Tuskegee Airmen: The Red Tails

Near the town of Tuskegee, Alabama, the Moton Field runways where Black pilots trained during World War Two still exist, maintained today as a National Historic Site by the National Park Service. The story of what happened here is one of the most consequential experiments in American military history.

The Army Air Corps insisted in nineteen forty that Black men lacked the mental capacity to fly combat aircraft. To test whether that prejudice could survive contact with evidence, the military established a training program at Tuskegee Army Airfield, adjacent to Moton Field, beginning in nineteen forty-one. The instructors were largely Black pilots already certified at civilian schools. The first class of five pilots graduated in March nineteen forty-two.

Over the course of the war, nearly one thousand Black pilots earned their wings at Tuskegee. They flew in the Mediterranean theater, eventually becoming the Ninety-Ninth Pursuit Squadron and later the Three Hundred Thirty-Second Fighter Group. They painted the tails of their P-Forty Warhawks and later P-Fifty-One Mustangs red, a marking that earned them the nickname the Red Tails.

The record they compiled dismantled every argument used against them. Flying escort missions for heavy bombers over Germany and occupied Europe, the Three Hundred Thirty-Second was credited with never losing a bomber to enemy fighters during escort duty, a claim later complicated by research showing a small number of bombers were in fact lost on a handful of missions, though still far fewer than other escort groups suffered. They flew more than fifteen thousand sorties and were awarded over eight hundred fifty medals.

After the war, their documented excellence contributed directly to President Truman's executive order nine nine eight one in nineteen forty-eight, which desegregated the United States military. The Red Tails did not just prove a point. They changed the law.