The Spirit of Tuskegee, a Stearman Training Airplane
Boeing Stearman · 1944
An open cockpit biplane hangs above the segregation gallery, painted blue and yellow in the colours of the Army Air Forces training school. It is a Boeing Stearman Kaydet, the aircraft on which almost every American military pilot of the Second World War learned to fly, and this one was used at Tuskegee, Alabama, to train the first Black pilots in the United States military. They became the Tuskegee Airmen, the famous Red Tails who escorted bombers over Europe.
The Stearman is simple, strong and forgiving, with two seats in tandem, the instructor in front and the student behind. Look up at the fabric covered wings and the radial engine, and imagine a cadet in leather helmet and goggles taking off from Moton Field in nineteen forty four. Nearly a thousand pilots and many thousands of ground crew trained at Tuskegee in an experiment that the Army expected to fail. Instead the pilots proved so capable that their record helped persuade President Truman to end segregation in the armed forces in nineteen forty eight.
The aircraft was restored in the two thousands and flown around the country as the Spirit of Tuskegee, visiting airshows and schools, before it was donated to the museum. Several of the surviving airmen attended the opening of the building in twenty sixteen. It hangs where the story of segregation meets the story of Black service in every American war, a theme continued in the military gallery upstairs.
Did You Know? Before it came to the museum the restored Stearman was flown across the country as the Spirit of Tuskegee, and some of the original airmen flew in it again in their eighties and nineties.
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