SOLDIERS OF CONSTRUCTION Despite more recent claims that the embrace of American political and social values by 1940s advocates of racial integration was a wrongheaded, if not a self-flagellated, vision of racial denial, Brown, in “Men of War,” anticipates what many of his generation steadfastly pursued as their inherent rights, guaranteed by constitutional decree. From this angle of vision, this section might productively be considered a distilled representation of political perspectives that Brown collected at the height of World War II when the nation rallied around the cry “V for Victory.” In fact, if “Out of Their Mouths” presents firsthand testimony of the varied responses of blacks to the racist conditions during World War II, “Men of War” represents Brown’s interpretive record, his showcase of black patriotic efforts supporting the war effort.
No doubt the problematic reality facing Brown demanded a response that would allow for a conversation encouraging sympathetic consideration instead of antagonism and confrontation. This goal would not enable him to follow the lead established by Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and Josh White’s Southern Exposure, An Album of Jim Crow Blues (with lyrics by Richard Wright), both of which were emotionally charged works of social protest. Like the singers, he found himself opposing a mistaken but omnipresent social Darwinist view that blacks were incompetent, incapable, and indolent. However, Brown chose to expose the lie, to refute prevailing racist assumptions by using exemplary instances of black success. When the question was asked in the February 1939 Congressional Record “if a Negro could really fly a plane,” Brown found in this ill-informed question an effective strategy for organizing “Men of War.” Thus the three pieces that constitute this section resonate, thematically, with a necessary racial promotion, showcasing exemplary black talent and accomplishment. Here we find multiple examples of demonstrated black racial excellence: men flying planes, building the Tuskegee Army Air Field, and successfully managing enormous government contracts.
“Soldiers” in the title “Soldiers of Construction” is a deliberate play on the term designating the service personnel of the Army, Navy, and Air Force who were then facing enemy gunfire in the European, Northern African, and South Pacific theaters. Like their more physically threatened compatriots, the construction managers and workers sacrificed themselves to prove a point: “that the government [recognize] the Negro as part of American democracy.” During the era of Jim Crow, when every instance of black achievement was cited as evidence of African American worth, the soldiers of construction established a laudable record of completing work. In addition to patriotism and racial pride, part of the incentive to do well was simply personal. Building Tuskegee Air Base meant that some black college graduates trained in engineering and related areas found themselves able, for the first time, to use their education for jobs in which they were superbly trained. Nonetheless, all workers understood what was at stake in their labor: “If the Negro proves his case down here, he’ll open the doors elsewhere.”
“Cubs” not only takes its name from the small Piper J-3 airplanes used to train beginning airmen; it also signifies the youthful inexperience of its trainees. Overall, the narrative, although rather brief, places the reader into the world of black pilots. In this world, safety is preached over and again, like a mantra. One crucial error might “bring down the curtain.” Part of the value of this piece is the marvelous tall tale it contains. Pilots flying the cubs navigated by spotting landmarks, not by using instruments. On one occasion, a novice pilot missed the marker denoting Tuskegee and wound up flying all the way to Florida. His reception there was a combination of awe, envy, and bewilderment. Ralph Ellison would take a version of this narrative and craft a marvelous short story, “Flying Home.”
In “Primary Field,” Brown distills personal observation and recorded history about the establishment of the Tuskegee Army Air Field, a topic later covered at length in Robert J. Jakeman’s The Divided Skies: Establishing Segregated Flight Training at Tuskegee, Alabama, 1934–1942 (1992). From his much closer vantage point, Brown constructs a narrative that brings the human essence of this history to the reader. An article titled “Writer Visits TAAF during Tour of the South,” published in the Afro-American (20 December 1944), contains a photograph of Brown surrounded by five members of the publicity staff at the airfield. Brown’s chats with these and other airmen enabled him to locate the human side of the story of the war. “Primary Field,” in brief, shows what African Americans could do, if given a chance.
Without specific mention, Brown makes this section reflect the midwar national black initiative called the “Double V Campaign.” While African Americans were stubbornly seeking to participate in the nation’s war effort at home and abroad, they were confronted by many resisters who fought just as tenaciously to preserve the racial status quo. African Americans understood the war as a fight to ensure a democratic way of life for all citizens of America. Thus, largely through the African American press, they launched the Double V campaign—victory abroad and victory at home. In effect, one imperative of this initiative called for a national public policy to “close ranks.” However, this did not merely translate into ignoring domestic social problems in favor of a unified war effort. Instead, the Double V campaign sought to guarantee that the freedoms that African American soldiers fought for in the European, African, and Asian theaters would also be granted to them at home. Part of this struggle meant dismantling the structure of codes and practices that sustained racial separation in the armed services, in effect showing how a desegregated military could serve invaluably in desegregating American society. “Men of War” suggests something of this rich but conflicted history.
SOLDIERS OF CONSTRUCTION The ten mile drive from the town of Tuskegee to the Air Base was along a typical Alabama backroad; a winding gravel and dirt road full of holes, crossing streams, some of them unbridged, and others with shaky, narrow bridges that I wondered how Army trucks could get across. There were fields of scraggly cotton, patches of underbrush, and woods, dusty near the road, and shacks and barns weather gray and askew. Chehaw was only slightly stirring from its long sleep. A few piles of Army stores, a barbed wire enclosure of gas and oil tanks, the Primary Field laying over to the right, none too prominent; these were the only signs of the new activity.
But at the bridge over the winding creek, the end of one world came, and another world began. On this side of the creek was a typical rural church, un-shaded in a bare plot of ground. On the other was the guard post with smart military police stopping cars and trucks and then waving them on.
Looking at the air base, I wondered how in the back hills of Alabama such a perfect site for a camp could have been discovered. I was to learn later that the site was man-made. Light yellow buildings with green roofs centering about a large building with streets radiating off as spokes from a wheel were clustered on a slope; at the foot stretched the buildings, hangars, and towers of the line and the long concrete runways. A couple of planes looking like silver fish were aloft, glinting in the sun.
A phone call cleared my entering. The well-built highway, so different from the backroad we had traveled, stretched on newly made, newly leveled land, still raw clay, up the hill, past another MP station to the hub of the camp, the headquarters building.
One of my first interviews was with Calvin McKissack, whose firm had been responsible for the construction of the base, the largest building job that had been granted to Negro builders by the Defense Program.
Calvin McKissack called the soldiers at the air base, whether officers, non-coms, or privates, an exceptionally fine group of fellows. “It is more of a university system than an Army camp,” he said. And so I found it. From the moment of my arrival there, when Hayden Johnson, adjutant of the 99th Squadron, now overseas in the Mediterranean Theater, called out of the window, “Well, if it ain’t the Flying Dutchman himself,” I found the warmest welcome. There were bull sessions, group gatherings, private confabs; I saw ex-students, ex-colleagues, old friends; I made new friends. Almost everyone had a tale to tell, or a job he wanted me to inspect. I got badly trounced at ping-pong in one of the soldiers’ recreation halls; I heard some odd homegrown boogie-woogie trounced out by a determined buck private, who was more interested in his own left hand than in my yarns about Pete Johnson, Al Ammons, and Meade Lux. Officers or enlisted men, they wouldn’t let me use my nickels in the fascinating machine that threw Coca-Cola bottles out at you. I drank so many Cokes that I felt that I would fizz away in that August heat.
The building job was in the last stretch, and McKissack was not too busy to show me around. I found him to be the same quiet, philosophical friend I had known years ago in Nashville. He is grayer now, but he seems no less vigorous. Unlike his brother Moses, who is a fountain of jests and whopping tall tales, Calvin McKissack talks little and then slowly and carefully. The cast of his face is brooding and sad, that of a man who has seen a great deal and has thought about it a long time.
He told me that really to appreciate what was there now, I should have seen the place before the bulldozers came. He pointed to the surrounding countryside and said that the camp had had the same rolling contours, similar hills and woods and thick undergrowth. There had been a cemetery on a hill, dating back before the Civil War, apparently a mixed graveyard with both white and colored buried there. He traced some designs on the sand, showing me where a swamp had been and how the course of a stream had been changed.
Yes, it had been quite different. And now, in the core of the Alabama hills, the post was about completed, and had of course been in service for months. So many million yards of dirt moved, shifted; waterworks, sewage disposal works, electrical distributors constructed; streets laid out, and what would be miles of pipe, miles of wiring, and many, many miles of highway if the runways and streets were laid end to end. It was an interesting growth, and he had seen it from the first bulldozers nuzzling into the hills, to the present. We heard a faint roar back on the line; a P-45 was zooming down the long runway; up above, three planes were skimming along against the bright blue sky.
A sweaty Negro near the sewage disposal plant looked up as we came by. “Hullo,” Calvin said in his bass voice. “Do you have a match?” The man gave him a dirty packet; Calvin crumpled off some of his homespun twist into his corncob pipe, and lighted it. He talked briefly to the man. “Yassuh,” the respectful fellow said over and over. “You welcome.” The big boss was obviously well liked.
“It does a fellow good sometimes to be working for his own folks,” Calvin said, cannily figuring out what I was thinking. Then he told me how the job gave openings that were all but closed throughout the nation: “Even cities like Washington or New York City don’t have Negroes working at skilled jobs in public utilities. So I wanted you to see this.” In the sewage plant, testing the sludge for bacteria content, there was a young fellow whose face and whose name I remembered. He was a graduate of the Howard University Engineering School, only a few years out of school. It was an ill-smelling job, and he wouldn’t shake my hand, but I could see that he was happy. He was having a chance to do what he had been trained to do; much responsibility for the health of the base depended on his scientific knowledge. He explained the Imholl Tank, the Dosing Chamber, the Filter Bed, the functions of chlorines with learned pride; he was glad to see another Howardite, but he excused himself to go back to his analyzing.
He was a good signpost to the future, Calvin McKissack told me. The average Negro boy in college couldn’t see a future in this kind of work: “It’s a bread and meat proposition with them. They don’t see any chance for these skills, so they crowd into medicine, the ministry, and teaching. Colored boys had such hard going getting into the Defense Program. They have always had trouble in getting a chance to handle big affairs on their own. They want a feeling of belonging, want something of the say-so about how things are being run.” He took pride, quite reasonably, I thought, in the openings that this construction job had afforded trained Negro personnel. From general superintendent down to foremen and unskilled laborers, the job was all colored. “If the Negro proves his case down here, he’ll open the doors elsewhere.
“The Negro has all along been saying, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’ But what the government really wants to hear is ‘See what I’ve done.’
“A year ago, nobody would talk cold turkey on a job like this; some didn’t want Negroes, others didn’t believe that Negroes could lay out plans and then carry them out. Can Negroes build an air base; can Negroes operate it once it’s built?
“We never became uneasy. They were curious about steam fitting, for instance. Well, we put a crew of Negro steam fitters on the job. When the first engines kicked off, we didn’t have any trouble then or ever since. They asked us how many white mechanics we would need. We said, none. The Army was not sure we could do the job, and sent in a lot of inspectors. They were always sitting down watching, expecting to see a bunch of lazy Negroes. We went right ahead. One high Army officer was asked ‘When are you coming down to see how we are getting along?’ He said, ‘Well I’ll tell you, I was down last week. I flew down. It looks like you’re doing all right.’ Nobody expected Negroes to finish such a job on time.”
We stood watching a gang of men “pouring a wall” at a far end of the line. They were scurrying about, pushing loads of cement in wheelbarrows equipped with fat rubber tires. “So that’s where the rubber goes,” I said. “Those are the first Georgia buggies I ever saw with tires on them.” Calvin and the foremen chuckled. The men would dump a load and race back to the loaders with their empty barrows bouncing. There was much yelling and laughter. I wondered if their speed was due to the presence of the big boss, but when I looked at the foreman I reckoned not. He was an able man, I could see that. He boasted that from nine to four-thirty, in one day, his men would pour eight hundred foot of wall. They looked fast enough to do it.
“Well the work has gone along on schedule; there is no kick about the quality; the cost has fallen within the estimated amount. We haven’t ripped out ten feet of lumber. The Mayor of Tuskegee had been skeptical, but he called it a feat nothing short of miraculous. We’re satisfied with our job, but we are most satisfied that the government recognizes the Negro as part of American democracy.”
The area engineer, a captain of the United States Engineers, had told me something of the difficulties. The McKissacks had sublet the land operations, being primarily builders, without the bulldozers, draglines, clam shells, power shovels, etc., that were necessary to clear a swamp, change a river’s course, clip off a hill here, and grade another there. Besides the natural engineering problems, much of the construction was done during the winter when the weather had to be fought. The engineer gave me figures on the average amount of dirt moved in one day, and one record twenty-four hours of removal; he was obviously impressed at a good job done.
He praised Calvin McKissack as a man “who knew how to play his cards smart.” At the peak of the job there were three thousand white and colored employed; at one time the McKissacks had twenty-five hundred of their own workers employed. Men were drawn from all over the Southeast, from as far off as Memphis and lower Florida. There had been no labor and no race difficulties. The safety record was a very good one; for four months they had held the safety banner, and he named a staggering number of man hours in which there had been no loss of time due to injury. He insisted that I make no specific references to his figures.
The Tuskegee Air Post was as Army posts go, but it was equal in quality to any other, answering exactly the high Army engineering qualifications. The runways were as good as could be found anywhere; and so were the sewage disposal, the waterworks, the layout, the buildings (hangars, observation towers, barracks, mess halls, kitchens, administrative buildings, hospital, the chapels, the Post Exchanges, the technical buildings, the theatres, etc.). The captain praised it as a model job of construction.
The McKissack and McKissack Company, certainly unusual in America, is the outgrowth of a family business in existence over seventy-five years. The grandfather of the McKissacks was a master builder far back in slavery days; their father was a prominent builder in his day and time; their uncle was a brick man in Athens, Ga. The whole family is involved in the building profession; Moses junior is a registered architect, and Calvin’s wife is the daughter of another builder. The concern, licensed in all Southern states, has done much work all over the South, including many public buildings. It is not so well known as might be. “Religiously,” said Calvin, “Moses and myself have stayed out of the public eye as much as we can. The less newspaper publicity, the better for all concerned. We are ready, however, for our friends to see what we have done.”
The single white employee whom I ran across was the office manager. He was spoken of as a job organizer who brought great experience to the McKissacks, part of which he had gained as secretary of Caldwell and Co., the large, well-known firm in Nashville. “We have to make use of all the other fellows’ risks and experiences,” Calvin explained. This manager was valuable as contact man also; working chiefly in the deep South, the McKissacks knew the minority technique. He was affable and voluble; he advertised McKissack and McKissack as “a contracting organization with the talent, resources, facilities required to design, layout, and construct Government Defense Projects and other diversified construction, supplying both architectural and engineering services.” By that time I knew all that myself.
John D. Reed, the personnel manager, had been a protégé of Booker T. Washington. He stayed so busy that he was called “the whirling Dervish.” Calvin McKissack said that one of his problems had been that of housing, though it had not proved to be so grave since many of the workers from the neighboring sections had been living in doghouses anyway. But Reed had done a good job in getting this large labor force into sanitary quarters and in keeping morale high.
I walked around with Reed, finding it hard under the blazing August sun to keep up with his swift walking and enthusiastic talking. He introduced me to a few key workers. One whom I remember was named Jenkins. He was a huge brick-red Negro, six feet three inches tall, with a pleasant freckled face shaded by a sun helmet. He weighed over two hundred, and looked to be solid muscle, a good chip off of John Henry’s block. When not working as foreman for the McKissacks, he was preacher of a Baptist church in a small Florida town. Calvin McKissack had just given him a leave to go to the Baptist Convention in Memphis.
“Have I anything to say about Mr. McKissack?” he answered my question. “I don’t know what to say about him. I just don’t have any words to tell you. He’s a great man, that’s all. Only way he can get shed of me is to fire me.
“I’ll tell you something. I’m pastor of a little church. When I got my letter from Mr. McKissack, I asked my church for a leave of absence. If they hadn’t give it to me I was going to resign. You know when a preacher is willing to give up his church, he really must have heard a call.”
Reed asked me to say a few words to the men at their meeting that afternoon at quitting time. I sat on the small platform with them and the office manager; their talks were on keeping the safety record, on buying bonds for victory. I forget what I said except that I was surprised and happy at the grand job of construction that they had done, and that the world outside looked on them, just as it did on the boys servicing the planes and flying them, as showing what we could do, once given a chance. I repeated Reed’s name for them: “Soldiers of Construction.” My talk was floundering, but those fellows, old and young, dirty and sweaty, veteran hands at construction, and college boys, illiterate and educated, gave me cheer on cheer. Many crowded about the platform and wrung my hands. I know it wasn’t because the speech was any good; it was rather their own pride in a hard job well done and their hope that somehow the good news of it would reach out to other parts of the world.
CUBS Without difficulty Lieutenant Marchbanks, medical officer of the primary field at Tuskegee, obtained permission for me to hang around the headquarters room. There was a board indicating times of flight and records of the flyers. A placard read: “Don’t forget that aviation is not unsafe, but like the sea is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness or neglect.” A cartoon showing a torn-up house, its chimney off, and the tail of an airplane sticking out of it, told of “A Very Hot Pilot”:
A very hot pilot was Henry Hightowers
Who boasted of having three hundred hours
To prove it he dove on his girl’s house one day
They would have been married the fifteenth of May.
In spite of these warnings, the flyers had made some mistakes, as indicated by gold stars beside their names. Mistakes were inevitable. Nevertheless, as instructor Charley Woods told me, it didn’t take but one mistake to bring down the curtain. Extra severity in marking the cadets might save trouble later. Charley was a tall, slim, nonchalant chap, with whom I could talk easily, especially when he recited a few stanzas of my Slim Greer poems. He had the reputation of being one hell of a fine pilot.
Through the window I watched the cadets in their parachute harnesses and goggled helmets walking toward their training planes, or dismounting from them, the propellers making a last few tired spins. They strode toward the building, feeling good, I guess because of the additions to their total hours in the air. Quite a group finally got together in the room. They were as courteous as I found all officer material at the camps; they said “Sir” in a way that made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, outside of their real concerns. When they identified themselves they stood up like school boys reciting. Things warmed up after we discovered people and places that we knew in common.
Most of them were college chaps; one young fellow had heard me talk at Morgan College, and others had studied under friends of mine. They were typically young Brown America, a few were ruddy and tan, a few were dark, most were brown. Three had been drafted and had worked their way up to being recommended for the Air Corps. One, a school teacher, had been attempting all along to get in the Air Corps, but he had been told and retold: “There is no place for the Negro in the Air Corps.” Now he had his chance. Another had had his leg broken when a bulldozer snapped over on it; when his leg mended he went to Chanute Field and served as airplane mechanic, then he was sent here to qualify as pilot. One, though young, had been a coal miner; he had left a wife and kid back in Birmingham; he had built them a house and was now concerned about “keeping all those little wolves away from my door.”
As a plane roared down to a landing and taxied to the ramp, their eyes would follow it, and the talk would stop abruptly. But soon they took up the slack and were in the middle of kidding and tall tales. One was joked about his dancing; he explained it simply, “She was trying to do an Immermann, and I was doing a Chandelle.” They told me that they didn’t like clouds; there were too many P-40’s flying around here, ripping through the air at 300 miles an hour. There had been no mid-air crashes, which nearly always proved fatal. In the clouds you don’t know up from down. They fly by field contact, with no air speed indicator. Everybody gets lost at some time or other in his training.
The best yarn on being lost was told by a young cadet without too much embarrassment, and I imagine with some garnishing. He had been attempting to spot Tuskegee by its white water tower, but as he got closer to the first tower he couldn’t see other distinctive landmarks so he kept on. Another tower, same thing. He kept flying, heading for a white water tower. Finally, the trail of water towers (he didn’t know this was a distinctive mark of many Southern towns) carried him all the way to Florida. He was forced to land in a cow pasture. As he bounced to a stop, wondering where he was and what he was going to do, a little white boy stuck his head over the wing of the plane and barked out, “Are you a Jap?” The cadet proved to the little boy, and to all the gathering crowd, that he was an American. Everybody turned out to see the marvel. One old colored woman looked disapprovingly at the plane. “Humph,” she said, “Never get me in one of those thaings.”
For a forced landing, the order was to set your plane down and stick with it. The cadet did this, and got word back to the primary field. The next day, a rescue plane reached him. His buddies added details that they said they learned from the rescuing lieutenant and pilot. When they found their lost sheep, he was seated in his plane, with a picnic spread out on the wing: a thermos bottle with lemonade, sandwiches, cake, everything. And some young white ladies were waiting on him. He brought the leftovers, some canned goods and sandwiches, back in his plane.
The cadet was a bit sheepish at the enlargements his mates made on his story, but he admitted the general truth.
John Pinkett and Charley Woods told me how the cadets concentrated their working hours and perhaps their sleeping hours on the tough job they were mastering. “They say ‘Allah’ as they walk by a plane, and salaam slightly. They are models of military decorum, saluting all the time and saying ‘Sir’ to everybody before they get their wings. But once they get them, they’re hell in britches.”
(Brown’s note: All of these cubs who made it—and most did—have now seen service in the Mediterranean Theater. In all probability their success is well-known to readers of Phylon.)
PRIMARY FIELD John circled low over a patch of woods, landed on a large field, and jockeyed to the large hangar. Since it was Sunday, there weren’t many people about, but I met several mechanics, electricians, and a licensed parachute rigger. John named the planes for me: a Howard, nicknamed DGA for “damned good aeroplane”; a dismantled Stinson, a rugged, reliable load carrier; several Luscombes, Wacos, and small yellow Cubs for pilot training. John showed me the Link trainer for blind flying and described it: “They put you in, pull down the hood, and you get every sensation of flying. You’re supposed to learn to fly entirely by instruments.”
At the field, cadets receive primary training under civilian instructors furnished by Tuskegee Institute under contract with the Army. The training is supervised by the Army, the maintenance by Tuskegee Institute. The general manager is G. L. Washington, formerly director of mechanical industries at Tuskegee. He told me a great deal of the history and purposes of the field.
He had corralled Negroes from all over the country from Boston to Texas: pilots, airplane engineers, men trained in Civil Aeronautics, mechanics, all the many technicians needed not only for teaching flying but also to service engines, aircraft, and manage the multiple duties connected with aeronautics. The staff met all the standards. The prevailing attitude had been that of the skeptic who asked in the Congressional Record for February 1939 “if a Negro could really fly a plane,” though at that time there were approximately three hundred licensed Negro pilots. The Army naturally made frequent investigations to see that the field met the strict stipulations, and, every time, maintenance and training came up to snuff.
On January 16, 1941, the radio announced that pursuit pilot training was to be set up for Negroes at Tuskegee. This historic decision came only after many trips to Washington, conferences, and investigations. There were also conflicts. Judge Hastie, then civilian aide to the Secretary of War, was firmly opposed to the establishment of a separate unit. He insisted that Negroes should be included in other training units all over the country. Washington stated that Hastie had kept his clear-cut stand all down the line; Washington had less respect for some other opposing forces who were willing to accept a segregated base, but merely wanted it in their locality. President Patterson had been doggedly determined to have a primary field at Tuskegee, in spite of all the blasts about segregation. His trustees backed him up, and since such a project demanded sponsorship of the kind that Tuskegee could afford, and since Tuskegee was in a good weather area where training could be given for twelve months, the Air Forces gave the contract to Tuskegee. President Patterson kept his closest touch with the activities of the field. He had just flown with some of the guests of Tuskegee in the Howard plane which I had seen outside the hangar.
At first an unsure gamble, the field is now on a firm business basis, with a half million dollar payroll. The 99th Flying Squadron can be said to be an offshoot of the Primary Field, which is steadily feeding pilots to the basic training at the Air Flying School. The number of washouts, once the cadets are passed from primary to basic, is not great, although it is quite a jump for green cadets, used only to cubs, to go to those high-powered ships with their intricate instrument boards. There may be some schools doing a better job, Washington confided, but not many.
Yet pursuit training is one of the most difficult types. Solo flying in these high-powered fighter planes is a sneaky thing. It’s not a Tinker to Evers to Chance teamwork, as with a crew; it’s a sort of Joe Louis affair, out there alone, on one’s own. All the primary field can do is to try to give the best of training in the best facilities that the Army affords them. He mentioned casually that the boys of the 99th had taken the track meet at Chanute Field, Illinois.
Washington found many white people cooperative with the attempts to establish the primary field. One story had it that a white Tuskegeean said that the whites downtown were getting peeved; the major is reported to have called it a lie: “Old so-and-so drinks so much liquor that he gets ideas.” In the early days of flying around Tuskegee, a request was made for permission to use the field at Alabama Polytechnic Institute at nearby Auburn. It was decided to put the matter up to a vote of the white cadets. During the conference, the Dean of Women at Auburn is alleged to have said, “I pity the boy that doesn’t vote for it.” The vote was 100 percent for permission.
“You know your race contends for a lot of things it’s not ready for,” an Army man said. “Now is a chance to prove what you can do, with a lot of eyes watching.” The day that the first Negro pilot was to land on the Auburn field was a special occasion. White people and Negroes were swarming about the field. The Auburn cadets were up in their cub planes until the time scheduled for the Negro to arrive.
“Then Civilian Pilot Anderson came in with his Waco. It was a hair raiser, the most powerful motor that had been heard so far at Auburn, where they had only cubs. You know a Waco takes a lot of beating. Anderson did some acrobatics, a lazy eight, some slow rolls and snap rolls. A cracker at the fences yelled, ‘Migard but that darky can fly!’
“Anderson drove right up to the hangar, to let the boys really see it. ‘Here she is. Go over and have a look at her.’ Nobody moved. Suddenly one man started, and then all went to the plane. They sat in it, and felt it all over.
“Our boys used that field all summer. It was just a show place, with crowds out on Sunday. It was that way at many airports which had never seen a Negro pilot in an airplane before. At Anniston, a Negro pilot about to land saw a car scurrying along in clouds of dust, trying to get to the airport. When he landed, a man ran out of the car toward him. It was the sheriff. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said, ‘I heard about it but I just wanted to see it: a nigger flying a plane!’ ”
The Negroes made a good reputation as flyers, and on the professional level, met the other flyers as equals. Of course they didn’t insist on eating with them, Washington added.
At the Civilian Pilot Training Field, another adjunct to the training program at Tuskegee, there is a crew consisting not only of Negroes, but also of Italians, Jews, Southern whites, Yankees, and Brooklyners, all under a Negro chief pilot. It was from here that Pilot Anderson flew Mrs. Roosevelt, a trip she publicized in her column. Many white Southerners take lessons here; one brought his daughter regularly for a Negro pilot to train. One might think that this might add to the natural hazards of flying, but the safety record is high here, as it is at the primary field and at the air base.
Much of what Washington told me had to stay off the record. But I saw and heard enough to realize that what was once a quip at Maxwell Field, “How’s your nigger unit coming?” no longer has any point. Negroes have answered the Congressman’s skepticism, not with words but with planes serviced on the ground and soaring in the skies.