WINNING THE RIGHT TO FLY

Five decades later the wounds are still fresh. Charles Dryden is 74 years old now, but during World War II, when he was young, he was one of the Tuskegee airmen, the U.S. Army Air Corps's first unit of African-American combat pilots. He remembers traveling in the South with his fellow airmen and being forced out of his seat and into the Negroes-only car at the front of the train, where the soot and smoke were thickest, to make room for German pows. He recalls being barred from the cafeteria at military bases, where Italian pows were served hot meals. As...