Seated in the cockpit, guiding an aircraft thousands of feet above the earth, it’s as if the plane is an extension of your body — like you’ve sprouted wings.
That’s the way former Army pilot Bert Levy describes it. It’s like heaven, he says.
"You are not encumbered by anything and you can look forever. You can look down at the ground, and you can look up at the sky. It is almost a magical thing. It gives you the greatest feeling of actual freedom. You’re not bound by anything."
Back on the ground, Levy had found things much different.
He thought boundaries had been broken and all hurdles removed when he — a young black man from the 900 block of South 15th Street — enrolled in the Army’s Civilian Pilot Training Program as the United States prepared to enter World War II.
The military, like most of the country’s civilian population at the time, still practiced racism. In fact, less than 20 years earlier — in 1925 — the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., had released a study purporting that black soldiers "lacked intelligence" to man sophisticated machinery and were "cowardly under combat conditions."
Despite this, there was some sense that these policies were changing. In 1939, the Army began creating the civilian flight programs at colleges around the country to train young men to fly, and among the schools selected were six historically black colleges, including Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (now Tuskegee University).
By 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order designating Tuskegee Institute as the Army’s first flight training school for blacks. Levy and the other men who completed this training became known as the Tuskegee Airmen.
Levy, who turns 81 next month, passed the army’s pilot examinations and was accepted to Tuskegee as an aviation cadet in 1943 at age 20. Shortly after "Bertram A. Levy, colored" received his orders from the Army to report to flight school, the pilot recalls, his "baptism to total segregation" began.
"Sometimes I think about this stuff and I start getting pissed off all over again," Levy says. He describes the military’s former attitude toward black soldiers as "totally demeaning, insulting, embarrassing," among other negatives.
The government could make the officers train black men to fly, he says, but it could not make them like it.
Levy says his family was one of the few black households in his neighborhood when he was growing up. One of a handful of black students in his class, he graduated from Barratt Junior High and then Central High School. His closest childhood friend was white, and so was his first girlfriend.
Levy became interested in flying as a child while reading stories about World War I ace pilots. When he was 19, he and a friend convinced the owner of an airfield near Roosevelt Boulevard to teach them to fly for $4 an hour — half of the weekly income he earned working as a shoe salesman.
"Flying was still a new, exciting thing at the time," Levy recalls. "It was younger then than space [travel] is today."
By 1944, he had completed his training at Tuskegee and earned his pilots’ wings. He was assigned to the Army Air Corps’ 477th Medium Bomb Group — the Army’s first black bomber group — and piloted a B-25 bomber.
Of the 95 men who started pilot training with Levy, only 23 graduated. Many were eliminated from the program after failing what Levy describes as the military’s subjective psychological tests. Others dropped out rather than endure the barrages of racist attacks from the white training officers, says Levy. "The idea was to get you angry to the point where you’d make a mistake."
He believes it was the Army’s intention to keep the number of black airmen to a minimum and, if they had it their way, keep them stateside for the duration of the war as well.
Levy, in fact, did remain in the United States throughout World War II, only flirting with being deployed to the Pacific at least 10 times, he says.
But Tuskegee Airmen trained in the program earlier were deployed overseas. Some of the first graduates formed the 99th Fighter Squadron, which completed numerous successful missions in North Africa.
Later, the Army created the 332nd Fighter Group, which escorted bombers on Berlin raids from bases in Italy. In 200 missions flanked by the Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd, not one bomber was shot down by the Germans.
By the conclusion of the war, 992 men had graduated from flight training at Tuskegee Institute. Of those, 450 served overseas and 150 were killed in action. All totaled, the Army trained an estimated 13,500 black men as bombardiers, navigators, radiomen pilots and other flight crew personnel at Tuskegee.
Levy remembers feeling disappointed that he never was deployed.
"Today I wouldn’t be, but we were young guys and we wanted it," he says. "We wanted to make a name. It was like a rite of passage."
The war ended and Levy entered the reserves in 1946. He moved back to South Philly for four years before relocating to West Philly and eventually Mount Airy, where he still lives with his wife, but he continued to be at the forefront of the integration of the country’s armed forces.
In 1948, he and five other men formed the first black National Guard unit in Pennsylvania, the 644th Engineer Combat Battalion. Then in 1953, he and another soldier became the first black members of the Army’s 315th Infantry Regiment of the 79th Infantry Division. Levy also became a pioneer in another field; he was one of the first black members of the city’s realty board.
The success of the Tuskegee Airmen made military accomplishments possible for minorities that followed, Levy says.
"We laid the groundwork for what became the total integration of the armed services. Because of the fight that we had made to be allowed into [the Air Corps], and then our performance, there was really no more logical argument not to integrate the forces."
