almost all Americans marched shoulder to shoulder in a spirit of unalloyed patriotism and mutual sacrifice, saw as well, one of the bitterest social upheavals of modern times. It started with the military's policy of segregation, which had barred most blacks from combat and poisoned relations between this patriotic subculture and the federal government.
After Pearl Harbor thousands of young black volunteers had rushed to enlist believing they would be taught crucial skills. Instead they found themselves restricted to Jim Crow units digging latrines, building roads and loading ships. Meanwhile their dark-skinned sisters — graduate nurses all — were either turned away by a demeaning quota system or restricted to treating black patients only.
At the same time, thousands of patriotic young men were seeking to enlist for flight training only to be rejected on the theory that blacks lacked the intellect to learn to fly. But as aerial combat in Europe and the Pacific thinned the ranks of degrees and experience on the bench, determined to mount a frontal assault: they would use the law to challenge authority, whatever the risks, and such risks during wartime were many and ominous.
Surprisingly, the same President Roosevelt who had considered silencing the black press had himself, on July 6, 1944, affixed his unmistakable signature to the executive order around which the Lonely Eagles organized their planned war on discrimination at Freeman Field. For the order specifically stated that no officer shall be excluded from facilities because of race. A test case was in the making.
But before the test could be mounted, a well-crafted, top-secret black underground movement needed to be created, one that could connect the Lonely Eagles, through well-placed friends and relatives, to the black press. Calling itself the "N. U. G." (short for Negro Under Ground), this elite cadre of clandestine allies worked the telephones and duly alerted the Los Angeles Sentinel, The Amsterdam News, and other militant papers across the nation.
Once the pieces were in place, all hell broke loose on April 5, 1945 at Freeman Field. Nineteen much decorated black commissioned officers of the United States Army Air Corps presented themselves at the white officers' club, forced their way inside, and demanded to be arrested. They were duly obliged. By the end of the week, thanks to the effectiveness of the N. U. G, the black press was informing sepia America that sixty five more of the Tuskegee Airmen had been arrested and confined at Freeman Field.
Then, exactly one week later, the best efforts of the N. U. G. were derailed on April 12 by the news that Franklin Roosevelt had died suddenly.
But after a suitable period of mourning for the beloved president, the sequestered Tuskegee officers, meditating on the wisdom of the old dictum ?If life delivers you a lemon, use it to make lemonade,? determined to link their story cause to the heightened national moment. And what followed under the leadership of a radical small cell of Lonely Eagle firebrands, including Lieutenant Coleman Young, a born scrapper who later became Detroit's brashest long-term mayor, was the most concentrated, and by far the most sophisticated frontal assault on Jim Crow military policy in American history.
At a 1991 Tuskegee Airmen's convention Mayor Young hosted in Detroit, he told me, ?Marsden Thompson, a guy with balls the size of watermelons, I speak figurative, of course, was really hell on wheels. He had been the first of us to be arrested at Freeman Field and confined to barracks, so we all knew he would be court-martialed. But on the night FDR died and we laid our larger plan, old Marsden busted out of confinement and the two of us charged into the bachelor officers' quarters yelling, "We want every living ass with a swinging dick who wants to get arrested to get the hell over to that officers' club; they're closing soon."
Finally with 101 of the black officers confined, phase one of the battle was accomplished. The rest would be left to the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who the N. U. G. had already alerted and primed.
Meanwhile, the entire arrested contingent was interned at Godman Field in Kentucky, a post that had been abandoned after the First World War. On the officers' arrival, they were arrested again and held until the government's case against them was ready for trial.
The importance of these events of early April 1945 is revealed in the fact that they anticipated by a full decade the civil disobedience of Mrs. Rosa Parks aboard a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. Not only that, the Lonely Eagles at Freeman Field set the gold standard for social protest, anticipating the Ghandhiesque, non-violent style of confrontation the civilian segment of sepia America would later embrace as it came to be led and preached by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., then still in seminary.
Meanwhile, it would be left to Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, to defuse the ominous crisis in Kentucky even as the war in Japan continued. "I want that mess in Kentucky cleared up once and for all," said the President, himself a former army officer and veteran of World War I.
In the court-martial that followed, the NAACP prepared to defend Lt. Marsden Thompson, and Lt. Shirley Clinton, the ringleaders. The rest of the officers were let off, for Truman and the war department understood that court-martialing 101 black decorated combat veterans was not the solution to the crisis.
A young black lawyer named Thurgood Marshall led the defense team, and later became the first black justice of the U. S. Supreme Court. Instead of appearing in court himself, Marshall engaged two of the most capable black civilian trial lawyers in the nation to defend the officers, Theodore Berry, later the Mayor of Cincinnati, as lead defense counsel; and Harold Tyler, a Chicago lawyer. Acting as assistant defense counsel was Lieutenant William Coleman, who later became the chief defense counsel of the NAACP.
Not surprisingly, Berry's virtuoso gifts made short work of the proceedings, and all the officers were found not guilty as charged. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Terry was convicted of "conduct unbecoming an officer," an honorable act that earned him a dishonorable discharge. (Justice prevailed 43 years later, however, when President Clinton at a White House ceremony in 1998, granted Terry an executive pardon, thus removing the stigma from his achievement.)
Meanwhile, back in Kentucky the story expanded to yet another theater of operations, in a different place. Realizing that the ingenuity and commitment of such a sophisticated cadre of educated black radicals would be hard to contain, Truman and his staff contrived a plan whose aim was to isolate the officers from all contact with white military society.
If Truman's dilemma bore a striking resemblance to the one Roosevelt had faced at the start of the war when he decided to lock up hundreds of West-Coast Japanese citizens in concentration camps, no wonder. But this time a more creative and legally-valid solution had to be found, and it was.
Instead of a "concentration camp" for Negroes, in the opening months of 1946 a camp of concentrated giftedness arose on the Southern Ohio landscape at Lockbourne Air Base outside Columbus. Assembled there were the entire Army Air Corp's roster of black specialists whose integration into white units was then impossible: not only the pilots, flight officers and meteorologists, but also the black lawyers, doctors, nurses, engineers and teachers.
Under the command of Colonel Davis, who incidentally was the 20th century's first black graduate of West Point, himself the son of a U.S. Army general, Lockbourne boasted the largest concentration of college and graduate degrees of any air base in the United States, a cultural mecca unto itself. But the real importance of Lockborne in the long-run scheme of things did become immediately apparent, even to the specialists stationed there. In fact, the separation of the races in all aspects of American life was so commonplace that not very many blacks living in Columbus, Ohio, just beyond the front gates of Lockbourne, ever really understood why the air base was there, or that it was connected in any way with the insurrections at Freeman Field and the aftermath in Kentucky. And whether or not the citizens of Columbus ever realized that they were neighbors to the first military station in all of American history where every soul stationed there, from the Colonel to the cooks, was black, it was not long before Lockbourne's star personalities such as the indomitable Lt. Chappie James, later to become the first Four Star General of his race, began asserting themselves. And there was comparable distinction in Lockbourne's medical sphere where Flight Surgeon, Doctor Vance Marchbanks, later became a leader in space medicine while others of that elite address were obviously marked for leadership roles when, at last, military apartheid would be a thing of the past.
I had been one of those young blacks who was so impressed with what happened at Freeman Field and later there at Columbus that I went there and enlisted in the closing days of 1947. The fact that I had jumped the gun, lied about my age, and joined up at age 14 is one more testimony to the Lonely Eagles' appeal to boys in need of life heroes. But I did not arrive at Lockbourne a 14 year-old raw recruit. Instead, I was a recently honorably discharged 17 year-old non-commissioned officer, a corporal, and veteran of eighteen months, having earned my stripes as a quartermaster corps bandsman. And so it was that I joined the world of the Lonely Eagles, if only its musical fringes, and it was then that the most resonant aspects of its importance became real for me.
Recently, as I worked at this article, I reread the transcript of Marsden Thompson's court martial. Its date was July 6, 1945. Had Federal Judge Constance Baker Motley, a New Haven native I know, joined the legal defense team at the NAACP by that date? I couldn't remember, so I called her at her home in New York. "No," she said, "I got there in October, and the first job Thurgood gave me was to go into a room stacked from floor to ceiling with transcripts from those court-martials. We were called on to review hundreds that had been submitted by black servicemen, who had been punished with far harsher sentences than their white counterparts." And speaking of the time only a few years before her own victory as a key member of the team that fought the legendary Brown vs. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, Judge Motely continued, "Few people realize that one result of that work for the returning G.I.s swelled the ranks of the NAACP to half a million for the first time. In fact, it also won Truman his second term. I mean the 1948 order ending segregation in the military. Truman was the first to see that the black vote could influence a presidential election, and campaigned not just in Harlem but in black Washington, as well. We all went to bed election night thinking Dewey had won, only to wake up the next morning to a different story."
Finally, this little-known episode of American history is not only important, I think, for gaining a better understanding of who we are. It needs to be revisited, yes, 58 years later, as a tribute to brave young black patriots who not only risked their lives in combat but also their reputations and their personal freedom in defense of what they had fought for. April 12, 1945, then, is a day doubly worthy of remembrance. We can never have too many contributions to cultural memory, in its best aspects, and this history which I have never seen in print except when I put it there earlier, is surely one of the most authentic and heartening gestures of the American spirit.