The following by Chauncey Spencer II was posted in comments on a Post Scripts article about the Tuskegee Airmen. We thought it should be posted on page one today.
Man says black aviators merit place at inaugural… Darrell Laurant, Media General News Service, Published: December 30, 2008
** Chauncey Spencer II has an issue with the committee orchestrating next month’s presidential inauguration. ***
“It’s not a big issue, maybe, but it is an issue,” said Spencer, the son of Lynchburg-raised pioneer aviator and civil-rights leader Chauncey Spencer and the grandson of poet Anne Spencer. “Especially given the historic nature of this inauguration.” *** Because Barack Obama is the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, making him the first black U.S. president, there will be a definite civil-rights subtext to his Jan. 20 swearing-in ceremony. *** And Spencer, who lives in Detroit but was in Lynchburg last week, believes that the National Airmen Association of America — an organization of black aviators of which his father was a charter member — should be included and recognized. **
“All the living members of the Tuskegee Airmen have been invited, and that’s as it should be,” Spencer said. “But it was the National Airmen Association that paved the way for the Tuskegee Airmen.”
Or paved the runway. A May 1939 flight from Chicago to Washington by Spencer’s father and fellow black aviator Dale White resulted in a chance meeting with then-Sen. Harry S. Truman, D-Mo., and the eventual integration of the Army Air Corps.
Spencer and White were on their way to lobby members of Congress on that issue, accompanied by National Airmen Association lobbyist Edgar Brown, when they encountered Truman on a street corner. He seemed surprised when they told him the Air Corps was open only to whites and asked to see their airplane at small nearby airport.
“If you had the guts to fly this thing here from Chicago,” Truman supposedly said after viewing the rickety, open-cockpit Lincoln-Paige biplane, “I’ve got the guts to back you for inclusion into the Army Air Corps.”
White and Spencer invited Truman to take a ride in their plane. He declined.
The elder Spencer was 37 when the Tuskegee Airmen were formed, eight years above the age cutoff for fighter pilots. Instead, he served at the Tuskegee University pilot training site in Alabama as an instructor and mechanic.
“He was suspended at one point because he refused to obey an officer who told him, ‘Boy, take this broom and go sweep the hangar,'” Spencer II said. “He said, ‘No. I’m a flyer.'”
That was typical of the feisty Spencer, who died in 2002 at age 96.
“He didn’t believe in dragging feet when it came to integration,” said Spencer II, one of four surviving children of Chauncey and Anne Spencer, “and he suffered for that. In the 1950s, he was branded a Communist and had trouble getting a job for two years.”
Spencer II would like to represent his father and the National Airmen Association in Washington on Jan. 20, despite the inconvenience that would entail.
“If I’m going to have any hope of finding a room,” he said, “I need to start working on it now.”
He has received a rejection letter from Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and has e-mailed Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.
“She [Feinstein] hasn’t gotten back to me,” Spencer said. “I know they’re really busy and it’s hectic for them, but this is a time to celebrate and recognize history.
“There were a lot of Martin Luther Kings — people like my father. I will never let his name die, and this is one way to keep it alive.”
Darrell Laurant is a staff writer for The News & Advance in Lynchburg.