Benjamin O. Davis Jr.

December 18, 1912 – July 4, 2002

Commander of the Tuskegee Airmen who broke the color barrier in the U.S. military and became the first African American general in the Air Force.

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Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr. was born on December 18, 1912, in Washington, D.C., into a family that already knew what it meant to break barriers. His father, Benjamin O. Davis Sr., was a career soldier who in 1940 became the first African American general in the United States Army. Young Benjamin decided early that he too would be a soldier and a leader, and in 1932 he won an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. What should have been a proud beginning became a four-year ordeal. Because he was Black, the white cadets subjected him to 'silencing,' an old punishment normally reserved for those who broke the code of honor: for nearly his entire time at the academy, no one spoke to him except on official business. He roomed alone and ate alone, and the isolation was meant to drive him out. It did not. Davis graduated in 1936, ranked 35th in a class of 276, near the top. Even as an officer, Davis kept running into the wall of segregation. The Army Air Corps would not accept him as a pilot at first, insisting Black men lacked the ability to fly. That changed only when political pressure forced the military to create an all-Black flying unit, and in 1942 Davis earned his wings among the first class of pilots trained at Tuskegee, Alabama. He took command of the 99th Fighter Squadron and led it into combat over North Africa and Italy, then rose to command the entire 332nd Fighter Group, the airmen who painted the tails of their planes bright red and became famous as the 'Red Tails.' As the leader of the Tuskegee Airmen, Davis flew missions himself and drilled his men to a standard so high that no critic could dismiss them; their record escorting American bombers deep into enemy territory during World War II helped shatter the lie that Black pilots could not measure up. Like the Navy cook Dorie Miller, Davis proved his courage in a country that still doubted it belonged to him. Davis's greatest victories may have come after the shooting stopped. In 1948 President Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, and Davis, by then one of the military's most respected officers, helped write and carry out the plan that integrated the newly independent United States Air Force, turning an order on paper into a working, mixed-race fighting force. His steady, disciplined leadership showed that integration could be done, and done well. In 1954 he became the first African American general in the Air Force, and he went on to command fighter forces and hold senior posts around the world before retiring in 1970. Across his long career, Davis's example fed directly into the civil rights movement, offering hard proof that Black Americans could excel at the highest levels when finally given the chance, and that segregation was a waste as well as an injustice. In 1998 President Bill Clinton advanced the retired Davis to full four-star general, formally honoring the achievement that decades of prejudice had delayed. When he died on July 4, 2002, Benjamin O. Davis Jr. was remembered as a man who answered contempt with excellence, who endured four years of silence to spend a lifetime being heard, and who, alongside his pioneering father, helped open the United States military to all Americans.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr.

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