An Interview with 95-Year-Old Tuskegee Airman Lt. Col. Harry Stewart

History Unplugged Podcast · Jun 18, 2019 · 57m

“Colored people aren’t accepted as airline pilots.” The “negro type has not the proper reflexes to make a first-class fighter pilot.” These were the degrading sentiments that faced eighteen-year-old Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr. as he journeyed in a segregated rail car to Army basic training in Mississippi in 1943. But two years later, the twenty-year-old African American from New York proved doubters wrong when he was at the controls of a P-51, prowling for Luftwaffe aircraft at five thousand feet over the Austrian countryside.

Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr. is one of the last surviving Tuskegee…