Pat Dollard

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Times Online:

Spann Watson is going to his second presidential inauguration — but this time he will actually touch the ground. The 92-year-old retired lieutenant-colonel from Long Island, New York, was one of the legendary black Second World War pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

The all-black unit of the US Air Force took part in the fly-past at the inauguration of President Truman in the still-segregated Washington in 1949. Mr Watson was one of a dozen black pilots who flew down Pennsylvania Avenue after the swearing-in, and past the parade stand. Then they kept on flying all the way back to their base in Ohio.

Tomorrow Mr Watson and many of the other 250 to 300 surviving Tuskegee Airmen, now all in their eighties and nineties, will receive a heroes’ welcome at the inauguration of America’s first black president.

Barack Obama has reserved prime seats for them on the Capitol lawn to honour their role in breaking down racial barriers in the United States decades before the civil rights era. “My career in public service was made possible by the path heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen trailblazed,” Mr Obama once said.

Mr Watson is joyous about the invitation and plans to attend. “I am very glad to be invited,” he said. “Years and years ago we never thought we would see a thing like this. Now it’s here.

“I would be glad to be hopping and skipping and jumping down Pennsylvania Avenue, saying, ‘This is me. I started this in 1939 and 1940 and now there is a black president. I’m Exhibit No 1’.”

Born in the segregated rural South Carolina in 1916, Mr Watson decided that he wanted to become a pilot after moving to a town near Teterboro airport in New Jersey as a child.

“We went to visit the airport near by. That was the first time we saw airplanes on the ground. We attended flying circuses there,” he recalled. “One day, Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St Louis into Teterboro. Somehow I was the only person around who recognised the Spirit of St Louis.

“A man laughed at me, saying it wasn’t. Then it landed and it was Lindbergh. I made up my mind then. It was an insult for the man to laugh at me.”

Mr Watson studied for two years at the black Howard University in Washington so that he could meet air force requirements and then applied to be a pilot. He was turned down and went to court, with the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

The US Army Air Corps agreed to establish the segregated 332nd Fighter Group at the Tuskegee air base in Alabama for black pilots and ground crew. Two fighter squadrons of Tuskegee Airmen served in combat in the Second World War in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and Germany.

Mr Watson’s 99th Fighter Squadron arrived in Casablanca in 1943 and first saw combat in bombing the strategic Italian island of Pantellaria in preparation for the invasion of Sicily.

In all, 992 black pilots were trained in Tuskegee from 1940 to 1946, and about 445 were sent into action overseas. A total of 150 of the airmen lost their lives in accidents or combat.

Despite their service, the black flyers had to continue to fight discrimination after the war. Mr Watson was one of 101 black airmen who tried to enter the whites-only officers’ mess at Freeman Field, Indiana, in 1945 to protest against the exclusion of blacks, and ended up facing a court martial.

“That was a turnaround point of segregation,” he said. “They knew we were determined and would never stop until segregation stopped.

“I despise segregation. Even after we went into the service, we despised segregation. But we said, ‘If we had to take that, we would fly until we got a change’. Now we got change, thanks in large part to black flyers in the air force.”

After leaving the military he became an air traffic controller.

He has already met Mr Obama, once in 2007 when the Tuskegee Airmen met senators when they were awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.

“He is wonderful as a person in addition to being black; he is a person with the ideas like Roosevelt and Kennedy,” he said. “We have a new America.”