General C.Q. Brown and Lt. Col. James Harvey: Wings of Freedom

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Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

The Tuskegee Airmen were some of the bravest and best pilots to ever fly for the United States Armed Forces. One of the last surviving members of the pioneering African-American fighting force, is Lieutenant Colonel James Harvey. He faced tremendous discrimination during his career, but he became the very first winner of the Top Gun competition. The success of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II led to the desegregation of the military. And that opened a path for fighter pilot Charles Q. Brown, the current Chief of Staff for the U.S Air Force, and the first African-American to lead any branch of the military. Both men share their extraordinary stories, and talk about how they persevered against the odds. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2022

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, it's Alice.
0:04.0	Do you think you were destined to become a legendary pilot?
0:08.0	No, I don't.
0:10.0	I don't think I was.
0:12.0	Just a pilot, that's's all the best pilot.
0:15.0	James Harvey is 98 years old when he was growing up in the 1920s and 30s he told Mary
0:21.5	Jordan it was unimaginable that he'd become a pilot in the military,
0:26.7	let alone the best pilot.
0:29.2	That's because African Americans weren't allowed to fly military planes at all.
0:34.8	But during World War II, the need for pilots
0:37.7	outweighed the racism that had kept them out.
0:41.0	Fortunately, James Harvey turned 20 in 1943, the year he was drafted and the year
0:47.5	the Air Corps, the predecessor to the Air Force, started training black pilots in Tuskegee, Alabama.
0:54.6	I was a perfectionist, so everything had to be perfect.
0:59.1	And if everything has to be perfect and you achieve that goal, you're the best. But in our group, each one of us
1:06.8	wanted to be the best. So you get all those best together, you've got quite an
1:11.4	organization. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey and the other Tuskegee Airmen came home after the war to Jim Crow America,
1:19.0	but James Harvey kept doing what he did best, flying.
1:23.4	In 1949, he and the three other black ace pilots on his team
1:28.6	won the first ever top gun competition,
1:32.3	even though they were flying in obsolete plane. Today James
1:36.7	Harvey is one of the only surviving members of the Tuskegee Airman. Luckily, he has lived long enough to see the first African American
	...

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