Podcast: Remembering a Tuskegee Airman from Morristown

A plaque on the Morristown High School Wall of Fame honors the late Roland Brown Sr. for valor.

In World War II, he focused on two foes: Hitler and Uncle Sam.

Talk about guts.

Roland Brown Sr. was a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, African American aviators whose distinguished service is celebrated in the new George Lucas film Red Tails.

Nearly 70 years after World War II, it’s not hard to envision black pilots scoring aerial combat victories for the United States against Nazi Germany. What’s difficult to fathom is why they would want to.

As second-class citizens in the segregated Army, they risked their lives flying fighter planes for a nation that would not even let them share a drink with the white bomber crews they were protecting.

Why would anyone do that?

In this podcast, we ask Brown’s son, Dr. Roland Brown Jr., a retired Army captain who is a Morristown dentist.

At a screening of Red Tails hosted last week by the local alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., Roland Jr. and other black veterans spoke eloquently about the benefits of military careers for minorities.

Their viewpoints surprised me, on a night of surprises.

Aside from the spectacular special effects one would expect from the creator of Star Wars, Red Tails is a surprisingly old-fashioned, conventional, cornball war movie, a buddy picture no better or worse than countless other Hollywood versions of World War II stretching back to John Wayne.

Except that nearly all of those films depict white guys doing heroic things.  In this one, nearly all the good guys are black, and virtually all the bad guys are white.

That set up the evening’s other surprise: How it felt as one of the few white people in an audience of nearly 300 African Americans, groaning along with them at white misdeeds and cheering with them for each black victory onscreen.

For a couple of hours, in the comfort of a theater, this was a chance to see the world from a minority perspective.

Which helped me appreciate the real-life experiences of men like Roland Brown Sr.

The war in Europe ended before his Tuskegee bomber group could see combat. His war was fought at segregated bases on the home front, where he came perilously close to meeting his maker courtesy of a white guard in Jim Crow country. Racism grew so intolerable that Roland Sr. took part in a mutiny.

Talk about guts.

Find out how it turned out for Roland Brown Sr., in this conversation with a proud son. The podcast runs about 40 minutes and includes anecdotes about a reunion flight on a Mitchell B-25 bomber, and about Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, who staked his career on the Tuskegee Airmen. Special thanks to Carolyn Lamb and Roberta Moseley of Delta Sigma Theta.