Some Stories Are Timeless

Eleanor Roosevelt proved a powerful advocate for Japanese Americans in the “relocation” camps, as well as for the Tuskegee Airmen. Here, she visits the Gila River relocation camp—which I was intrigued to discover once stood about fifteen miles from where I live.

Many Hurdles for Black Airmen

Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee’s father, an AME pastor in the Midwest, instilled in him a belief that all people stand as brothers and sisters before God, regardless of skin color. An outstanding student, Charles enrolled in R.O.T.C. at the University of Illinois. He was accepted into the experimental Tuskegee Airmen’s training program in Alabama.

The discrimination he had experienced growing up did not prepare him for life in the South.

“As the train left Southern Illinois, you had to change your location in the car…. You could feel the change in atmosphere….”
– Charles McGee

“Everything [on base] was black or white. They wouldn’t let black officers in the white officers’ club…. We went to the movie theater and they had a sign up that said, ‘Blacks in the back.’”
– Tuskegee Airman Roscoe Brown

The Army’s segregation rules dictated that black officers could not serve over white men. Qualified black pilots could not receive their commissions until black crews and a full complement of mechanics and supporting staff had also been trained. Army policy restricted black officers to assignments in “predominately black nations.” But the need was great enough that 355 Tuskegee airmen saw combat over Italy and Germany anyway.

Tuskegee Airmen in Italy

The Tuskegee Airmen’s Legacy

The group’s record proved exemplary. They flew over 1500 missions, losing only 27 bombers they escorted.

Eighty-four Tuskegee Airmen lost their lives. Thirty-two were captured. CBN has produced a riveting video clip in which Tuskegee Airman Harold Brown credits God with intervening twice to save his life after his P-51 went down in Germany.

“You realize somebody, somebody had to be looking out for you; somebody had to be taking care of you. And there’s only one somebody in the world who I know is capable of doing that—God.”
– Harold Brown

Nisei from the internment camps. Black “Tuskegee Airmen.” Native American “code talkers” who enlisted from reservations. These people of color faced racial barriers we would never conceive of tolerating today. Yet they served with distinction and pride in every theater of the war.

We Hold These Truths

So do America’s “self-evident truths” apply to some but not to others? If so, what makes her worth fighting for? When the nisei in my story A Matter of Mind and Heart sees action for the first time against Japan in the Pacific, he must come to grips with this question.

One answer was expressed very memorably by a group of men who spent most of WWII as prisoners of the Japanese army—the Doolittle Raiders captured in rural China in April 1942. These heroes inspired several of my characters in The Plum Blooms in Winter. Here they reflect on that experience:

“In the hundreds of lonely hours we spent trying to retain our sanity… one of the documents we remembered and recited to ourselves was the Declaration of Independence.

‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…’

The meaning of those words really comes home to you when you are confined by a brutal enemy who totally reject the concept of individual liberty.”

– Four Came Home (Carroll V. Glines, 1995)

The U.S.A. is the longest-standing and most successful experiment with the idea that “we the people” are fit to govern ourselves. That government exists to serve its people—who are all equal before the law—and not the other way around. That we don’t need a privileged class born to rule over us, or an authoritarian central government to dictate what’s best for us.

Has this American experiment been perfect? Clearly not. But I contend it has only improved over time, as the ideals expressed in our founding documents have become real for more and more people. And I defy anyone to point to a system that works better for its constituents than this one does.