A Tuskegee Airman Goes to the Movies
Hollywood will tell the story of the Tuskegee Airmen this month. George Hickman knows more than the plot.
“NOW THIS IS MUCH BETTER THAN THAT OTHER FILM.”
And George Hickman is off and running. “This” is Red Tails, the CGI and explosion-heavy George Lucas–produced movie about the Tuskegee Airmen that opens in January. “That other film” about the segregated squadron of black pilots who helped chase Hitler from the sky in World War II, creatively named The Tuskegee Airmen, aired on HBO more than 15 years ago. It’s late November and the 87-year-old just watched the trailer for Red Tails for the first time on an iPad in the Museum of Flight. Now he wants to tell the real-life tales that inspired it.
Today Hickman ushers at UW basketball games, but 60 years ago he flew with the Tuskegee Airmen. He’s one of a handful still living in Seattle, but one of only two who speak publicly, and he’ll take any opportunity to spin a yarn about the war. So as he sat on a bench near the museum’s Tuskegee exhibit, swallowed whole by a brown bomber jacket, he recounted moments like the night he arrived by train near the Tuskegee Airfield. He’d barely stepped onto the platform, covered in ash from sitting directly behind the coal car, when his new commanding officers began barking orders at him. But instead of cowering he stood a little taller. These were accomplished black men, dressed sharply in pressed uniforms. And despite what society had taught him, he could join them.
Other visitors to the museum stopped to gawk as Hickman posed for a picture in front of the museum’s P-51 Mustang—the plane his squad flew—and a docent answered their whispered questions. And even after the photographer put away his camera Hickman was still smiling, not because of the attention but because somebody wanted to know how he and his fellow airmen contributed. If they learn more from Lucas’s movie, all the better. But what he really wants them to know is what so many whites in the military refused to accept: that a black man could fly a plane. “I believed I was going to be somebody,” Hickman says. “I was going to make something out of myself.”
Published: January 2012
I am pushing 70 years old and have been flying for 40 of them and in the light aircraft repair business. I formed a flying school in 1975 and have dedicated my life to keeping pilots and aircraft flying. I never flew in the military yet was in the Air Force doing maintenance in the early ’60s. I am a history buff, belonging to several museums (including the Seattle Musem of Flight) and have attended a few of the Tuskeegee Airmen programs. I have the utmost respect for this outfit and was delighted to hear the Lucas film was being released. I saw it opening weekend and plan on going a few more times in the theatres and acuiring a copy of the DVDwhen available. My wife and I shed a lot of tears during the show.
I have many pilot friends and former precision flight team members who were flying fighters and bombers in WWII and have listened to many of their war stories. Many of them have since flown west and, of the few left, I cherish any time I can spend talking with them. This is the unfortunate situation these brave men of the “Tuskeegee Experiment” face as we loose more of them each year. I would urge anyone to attend any program or event where these men will be speaking and, by all means, go see the movie, “Red Tails”.