Tuskegee Airman: ‘They don’t know the struggles we went through’

• Reprints

Tuskegee Airman Quentin P. Smith is photographed in his Gary, Ind. home Friday January 13, 2012. Smith served from 1942-1946. | Stephanie Dowell~Sun-Times Media

Learn more

Read more about the movie “Red Tails” in the I.Q. section

Article Extras

Related Stories

• Trailblazers of the sky

Updated: May 9, 2012 10:10AM

Quentin Smith sat up slightly in his living room easy chair for brief comedic effect.

“The devil looked at me and said, ‘Let him par-boil a little while longer,’  ” Smith told me before smiling at his own quip. “I’m doing all right for an old codger, I guess.”

The 93-year-old Gary man recently was released from the hospital after a nearly three-month stay for an infected gallbladder. But it was important for him to be out by today so he could attend a special premiere in Chicago of the new action film “Red Tails.”

The movie, to be officially released Friday, is the creation of sci-fi filmmaker George Lucas, who’s been working on the project for more than a quarter century. The 67-year-old director of “Star Wars” fame spent $58 million of his own money to bankroll his new film about World War II black aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

Smith is one of the few remaining Tuskegee Airman still alive, and he first heard about “Red Tails” more than a year ago.

“I’m looking forward to seeing it,” he told me Friday morning in his Gary home, which showcases a small statue of a Tuskegee Airmen on the fireplace mantle. “That statue’s face was modeled after me. That’s right.”

The previous movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, in 1995, was supposed to be directed by Lucas, but he had obligations to “Star Wars.” It missed his special touch.

Lucas was the first person to buy the rights for the Tuskegee Airmen’s story, back in 1972, for $75,000, Smith said. With only 150 or so Tuskegee Airmen still alive, including just a handful in the Chicago area, it’s taken Lucas almost 40 years to finish the project.

“It’s about time, huh?” asked Smith, who lost 30 pounds while in the hospital and needs a walker to get around.

Smith recalled the constant dogfight on “two fronts” facing the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II — one on the overseas battlefield and the other in the United States Armed Forces.

In a word, racism, our country’s deepest sin.

“Blacks can’t lead. Blacks can’t fight. And blacks can’t fly complicated planes,” Smith said shaking his head. “That’s what we were told, and that’s what was written in policies.”

Back then, any U.S. pilot with five kills was deemed an “ace.” But racism and bigotry stood in the way of any of the Tuskegee Airmen becoming an ace. Every time they reached four kills, they would be returned stateside.

Back then, Uncle Sam didn’t want black pilots involved in combat operations until the U.S. and its allies opened up their second front and then Uncle Sam needed the Tuskegee Airmen, he said.

“They needed us,” Smith said.

Back then, black men had to have college degrees to become pilots. White men could become pilots straight out of high school.

“That’s just how things were,” he said. “We fought to change things, though.”

Earlier in their career, when Smith and the other black airmen got transferred to Freeman Field in downstate Seymour, they experienced similar discrimination on the home front.

“We were told we were not allowed into the officers’ club,” said Smith, whose memory is as clear as a cloudless sky. “A colonel there ordered me out or I would be serving 20 years in Leavenworth. They placed us in the stockade at Fort Knox.”

The 100 or so airmen stood their ground and eventually they were released after Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP got involved.

“President Truman told them to turn us loose,” Smith said proudly, but his military personnel record wasn’t expunged of the incident until 1995.

“We’re trying to keep this chapter in our country’s history alive, but the black community still doesn’t know about us,” he said. “They’re not being taught enough about it in school.”

“To be honest, I don’t know if younger folks these days care about civil rights and integration in the armed forces,” he said. “They take it for granted. They don’t know the struggles we went through.”

Does that bother him?

He paused, thought about my question, and replied slowly, “Yeah, it bothers me a little bit.”

Smith, whose wife died several years ago, came to this region from Texas more than 80 years ago, but not in familiar fashion.

“My daddy broke a police sheriff’s arm in Texas, and he had to get on the first thing that was smokin,’  ” Smith recalled with a grin. “Or else he would have got hanged or shot or something.”

Smith’s father chose East Chicago after landing a job at a local steel mill.

Smith graduated from E.C. Washington High School, and attended Indiana State University and the University of Chicago. He was a teacher at Roosevelt High School in Gary when he was drafted in 1942.

He credits Willa Smith, a black woman and pioneer in transcontinental flight, for teaching him how to fly at her flight school on Chicago’s Southwest Side. He earned $15 more per month as a stateside pilot than he did as a teacher, he said.

Smith last aviated an airplane about a decade ago. He misses being at the controls, but he knows such things are for younger pilots, not 93-year-old military veterans. Still, he takes air flights occasionally to visit his two sons in Scottsdale, Ariz., or to conventions for the Tuskegee Airmen.

On Monday — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — I will visit again with Smith, who was finally awarded a Congressional Gold Medal by President George W. Bush in 2006, along with his Tuskegee peers.

I’ll ask him what he thought of “Red Tails” and if the movie did the Tuskegee Airmen proud. Or if Hollywood shoots holes through the historical accuracy of his group’s efforts on two battlefields.

“I’m curious, too,” he said.

Listen to Quentin Smith talk about the new film “Red Tails” on my “Casual Fridays” radio show this Friday at noon on WLPR 89.1-FM or www.thelakeshorefm.com.