Myron Wilson joined the Air Force to fight the Good War. He joined the Baha'i Faith to fight, and heal from, the racism he experienced as a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first group of African-American fighter pilots in the United States and the only group of African-American fighter pilots in World War II.

President Bush salutes one of the Tusksgee Airmen.
Photograph from Tuskegeeairmen.org

A talented flyer, Mr. Wilson was one of 334 of the nearly 1,000 Tuskegee Airmen to see combat. He died in 2001 at age 85 and was recently recognized for his skills and bravery: On March 29, the Tuskegee Airmen received a replica of the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest civilian award bestowed by the federal legislature, at a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda.

The Tuskegee aviation program was formed under social pressure after the NAACP filed a lawsuit on behalf of a student at Howard University, a historically black college, was denied acceptance into a U.S. military program to train pilots.

Myron Wilson possessed extraordinary talents, says his son, Myron A. Wilson, a Baha'i who lives in Aurora, Colo. At age 19, the elder Wilson led his own 19-piece orchestra in Danville, Ill., where he grew up. Before training in Tuskegee, he was accepted at MIT, but couldn't afford the tuition.

Myron WilsonScholarships weren't given at that time to African-Americans applying to MIT, so he enrolled in the mechanical engineering program at the University of Illinois. He was forced to drop out after two years from the pneumonia he contracted while hitchhiking regularly from Danville for lack of money for transportation.

Myron Wilson placed third in the Air Force exam and was accepted to flight school at Tuskegee, where he became an experienced mechanic and pilot. He was involved in combat in Italy and Northern African until the end of the war. He spoke German and Japanese fluently.

"The list goes on and on," his son says of his father's accomplishments. "Who knows what he could have done and what positive contributions he could have made if he had been given a fair chance? He wanted to be a commercial airline pilot, but the pathway wasn't there. There were too many obstacles.

"My father was totally dejected about how he was treated while an airman," and had good reason to be, says Mr. Wilson. The first slap in the face came when some 30 black airmen were bused to Tuskegee for training and "seven miles from base, the bus driver made them get off to make room for white prisoners of war. The black airmen had to walk the rest of the way."

Next, the elder Mr. Wilson and two other flyers were denied credit for piloting the first fighter jet in World War II. The Air Force said it needed footage of Mr. Wilson and his buddies flying the plane, something they couldn't provide.

The racial slams continued after the war. "To draw a paycheck after the war, the Tuskegee Airmen, and only them, were forced to give up their commissions," Mr. Wilson says. "So my father became a staff sergeant at Mitchell Field in Milwaukee."

While there, a young, white pilot challenged his credibility, unaware of Mr. Wilson's prowess as a Tuskegee Airman.

After walking away from the military without a retirement package, Myron Wilson found the Baha'i Faith, which started the healing process. "He went to his grave healed," his son says.

Until recently, Mr. Wilson believed his father to be the only Tuskegee Airman to join the Baha'i Faith. He hopes that one day he'll have the opportunity to meet the other Baha'i Tuskegee Airman, Dr. Dempsey Morgan, who became a member of the Baha'i Faith in 1950.

Dempsey Morgan located on the the far leftThe Baha'i Faith stresses the importance of the elimination of prejudice and racism. Baha'is hopes the presentation of Congressional Medal of Honors to the Tuskegee Airmen signifies this country is moving closer to understanding the roots and solution to racism, as expressed in a statement from the Baha'i International Community to the United Nations World Conference against Racism, held in South Africa in 2001:

"Racism originates not in the skin but in the human mind. At the root of all forms of discrimination and intolerance is the erroneous idea that humankind is somehow composed of separate and distinct races, peoples or castes, and that those sub-groups innately possess varying intellectual, moral, and/or physical capacities, which in turn justify different forms of treatment.

"The reality is that there is only the one human race. We are a single people, inhabiting the planet Earth, one human family bound together in a common destiny, a single entity created from one same substance, obligated to "be even as one soul."