Negro newspapers and civic groups around the country began a public campaign to integrate the armed forces. In 1939, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took aim at the military’s segregationist policies. The notion that blacks were inherently inferior to whites was still a wide-spread belief in most of the United States but particularly in the South, where virtually all aspects of life were racially segregated, so it is not surprising that Southern military men readily accepted-in fact, they had helped to write-a 1925 Army War College study of black troops in World War I that concluded Negroes, the racial term then in use, were subservient, mentally inferior and “barely fit for combat.” military until after World War II however, during that war large air groups were designated Eighth Air Force, Fifteenth Air Force, etc.) The officer corps of the Army included a high number of men from the South, the region of the old Confederate States of America during the Civil War. Air Force did not exist as a separate branch within the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1907 until near the end of the 1930s. Army Air Corps had been limited to white personnel from its inception as part of the U.S. Pilots, navigators, bombardiers, maintenance and support staff, and instructors all played a role. Although the best-known Tuskegee Airmen were the fighter pilots of the 332nd Pursuit Group (99th, 100th, 301st, and 302nd fighter squadrons), the 477th Bombard Group (the first black bomber group) was also part of the Tuskegee Airmen. The group compiled an impressive record, primarily in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, despite facing frequent resistance to their presence in the formerly all-white Army Air Corps. Army Air Force units in World War II that were comprised primarily of African American flyers and maintenance crews, though a few white officers and trainers were also involved. Tuskegee Airmen is the name given to members of the U.S. 616th, 617th, 618th, 619th Bombardment Squadrons Wars Foughtįirst African-American military aviators AKAĮxplore articles from the History Net archives about The Tuskegee Airmen
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