Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert W. Williams both grew up in the bondage of racism that infiltrated every class and profession, every walk of life in this country in the century following the Civil War. Black men may have been freed when those Northern Yankees won the war, but most blacks still struggled on a daily basis against the adversities of white mind sets that compared black Africans to little more than beasts of burden.
Martin Luther King Jr., was born Jan. 15, 1929 in Atlanta, GA, deep in the heart of the South with a dense black population, and Robert W. Williams was born in 1922 in Ottumwa, IA, a community in the Heartland of the United States, where the population was primarily Caucasian. At the time both of these men reached their prime, however, racial bias was still rampant nation-wide.
It’s not known if Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Williams ever met, but the two men shared a like mind-set. King was quoted as saying, “A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”
What does this have to do with Robert W. Williams? In William’s obituary, his family shared, “Robert W. Williams, the persistent patriarch of the Tuskegee Airmen… spent 43 years bringing the significance of that all-black flight squadron to the public’s attention…” That’s a testament to the fact that Williams was a tenacious man, with a tenacity comparable to that which King demonstrated.
Tuskegee University, the academic home to the renowned black scientist, George Washington Carver, in Alabama was chosen to house the first African American military aviators in the United States armed forces. Archie Alexander, a prominent black engineer, also from Ottumwa, IA, was actually in charge of building the Moton Field in Tuskegee.
That may never have happened, however, without the assistance at the time of First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. She really gave the Moton project PR accolades that brought it to national media attention. She went for a ride in an airplane piloted by African-American chief civilian instructor C. Alfred “Chief” Anderson, a story that received newspaper coverage nation-wide. She also used her considerable resources to arrange a loan of $175,000 to finance the building of Moton Field which she was in a position to do because she was a trustee of the Julius Rosenwald Fund at the time.
When the facility opened for business Robert Williams saw an opportunity to get an education through military service and enlisted. The only operational unit to come out of the Tuskegee training was the 332nd, which served in WWII with distinction, despite the racial biases they met with on a daily basis. Robert Williams was a proud member of the 332nd Fighter Group. So proud was he, in fact, that after the war, Williams couldn’t let their story die.
At the time, the armed services were racially segregated. For that matter, the Federal government was segregated, but the war was seriously depleting aircraft resources overseas or the Tuskegee pilots might never have gotten off the ground except in the air over Alabama.
First the 332nd Fighter Group was sent oversees in a deployment called Operation Torch over northern Africa. In the beginning, most of their service took place on the ground. However, it soon became evident the Red-Tails Angels, as they came to be called, were needed in Sicily and Italy. The moniker came about when they painted their aircraft tails a bright red, and then went on to perform with distinction. Once they had a taste of success, they didn’t stop there.
Pilots began specifically requesting the Red-Tails as their escort bombers. Here is where their distinction came to be recognized. They went on to fly missions over Italy, Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Williams became a decorated hero, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Presidential Distinguished Unit Award, but when the war was over, the black pilot couldn’t get a job in the air flying a plane anywhere in the United States. So he took up acting. This led him to write a screen play, according to his obituary in the LA Times, specifically, about the story of “the first squadron of black combat fighter pilots and the vanguard of nearly 1,000 black fliers-(who) overcame racism for the right to serve their country, and emerged from the war wreathed with honor but with little public acclaim.”
Eventually, HBO produced the film in 1995, 43 years after Williams began seeking acclaim for the Tuskegee Airmen. Time television critic, Howard Rosenberg, said about the film at the time, “the latest in a string of historical pearls.”
George Lucas is putting $58 million dollars of his own money into the January 20, 2012 release of “Red-Tails,” the most recent movie production honoring these Black-African heroes of WWI aviator history. Robert Williams is never mentioned in the movie, nor are any of the men who served with him. Still, the characters in the movie are loosely based on Robert William’s life and he and his fellow squadron members battle against racism to serve their country on the European war front.
“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said. Except for the Robert Williams of this world, the George Lucases of this world, stories like the story of the “Red-Tails” might simply go untold. King knew it. Williams knew it. George Lucas knows it.
At a time when U.S. politics is mired in personal agendas, the release of the “Red-Tails,” Robert William’s epic story of racial bigotry seems to be a timely event.