By Sam Brunson

Last week, my family and I were at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site. I wasn’t terribly familiar with the Tuskegee Airmen before visiting; frankly, their story is amazing, inspiring, and shocking. Basically, Army War College study from the early twentieth century claimed that African Americans lacked intelligence, ambition, and courage, and were thus unfit for the military, and especially unfit to be airmen.

The Tuskegee Institute had an airfield where it trained African American pilots; eventually the government accepted it as a training ground for military pilots. The Tuskegee Airmen proved the Army War College study wrong with a distinguished record of military service. Still, the military in the 1940s was segregated, and these Tuskegee Airmen served in segregated units and, when they returned home, they faced continued racism. Many, tired of what they experienced, went on to join the civil rights movement. And many of them share their stories, through audio, video, pictures, and artifacts, at the NHS. Continue reading “Tax at the National Parks: Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site Edition” →