Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – This is one of my most cherished photos of my father, in part, because we didn’t find this one until, tearfully, after he had passed away. He had been so modest that we didn’t know it existed. It was a gift from the universe to see an image of him from a time I could not have known.
The Tuskegee Airmen only became household names in the last couple of decades, so my mother had not been especially impressed by this when she and my father were courting. She was looking for a kind, intelligent and hardworking man, preferably, in her words, tall, dark and handsome. And she found him.
While Tuskegee wasn’t a source of everyday conversation, he would faithfully attend the local meetings of the Tuskegee Airmen and the Civil Air Patrol, and he kept every scrap of Tuskegee memorabilia, even a propeller from one of their training planes.
He did not live to see the near universal acclaim that the very idea of the Tuskegee Airmen now evokes. But one day, in the last years of his life, as I boarded a commercial flight with my parents, we peeked into the cockpit and saw that the captain was Black, a position the airmen sadly could only have dreamt of.
I whispered to the captain my father’s history.
Once we reached cruising altitude, the captain made an announcement. He said that there was a Tuskegee Airman on board and that the airmen had been pioneers in aviation. The whole cabin of passengers erupted into applause, because on the plane with them was living history. My father hadn’t expected that, and he teared up, as he tended to do when he was overcome with emotion. I will miss him for as long as I live.
#FathersDay #tuskegeeairmen | Posted on 16/Jun/2024 21:13:44
