Blue Skies, Black Wings: African American Pioneers of Aviation (review)

Samuel L. Broadnax is a Tuskegee airman. He graduated from the Institute five months before Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. He is a retired pilot.

Broadnax is a rememberer and a reminder. In Blue Skies, Black Wings, he elides the distinction between history and memory. He remembers his aerial aspirations ripening. He recalls the black men and women who flew before him: Willa B. Brown, Eugene Bullard, Bessie Coleman, Dorothy Darby, Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, Sosthene H. Mortenol, Charles Wesley Peters, John C. Robinson. He remembers learning to fly in the segregated south. He reminds us that Crow flew too.

Blue Skies, Black Wings is about war. It is about the Second World War and the first generation of African Americans who served formally in the United States Army Air Corps and Forces. It is also about the domestic race war that took place on the ground and in the air.

In the United States, rigid racial barriers separated soil and sky. Systematically, the state tried to ground black people. It commissioned seemingly scientific studies such as “The Use of Negro Manpower in War” and it used intelligence exams to determine if the Air Corps should enlist African Americans. Repeatedly, the results said no. “Blacks were considered fair laborers but inferior as technicians and fighters” (10).

Boldly, African Americans ascended. Reminiscent of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), Broadnax argues that it was “patently unthinkable” that the descendants of slaves could fly (xi). In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the airplane emerged an explicit emblem of national pride, power, and progress in the United States. In the popular imagination, aviators were white men and women who conquered nature bravely, defied death daringly, and promoted nationalism proudly. “There was just too much glitter, too much sparkling prestige, and perceived power attached to flying to permit inferiors to bask in the same golden glory” (xii) Nevertheless, they rose.

The beginning of Broadnax’s ascent is familiar. It revisits and reproduces the romantic image of rapt children watching new airplanes soaring. It is summer. A father and friend drive a boy to an uncultivated field in Kansas. There is a reddish brown bi-plane and a pilot offering joy rides. The boy is six. He is too small to fly, but that does not matter. It is his first encounter with an airplane. Onward, winged mechanical things obsess him. He builds model planes. He watches daredevils stain the sky and he enjoys grounded airplane rides at carnivals. He is determined. He wants to fly. He wants to pilot. In 1943, the United States military sends the first African American aerial combat unit to North Africa. Now a teenager, the boy’s ambitions tighten. He wants to be a pursuit pilot. He wants to fight, in the above.

The cultivation of this desire marks the moment when Blue Skies, Black Wings departs from most early aviation tales. Others tend to tell spectacular stories about famed ground-breakers, record-holders, disasters, and the disappeared. They tend to focus on the feats of nation-states, empire-states, and industries; the efforts of subaltern people and places blear on the margins.

There are exceptions. In them, certain subaltern contributions are centered and celebrated. As Broadnax points out, “Without question, the fighter pilots of the 99^th Fighter Squadron and the 332^nd Fighter Group have received the lion’s share of the publicity and attention directed toward and about the Tuskegee Airmen” (142). Indeed, stories marking the aerial achievements of black people exist, but they are set apart. They are footnotes, chapters, articles, and monographs that are almost but not quite integrated into the triumphant tales we tend to tell ourselves about the advent of heavier-than-air travel.

Inadvertently, Broadnax offers an alternative. Unintentionally, moments and mentions in this book suggest that the African Diaspora was central to the invention of mechanical flight. For example, Broadnax...