Lessons in Soaring High Planned for Atlanta School

The staff at the new Tuskegee Airmen Global Academy in southwest Atlanta is flying high, encouraged by the excitement surrounding its opening in time for the start of the school year. Today, school officials, Tuskegee Airmen, and other well-wishers attended a ceremony celebrating the elementary school named for the revered young men who were the first African American aviators in the United States.

“They were trailblazers,” says Dolores Crenshaw Singleton whose father was a Tuskegee Airman. Dr. Milton Crenshaw passed last November. Singleton, who was her father’s caretaker the last few years of his life, says her dad “loved people and he loved telling stories about those days.”

The surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen are passing away at a time when Black America is revisiting old wounds inflicted by generations of racism. Within the last few months, several of the aviation heroes died: Dr. Crenshaw, Dr. Roscoe C. Brown, and Norris Connally.

Family and friends of the Tuskegee Airmen think a school dedicated to the legacy of the aviation pioneers is an ideal way to connect the past with the future by inspiring young students to excel in the fashion of the Red Tails, a nickname given to the Airmen because of the distinctive red markings on the tails of the planes they flew. School officials combined two elementary schools plagued by performance deficits to create the Tuskegee Airmen Global Academy. It is a nod to a group of Americans noted for greatness.

“They were very intelligent and wanted to fly when many African Americans weren’t even driving because we weren’t really mobile at that time,” says Singleton.

Singleton is a retired teacher who spent 40 years teaching her students that “they can fly.” As the daughter of a world-famous aviation tradition, she meant that literally. “A few months ago a friend and I were at Moton Field, the airfield at Tuskegee, and he could not believe the number of African Americans flying their own planes. We are still achieving and blazing trails.”

Classes at the new Tuskegee Airmen Global Academy start Wednesday. For more information about the Tuskegee Airmen, visit tuskegeemuseum.org.