“By Request”

The Origin Story of the Tuskegee Airmen

When Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. arrived at West Point in 1932 the administrators were caught off guard, as they were not expecting a light-skinned, mixed race cadet. One drop of negro blood still consigned you to the ashes, and so Cadet Davis was housed in a converted janitor’s closet. West Point invoked the policy of “Coventry”, more clearly, the silent treatment, hoping the extreme social isolation would force him to quit.

Although he succeeded academically, he failed partner-reliant coursework such as boxing and CPR as fellow cadets refused to touch him. He went to the Army-Navy game on a bus by himself with a black driver. Cadet Davis graduated in the top twenty percent of his class and rejected the offer of a law school education if he would accept an honorable discharge. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry, and “grounded” in segregated pre-war assignments when all he wanted was to be a pilot. How would you have fared under such circumstances?

World War II begins and Roosevelt wants to win the Black vote, so he hires Benjamin’s father, Benjamin O. Davis, Sr. to be the head of Black policy in America. He advises the president that “you have to start treating the military as fair…you should allow Blacks to fly airplanes” and proposes that his son lead the program. Benjamin Davis, Jr. heads to Tuskegee, Alabama (where the Ku Klux Klan is still active), passes the flying test and is tasked with creating a segregated Air Force. Ironically, Col. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., commander, named his airplane “By Request”.

My cousin, Lt. Col. Dennis “Ox” Oxelgren, USAF, retired, took me up in his Cessna over Fort Worth and allowed this “grunt” (military slang for low ranking service-member), as he lovingly called me, to take the controls. I will never forget the exhilaration, the feeling of freedom in the sky. I recall the same feeling when returning to Fort Hood from Fort Sam Houston in a Huey with the doors flung open, following MEDEVAC missions. I would like to imagine a similar feeling being embodied by the Tuskegee Airmen who were treated as second class citizens when on the ground in America.

Mary Jo “MJ” McConnell, former Captain, US Army Nurse Corps, is a member of the Anti-Racism Committee here at St. Ignatius

"The Tuskegee Airmen served with distinction in combat theaters across North Africa and Europe. The 332nd Fighter Group became especially renowned for its escort missions protecting Allied bombers over enemy territory. Their story remains one of the most significant chapters in both aviation and civil rights history." tuskegeemuseum.org

"Now they keep asking for us (the red tails of the 332nd Fighter Group) to escort their bombing runs." – Eugene Richardson, Tuskegee Airman

"The privileges of being an American belong to those brave enough to fight for them." – Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., Commander of the Tuskegee Airmen.