Black pilot fought in deadly skies

Tuskegee airman George Shade receves award today

Lenor flierm Tuskegee comrades earn congressional gold medal

Thursday, March 29, 2007

By Marcie Young
Charlotte Observer Staff Writer

LENOIR - When Maj. George Shade was a kid, he used to make model airplanes out of wooden orange crates near his Lenoir home.

Years later during, in World War II, when Shade was in his early 20s, he was flying planes over Italy, shooting at enemy fighters and protecting U.S. bombers from oncoming fire.

Today, after more than 60 years, Shade and about 300 other Tuskegee Airman are in Washington, D.C., to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest civilian honors awarded by Congress.

The medal is equivalent to the Presidential Medal of Freedom and given to individuals or groups for exceptional service and lifetime achievement.

Shade and his comrades join an illustrious group of recipients that includes George Washington, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Edison, Rosa Parks, the Wright brothers and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

At 83, Shade, a Caldwell County native, is one of a few hundred surviving members of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen, one of the nation's most successful military flying squadrons. The airmen flew both fighters and bombers.

"We were like Michael Jordans, basically," Shade said. "We were just that good."

The Tuskegee Airmen, crushing the view that blacks were incapable of combat flying, flew more than 15,000 sorties and 1,500 missions over North Africa and Italy during World War II, destroyed more than 250 enemy aircraft on the ground and 150 in the air and protected the American and Allied bombers they escorted into enemy skies.

But in the years leading up to the war, American military leaders weren't expecting a lot from black pilots, men who a 1925 study by the Army War College labeled "cowards and poor technicians and fighters, lacking initiative and resourcefulness"

"At that time, they wouldn't teach blacks," Shade said. "They said we didn't have the intelligence and (that) we were inferior."

A 1941 visit from first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the all-black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, however, changed a few things. Roosevelt, concerned that black pilots were facing discrimination and being barred from flying, joined Tuskegee instructor Charles Anderson on a flight. The flight, according to documents from the Franklin Delano Roosevelt library, encouraged the president to use the Tuskegee 99th Squadron in combat missions.

"That was a great, getting-up moment when they got back from that flight," said Shade, who met Roosevelt during the visit.

Shade, who graduated from Tuskegee in 1943, worked with the squadron in Italy for nearly a year and guesses he flew more than 450 times.

"They called us black birds with red tails," he said. "We're a rare species."

Shade, a graduate of Lenoir's Freeman High School, was born in 1923 and became Caldwell's first black commissioned officer. His father, a mortician with Cherokee blood, and his half-Swedish mother, a teacher, valued faith and determination.

Those characteristics, Shade said, were key to his successes during his 15 years in the military.

"God was our pilot, we were just the co-pilots," he said. "You've got to fight for the right of all. If you go by pigmentation of skin, you're in trouble."


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