Airmen recall fighting with color barrier

Separate but equal was the United State's motto during the period after Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896 and before Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education in 1954. In 1941 the armed forces used that motto as a basis for the "Tuskeegee Experiment," in which 992 black men were chosen to outfit a separate black unit in the U.S. Air Force. Several members of the Tuskeegee Airmen spoke to approximately 20 students Wednesday night as part of a program sponsored by the High Rise South Resident Advisors celebrating Black History Month. The evening began with exerpts from Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, a public television special on the black soldiers who liberated the concentration camps and the discrimination they experienced in the Army. "We wore the same uniform, were there for the same reasons, but couldn't do the same things," Johnny Steele said on the show, capturing a common sentiment among the soldiers. Four of the men -- James Williams, Wesley Hurt, Wesley Walker and Nathaniel Stewart -- alternated between narrating their own experiences in the segregated Army and answering the audience's questions. They related anecdotes of being refused admission to officers' clubs, being relegated to segregated housing and witnessing the physical abuse of fellow black airmen by white residents of the southern towns in which they trained. Stewart recalled warnings from his superior officers to be careful when leaving the base. "If we went into town, if we got into trouble with the civilian authorities, there was not too much they could do for us," he said. Stewart added that those wishing to integrate the army "knew that we had to do it peacefully and nonviolently." Asked why blacks wanted to fight for a country that treated them with so little respect, Williams said that many saw joining the Army as an opportunity to prove themselves to their country. "Whatever else I am, I am an American," William added. They also discussed the validity of drawing a parallel between blacks overcoming the military's segregation and gays currently fighting to serve in the military. "I know they're in there and I feel that, yes, they have a right to be there," Stewart said. "I don't know why they'd want to tell people." Walker agreed, saying "Let them do what they're doing." However Williams said that the only similarity between the two bans "was the word banned." "There are regulations in the service that regulate behavior," he said. Reaction to the program was positive. "I've studied World War II military history as a hobby my whole life, and this is another aspect of it," College senior Brooke Temple said. "It was neat because the campus that I come from is predominantly white," said Betsy Burgess, a physical therapy graduate student at Thomas Jefferson University. "It was neat for me to learn more of how African-Americans were treated in the past."