The Tuskeegee Airmen, in more ways than one, were directly responsible for the fact that I had a seat in the theater. They fought for the rights that I take for granted: the right to be an American Airman; the right to be a full and free citizen of my own country; the right to simply sit wherever I want in a movie theater.
All too often, the Black Freedom Tradition in our nation is ignored, distorted, and misappropriated for reasons that range from silly and shallow to dangerous and vile, despite the fact that our nation’s survival has often depended upon it. Still, the tradition endures, in reverent memory, in deep ancestral bonds, and in day-to-day practice.
In April of 1866, Walter A. Bookram, a civic leader in the Black community of the town of Franklinton, North Carolina, wrote to the editors of the A.M.E. Church’s newsletter, The Christian Recorder, to inform them that a school for the town’s free and newly-freed Black residents had been established. The school in question was a night school housed in…