(TAAF) some ten miles away, its having been built, as government press releases pointed out, by Negro contractors and with Negro skilled and unskilled labor forming the work force.

From the first, there were problems. Locals objected to black MPs challenging white people and going about with weapons when they patrolled in town. The commanding officer supported the MPs, but soon was relieved. His replacement, an old-line Army colonel, stood fast for Whites Only and Colored Only drinking fountains and bathrooms on the base, and he issued orders forbidding any whites to enter the post theater or canteen, where they might sit next to or eat with blacks. Black newspapers protested. The old-line colonel was kicked upstairs. His replacement was the director of training.

Parrish was then 33 years old, but looked far younger, was witty, polished, and affable, had great finesse and charm, was a great ladies’ man, had written many magazine articles under a nom de plume, and was interested in music and painting. His previous doings indicated no great involvement with or concern about blacks. As a kid, he remembered, he once hiked three miles to see a scorched tree where a black man had been burned to death.

He was aware, he said later, that a “weird and worried kind of laughter” issued from people’s mouths when they heard of the project to make blacks into fliers and mechanics, and he had heard from a visiting British air ace that it was better to have a “Messerschmitt on his tail than to try to teach a Negro to fly.” But he had been told to make a pursuit squadron from this separate and segregated little army within an army, and, as a professional flier and teacher, he set out to do so. Parrish was no crusader and no philanthropist. What mattered in creating fliers, he said, was cold professional judgment of individual capacities, and techniques taught with a stern thoroughness as impersonal as the universal laws of physics and aerodynamics. Negroes might or might not use inborn rhythm to fly, he said, and might or might not have better night vision than whites, or who knew what mysterious abilities. If such proved to be the case, these capabilities would be used for the benefit of the military’s air arm. As for letting the downtrodden slip by in the name of benevolence, that would get them killed. Men would perform to the highest standards expected of whites, or he’d wash them out of his outfit.

Under great pressure from all who had any kind of opinion on racial matters, his little backwoods Tuskegee Army Air Field becoming, it was said, the focus of 13,000,000 black Americans observing the experiment, he did his work. The men went into PTI3A Stearman primary trainers, then the AT6, and, finally, the P40. The base grew: hangars; a control tower; repair shops; facilities for the training of radio operators, photographers, and weathermen.

There was little in the immediately

accessible area to offer his troops recreational opportunities, so Parrish arranged morale-building visits from Lena Home, Joe Louis, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Robinson, Louis Armstrong, and Langston Hughes. The base’s football team was invited to play Wiley College of Marshall, Texas for the “National Negro Championship.” Parrish had, in the mothers of his recruits, proud women in hats and gloves, carrying purses and wearing corsages as they posed for pictures with the commanding officer of their United States Army Air Forces sons.

Parrish made full colonel. The personnel at TAAF reached 4000, and, in the faraway skies over Anzio in Italy, the all-black 99th Fighter Squadron, each member of which had been trained at Tuskegee, began knocking down German planes. The 332d and 477th followed. A total of 966 fliers came from the airfield in the red-clay Alabama hinterlands to fly 15,553 sorties, to complete 1578 missions, to lose 62 men in combat with 32 shot down and made prisoners of war. Schwarze Vogelmenschen, the Germans called them: black birdmen. They called themselves the Tuskegee Airmen. Benjamin O. Davis was not the only one of their number eventually to become an air general. What they did in the European skies was celebrated in the years after the war and very much helped desegregate the armed forces, which very much helped desegregate American life in a manner undreamed of when first they went to be fliers and mechanics and specialists.

Noel Parrish stayed in command at Tuskegee all through the war, got a general’s star and then a Ph.D. and taught history in the Texas he had fled because he didn’t like his girlfriend’s hands, and  he retired. He died in 1987. Douglas MacArthur once had something to say about an old soldier who did his duty as God gave it to him to see that duty, and perhaps there was something to that in the life of the Southern minister’s son. Once, at a meeting, he was introduced with a reference to the old black spiritual “Now, Let Me Fly.” Here was the man, the people at the meeting were told, who helped black men do just that.