When Cheo Hodari Coker has a hard day, he pictures his 23-year-old grandfather in the cockpit of a P-51 Mustang fighter plane.
“And just the stories he would tell about that time and how it gave him a certain fortitude and confidence to fight any kind of aggression that he faced coming home,” Coker said.
Coker, a Connecticut native, is a writer and producer known for the Marvel TV series “Luke Cage.” His grandfather, Lt. Col. Bertram Wilson, was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen and the famed Red Tails fighter group. For his World War II service, Wilson was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and a Bronze star – at a time when the U.S. military was racially segregated and African Americans were still subjected to racist Jim Crow laws.
“He would also talk about how they had instructors that would literally try to wash them out, the psychological games that they would play by constantly referring to them with the ‘N’ word. And how a lot of people couldn’t take it,” Coker said.
His grandfather told Coker to ignore the name-calling.
“He taught me, in very frank terms, to not let anything get in my way,” Coker said.
Wilson is featured in an ongoing exhibit at the New England Air Museum called “The Tuskegee Airmen: Their Untold Stories.” It highlights two battles that the country’s first Black aviators faced: against Nazis during World War II in Europe and against racism in 1940s America.
The exhibit is located inside a B-29 hangar and features a Boeing-Stearman biplane, an iconic training aircraft with two sets of wings, one above the other. This very biplane trained Tuskegee Airmen.
“It looks like a barnstorming derring-do type craft,” said Mike Thornton, a museum curator. “But it was built to be rugged and fast and kind of give anyone learning to fly, the wherewithal to handle fighter planes, bombers and be successful at that.”
Candid moments offer humanity
Before 1941, young Black men were not allowed to train as U.S. military pilots. Officials at the time pointed to a 1925 Army War College report stating African Americans would be unable to serve successfully.
But on the brink of entry into World War II, the U.S. Army Air Corps needed more pilots. They formed a segregated squadron and experimental training program in Tuskegee, Alabama. After training, the airmen were sent to the Mediterranean to fly escort missions. Their job was to protect heavy bombers from German fighter planes as they flew to a target and back home again.
Thornton said their outstanding record helped pave the way for integration of the military after the war.
“But when we say Tuskegee Airmen, it's not just the pilots, it's anyone who trained at Tuskegee field from 1941 on through 1949,” he said. “The logistics of the air war in World War II took so many people behind the scenes: from the nurses and the doctors and dentists who took care of them, to the meteorologists who are making sure the weather’s right for flying, the cooks, the mechanics alone to maintain these machines.”
Images on an exhibit wall feature candid moments with the airmen.
“The Army is all about standardization,” Thornton said. “Yet the individualism that comes across in how these men wear their uniforms, the different hats – whether they’ve taken the band out so it’s crushed down so it looks ultra cool, to this guy who’s wearing just a mechanic’s cap from maybe Sears and Roebuck.
“You get a sense of all their personality and their humanity in these pictures.”
In a nearby glass case are objects belonging to Lemuel R. Custis, a Tuskegee airman who was the first Black member of Hartford’s police force.
Thornton points out Custis’ A-2 flight jacket.
“You can see how worn it is from all of those missions,” Thornton said.
Visitors also see Custis’ service pistol, as well as an oxygen mask, goggles, navigation equipment and other gear pilots used while flying missions.
‘A sense of ownership, pride’
Thornton said exhibit visitors are often deeply moved.
“I see wet eyes every now and again,” he said. “And it's impossible not to. There’s such a calling with this story, not only for the sacrifices they had to make and the mantra of excellence that they had to shoulder, but how they have used that as a positive force and how that continues to inspire.”
For Coker, the museum exhibit keeps history alive.
“People love to point to the Tuskegee Airmen as amongst the first quantifiable proof that there was nothing that could stop us moving forward as African Americans,” Coker said. “And it's one thing just to see some random brother with a leather jacket as a pilot that already gives you confidence. But when you actually know that one of them who pops up in the pictures is your grandfather, it gives you a sense of ownership, pride.”
“There are very real obstacles of racism,” Coker continued. “All types of ‘isms’ that you have to fight against. But then knowing that you have somebody that navigated those very dangerous skies and survived, gives you the confidence that you can do it, too.”
