DEFYING GRAVITY continued from previous page


everybody,” Brown recalls. “There were several lectures against the Nazis, against the persecution of the Jews. We identified with that. We were aware of the fact that the United States needed to do more.”


Like many of his classmates, Brown spent summers participating in a civilian military training program. On a Sunday afternoon in December of his junior year, Brown was in his dorm room in Alumni Hall listening to a football game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers (both then names of NFL teams as well as


Brown, center, with the Varsity Club


Major League Baseball squads). The word came through that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.


“It was the Day of Infamy,” Brown says. “Everybody was upset. What could you do? We knew it was going to change our lives— that’s for sure.”


“It was the Day of Infamy,” Brown says. “Everybody was upset. What could you do? We knew it was going to change our lives—that’s for sure.” Some classmates enlisted. Brown opted to finish his degree, an accelerated program that led to his gradua- tion in March 1943. It was a surreal time: his family coming


up to see a somber service commemorating Roscoe’s degree completion at the top of his class. The next morning he boarded a train for Washington, and transferred to a segre- gated train heading to the Deep South in Mississippi. “That was,” Brown says, “the beginning of a lot of challenges.” After a few weeks of training, Brown headed to Tuskegee, Alabama.


TUSKEGEE. IT MIGHT be the most double-edged word in the history of American race relations.


On the negative side is the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. In perhaps the most shameful application of experimental research our country has ever known, scientists working for the U.S. Public Health Service studied the progres- sion of untreated syphilis in rural black men from 1932-1972. That included knowingly withholding information about, and treatment with, penicillin, which had proven an effective treat- ment for the disease. Many of the men, their


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wives, and children died unnecessarily as a result. In 1997, President Bill Clinton publicly apologized for this research to the remaining eight survivors, saying in part, “The United States Government did something that was wrong, deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commit- ment to integrity and equality for all our citizens ... what the United States Government did was shameful, and I am sorry.” But Tuskegee is also connected with one of the defining achievements in the history of American civil rights—the heroic service of the Tuskegee Airmen. Overriding advice from some of his generals, President Roosevelt ordered the creation of a program to train African-American pilots. The pilots served with remarkable valor and distinction in the war in Europe and North Africa.


Tom Brokaw has famously dubbed those who grew up in the Depression and fought for freedom in World War II as “the greatest generation.” If so, a special distinction seems appropriate for the Tuskegee Airmen, all of whom had to fight for freedom in their homeland. It’s important to remember the historical context. This was more than a decade before the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which declared separate inherently unequal. It was far in advance of Rosa Parks’s quiet defiance on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. And it was more than a generation before Martin Luther King Jr. spelled out his dream at the Lincoln Memorial.


This was a time when “whites-only” water fountains were common, when the blood supply was segregated, when only a tiny percentage of blacks in the south were allowed to vote, when lynchings by the KKK were disturbingly common.


This was a time when “whites-only” water fountains were common, when the blood supply was segregated, when only a tiny percentage of blacks in the south were allowed to vote, when lynchings by the KKK were disturbingly common.


But there was a war against a fearsome enemy, personified by a man in Germany trying to create a


master race. And Tuskegee Airmen like Roscoe Brown were more than willing to plunge into the fight. “We knew we had to prove a point,” Brown says. “We knew we were all very capable ... We all wanted to fly.” And fly they did. Painting the tails of their P-51 Mustangs red, the Tuskegee 332nd Fighter Group distinguished themselves as bomber escorts for white pilots, and also engaged in direct action amid great peril. Brown shot down a German Messerschmitt jet over Berlin in one of his 68 missions.


Sixty-six Tuskegee Airmen would be killed in action during the war. Forty-six Springfield College students, including five of Brown’s cohorts from the class of 1943, would never make it home alive. A plaque with their names hangs to this day just inside the doors of Marsh Memorial.


TRIANGLE 1 Vol. 83, No. 3


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