ELLIS BRIGGS SERIAL NUMBERS HOW TO

If only the gateway, the staircase to this near but distant nirvana, could be pried open, all the way open – for everybody. Up high enough and you were in heaven, utopia, the Elysium.įor dreamers the airplane was the symbol of ascension come true, the real-life “sweet chariot” in the melodic Negro spiritual that serenaded congregations at Sunday services with the promise of “coming for to carry me Home.” Chauncey and Dale, riding on the momentum of their supporters, believed that flight portended great things, not just entry into the previously denied domain of the open air but fruition, wholeness, equality. Mythology, poetry, and liturgy had long propounded the kingdom where the birds sing as an idyllic oasis, a place of unfettered freedom, where the enslaved could escape oppression and the soul could find fulfillment. The sky as a metaphor for freedom was not a new idea. In the air, their thinking held, the law is fair and inviolable it applies uniformly without exception to all people regardless of extraneous factors like race, color, creed, gender, ethnicity, ancestry, and national origin for it is not man’s law but nature’s law. The members of the mostly black National Airmen’s Association of America and its precursor, the Challenger Air Pilots Association, saw the sky as a medium inherently devoid of the artificial barriers erected by one class of men to block another. The biplane’s two African American pilots, Chauncey Edward Spencer and Dale Lawrence White, brimmed with high expectations, too rapt by the audacity of their project to entertain its probable limits.īoth Chauncey and Dale belonged to a fledgling group of flying enthusiasts who, despite stinging drawbacks, held to the notion that aviation was the means to an emancipatory realm. On the morning of May 8, 1939, a rickety red-and-cream Lincoln-Page biplane, propitiously yet incongruously nicknamed Old Faithful, rose from Chicago’s Harlem Airport on a mission to change the world. This section will look at the events that led to the presences of hundreds of black pilots in WW2.

ELLIS BRIGGS SERIAL NUMBERS HOW TO

The experience of black pilots in WW2 is the convergence of the long civil rights struggles of racial minorities in the United States and the national military’s grappling with how to integrate these groups into the armed forces, specifically the Army Air Corps, in the twentieth century. In 1943 the 99 th Pursuit Squadron joined the 33 rd Fighter Group in North Africa. The Tuskegee program began in 1941, at the Tuskegee Institute, when the 99 th Pursuit Squadron was established.

The Tuskegee Airmen destroyed 251 enemy airplanes and were awarded a total of 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses for their service. Click here to see more articles in this category.

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