The Ninety-Ninth Squadron

Under Alabama's sun the first Negro fighter squadron in the world was training last week in circumstances which might have exasperated Job.

Sepia Soldiers. The Tuskegee school to train pilots for the 99th Fighter Squadron of the Army Air Forces was established in July 1941. Primary pilot training began on a small field near Tuskegee Institute, the famed Negro college, was carried on into its basic and advanced stages in November and January at a spanking new airport every bit as good as those built for white pilots. Candidates were chosen by the same rigorous examinations applied to white folks. The supervisory post officers, including instructors in basic and primary stages, were white.

Tuskegee's Negroes faced two problems: 1) learning to fly; 2) learning to become aggressive, when every tradition had taught them submissiveness. The raw material was good. Of these Negro cadets, 57% had had technical studies in school, the average had had three and a half years of college. Of the first 81 cadets accepted, 44 were from the South, 26 from the North, six from the Middle West, five from the Far West. They were anxious, eager, studied hard, flew hard, busted buttons bulging their chests at inspection.

Prize pupil was tall, lean, handsome Benjamin O. Davis Jr., first Negro ever accorded the traditional "recognition" by upperclassmen at the end of his plebe year at West Point. (His father, a Brigadier General, is an assistant to the Army's Inspector General.) Tuskegee's Negroes were as proud as all get-out when young Davis won his wings.

Trouble came in the irresponsible phrases of the excitable, dissatisfied Negro press. For months Negro editors pointedly ignored the Tuskegee flying school. When they could no longer ignore it, they poured out tirades against "Uncle Toms"—the Negroes who were willing to be in Negro units. One member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who praised the 99th Fighter Squadron and who dared castigate critics of segregation was read out of the organization. One Negro weekly which derives advertising revenue from manufacturers of skin bleaches and hair straighteners—and which nevertheless proclaims the superiority of the Negro race—regularly inveighed against segregation at Tuskegee.

Trouble also came from white planters of the region, who watched their cheap help skitter off the fields to get better jobs at the Army post. The planters referred contemptuously to "that nigger airport." A white planter telephoned that he would kill the first Negro soldier who ever again waved greetings to his womenfolk.

An officer called a meeting of white farmers, told them that this is just what Hitler wanted, just this kind of division among the U.S. people; Goebbels would be delighted. In view of the grim problems of this war, couldn't he count on their cooperation? When he finished talking the white men solemnly shook his hand.