The late Roscoe Brown showed that skin color was irrelevant in the skies above Germany in World War II.
By Bob Manieri
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke volumes when he said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
The 50th anniversary of "The March on Washington" and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech have passed, and we are all left to wonder: Will we ever get there?
Well, we may not know it, but some of us have already been "there."
The world just lost one of a great group of men, who were, to paraphrase Dr. King, "not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." I refer to the death at age 94 on July 2 of Dr. Roscoe C. Brown Jr.: college professor, Army Air Force veteran of World War II, Tuskegee Airman and American.
Brown and several others truly were judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin, by several thousand of the men they met.
The meeting place was four to five miles high over Nazi Germany. The fellows that Brown met were bomber crews attacking Germany in broad daylight -- and the men in these other Army Air Force units were most certainly all white.
When Brown and his comrades met them, these men in these bomber crews could only judge him and the other Tuskeege Airmen of the "Red Tail" pilots by the kind of men they were. You see, Brown's crew was assigned as fighter escorts for heavy bombers of the 100th Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group, 15th Army Air Force.
The 332nd didn't know it then, but they were judging the African-Americans in the red-tailed P-51 Mustangs by the content of their character only.
In the bitter cold temperatures in the spots where they met, you can't tell what color the man flying the P-51 is. As a bomber crewman, you only know that it's 50 degrees below zero, and that German fighters are decimating the formation of B-17s and B-24s of which your aircraft is part. Most of all, you know that the men in the P-51s are there to protect you.
And, as many of the bomber crews were to observe, the men in the P-51s were so fierce, so dedicated, so professional that their conduct and valor would one day bring forth the legend "...they're that 'colored' outfit that never lost a bomber to enemy action."
So you see, a small part of Dr. King's dream has come true.
Bob Manieri writes from Mantua Township.