Many Famed Tuskegee Airmen Hailed from Pittsburgh

Editor’s note: This story was originally published in February 2019. 

Harold Slater wore the vestiges of his military service long after he last put on a uniform.

“It created the quilt of who he actually was,” said his daughter, Kimberly Slater-Wood. “A very proud, very humble, very smart, very wise man.”

But Slater never talked about his service until one day in 2012, when Regis Bobonis Sr., a retired Pittsburgh journalist and amateur historian, asked for Slater’s help. Bobonis wanted to capture the stories of Pittsburgh’s Tuskegee Airmen, and Slater had served as a mechanic with the 477th Bombardment Group.

Though a stroke had paralyzed the left side of his body and confined him to a bed in his Hill District home, Slater’s memories were sharp, and they came spilling forth: the Jim Crow racism African-American soldiers had to endure, the way Nazi prisoners received better treatment than they did, the pride and privilege of serving his country.

“This,” he told his daughter after Bobonis left, “is the happiest day of my life.”

Distinguished Service

Pittsburgh seems quite a distance from Tuskegee, Alabama. But it was there, at an army airfield and at nearby Tuskegee University, where thousands of African American pilots, navigators, bombardiers and support personnel were trained and formed into black squadrons to fight in World War II.

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African American aviators and military support soldiers in what was then still a racially segregated U.S. armed forces. According to Bobonis’ research, the Pittsburgh region sent the largest contingent of black airmen trained at Tuskegee and enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, including the only woman, Rosa Mae Willis Alford of Beaver County.

Meeting Slater and dozens of other Tuskegee Airmen from the Pittsburgh area inspired Bobonis to spearhead two lasting memorials for the aviators and support personnel: a plaza with four grand, granite monuments at Sewickley Cemetery, and a museum-quality photographic display in Pittsburgh International Airport’s Concourse A.

Both exhibits are open to the public. Sewickley Cemetery’s gate opens at 6 a.m. and closes at dusk; PIT visitors can get a myPITpass at the third-floor ticket counter to access the airside terminal.

Bobonis credited the rush of local enlistees to Robert L. Vann, the legendary editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, then one of the most prominent black newspapers in the U.S. at the time. In April 1938, Vann wrote an open letter to the nation’s leaders, on the front page of his newspaper:

“Although colored citizens have participated with honor and distinction in every war the United States has fought, and died in the thousands that this grand Republic might live, they are today barred from virtually all service in our army and navy