At the outset of WWII, MIT contributed to the training of African-American military pilots popularly known as the Tuskegee Airmen.
Overview
When the Army Air Corps found itself short on weather forecasters at the outset of WWII, it teamed up with academia to increase training of weather officers. MIT was the first of three American universities to offer graduate degrees in meteorology at the time and contributed to the training of African-American military pilots popularly known as the Tuskegee Airmen. In the summer of 1940, the Institute began offering abbreviated courses in the teaching of meteorology to select aviation cadets. Candidates requirements included: engineering or other degree, two years in mathematics (including differential equations and integral calculus), and one year in physics.
Among the MIT alums who served as Tuskegee Airmen were Wallace Patillo Reed ’42, Second Lieutenant Victor L. Ransom ’48, aeronautical engineers Yenwith Whitney ’49 and Louis M. Young ’50, and meteorologist Charles E. Anderson PhD ’60.
TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE
A 1920s War Department report stated that blacks weren’t intelligent or disciplined enough to fly a plane. During World War II, black civil rights groups tried to get the U.S. military to add black pilots to its ranks. The 66th Air Force Flying School was opened at the historically black college Tuskegee Institute (today Tuskegee University) in Alabama.
The flying school was opened as an experimental training ground to test the potential of black pilots.”It was programmed to fail,” said [Tuskegee Airman Yenwith] Whitney, noting that the school was set up as a tool to back up the findings of a 1920s War Department report stating that blacks weren’t smart enough or disciplined enough to fly a plane.Under the direction of Charles Alfred “Chief” Anderson, the pioneering airmen practiced at Moton Field, a tiny airstrip surrounded by marshes and stands of pine near the institute founded by Booker T. Washington, the son of a slave who was a strong advocate for black rights.During their flight training, the airmen were denied rifles because the airstrip was in Alabama, a deeply segregated state where some folks didn’t like the idea of blacks shooting at whites — even if they were the enemy.The drills became bittersweet to the airmen, whose hopes of flying dimmed as they waited and waited for a call-up from the government. After months of waiting, their spirits were restored by a visitor to the airstrip. “I’ve always heard colored people can’t fly, but I see them flying around here,” Eleanor Roosevelt reportedly said during her visit. Against the objections of her security men, the open-minded, free-spirited first lady asked to fly with Anderson.Using her political connections, Roosevelt convinced her husband to use his influence to give the airmen a chance to fight — especially since the military was facing a critical shortage of pilots.The Tuskegee Airmen not only broke the color line, they shattered stereotypes about black pilots. Tracie Reddick, “Tuskegee Airman Yenwith Whitney soared above barriers,” Bradenton Herald, 27 July 2000
George Leward Washington ’25, MS ’30 earned his Bachelors (1925) and Masters (1930), both in Mechanical Engineering (Course II). He became the first black registered engineer in the state of North Carolina. Before World War II, he helped establish an Air Force training program for black pilots at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington later served as the director of special services for the United Negro College Fund.
From “Training at Tuskegee: Turning dreams into reality” by Randy Roughton, Air Force News Service, 11 February 2014
WARREN HENRY
Chemist-physicist Warren Elliott Henry was born to two Tuskegee alums who were local schoolteachers. He grew up on a peanut farm in Alabama, where George Washington Carver often conducted research on crops.
Henry earned a Bachelor of Science (1931) from Tuskegee Institute, a Master of Science in Organic Chemistry (1937) from Atlanta University, and a PhD in Physical Chemistry (1941) from the University of Chicago. He returned as faculty to Tuskegee Institute in 1941, before being recruited by the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1943.
Pioneering NRL Physicist had Tuskegee Ties
After Tuskegee and MIT
Henry later held positions at University of Chicago, Morehouse College, Howard University, the Naval Research Laboratory, and Lockheed Missile and Space Company. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Warren E. Henry performing research at cryogenic temperatures at the Naval Research Laboratory high magnetic field facility, ca. 1943.
Source: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
WALLACE PATILLO REED
Valentine’s day marks 1st for African American Meteorologist
Nellis Air Force Base News (21 February 2012)
by Jerry White, 99th Air Base Wing Historian
On Feb. 14, 1942, the first African-American meteorologist in the armed services graduated from a specialized training course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Wallace Patillo Reed was found through an extensive search by MIT officials at the request of the Army Air Forces [AAF]. In 1940, the Army had only 62 qualified weather forecasters. With WWII expansion already underway, it was initially estimated that as many as 10,000 weather officers were needed just for the AAF; by war’s end, more than 6,000 had been trained.
Cadet programs were set up initially at MIT, New York University and the California Institute of Technology, with additional courses later at the University of Chicago, the University of California Los Angeles and an AAF program at Grand Rapids, MI. Potential weather officers needed engineering, math, physics or chemistry degrees, later lowered to at least two years of coursework. Reed entered MIT’s second class in 1941, followed by 14 other African-American aviation cadets and one enlisted forecaster before the program closed in 1944.
Upon graduation, Reed was commissioned into the Army Air Corps, three weeks before the first class of pilots graduated from pilot training at Tuskegee Army Air Field, Ala. After a three-week orientation at Mitchel Field, New York, Lt. Reed was assigned as the Tuskegee AAF base weather officer.
Reed served his entire tour in charge of the base weather station there and helped train weather officers who deployed overseas. After the war, he moved to the Philippines where he worked for Pan American Airways and the Weather Bureau. Years later he returned to the United States, passing away in 1999.
In addition to being the first African-American meteorologist in the military, Capt. Reed is believed to have been the Weather Bureau’s first African-American meteorologist.
After Tuskegee
In 1946, after serving in World War II, Reed took a post as a government official, connected with the U.S. Weather Bureau at Nickols Field. He lived in Manila for over three decades before moving back to the United States.
VICTOR RANSOM
Background
Victor “Vic” Llewellyn Ransom ’42 was born in New York City to a schoolteacher and a writer, both of whom were part of the Harlem Renaissance. Chasing after top schools for Ransom, the family moved 16 times before he turned 16. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School, a magnet public school known for its rigorous math and science curriculum. By senior year, Ransom had already set his sights on studying electrical engineering at MIT.
At the Institute
Ransom’s memories of his arrival to the Institute in 1941 are vivid. His impression of the campus was of a “War Department,” with “massive, unsympathetic buildings”. In December of that year, in fact, events at Pearl Harbor led to the United States’ entry into World War II. During his sophomore year at MIT, Ransom took a leave from MIT for service training.
I received a letter from the ROTC program, which I was involved in, that said something like, “This man has had training in engineering and ought to be considered for the Signal Corps.” Well, the Army had no idea what to do with that note like this about a black soldier, so I stayed in the reception center for a couple of months while they tried to figure it out.
Victor Ransom in Technology in the Dream by Clarence G. Williams (MIT Press, 2001)
Freeman Field Mutiny
Black officers at Freeman Field, Indiana were segregated in an abandoned cadet field and referred to as “trainees,” regardless of rank. A member of the the 477th Bombardment Group, Ransom was among the 101 Tuskegee Airmen who took part in the Freeman Field Mutiny protest against segregation in 1945.
The war ended without Victor Ransom ever leaving U.S. soil. But he and other members of the 477th Bombardment Group were busy fighting a different battle.
Activated in June 1944, the 477th was plagued by delays and inefficiencies, due in large part to its commander, a white colonel and rigid segregationist who moved the group from base to base 38 times in less than a year to try to quell dissent. Fed up, a group of black officers staged a quiet, nonviolent protest at Freeman Field, Indiana, on April 5, 1945, when they tried to enter a club used by white officers only…
“I was the first guy into the [white] officers’ club,” says Ransom…“They said to go back to quarters and remain there. So we were under arrest in quarters for violating an order.”
Cleared by a congressional inquiry, Ransom and the others were released within a few weeks. A few months later, the war ended and Ransom returned to MIT to complete his graduate work in electrical engineering…
“My achievement was our efforts to integrate the officers’ club,” he says wryly. “It was silly. But it characterizes the nature of the country at the time.”
“Double Victory: Jersey’s Tuskegee Airmen” by Mary Ann McGann, New Jersey Monthly, 18 January 2013
Post-war and MIT
After the war Ransom resumed undergraduate studies at the Institute, completing his remaining years under the GI Bill in 1948. Though faced with a tough job market after MIT, Ransom received an immediate job offer from NACA–precursor to NASA–at the Langley Field Lab in Hampton, Virginia. Segregation led him to transfer to NACA’s Lewis Lab in Cleveland, Ohio, where he would be able to complete graduate studies; in 1957, Ransom earned his Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Case Institute of Technology (today Case Western).
Ransom joined Bell Laboratories, moving up the ranks at Bell Labs and in the communications industry for the next 30 years. His areas of specialty included transistors and digital products, network switching technologies, systems for special needs, and environmental control systems design.
YENWITH WHITNEY
Yenwith K. Whitney ’49 enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps in 1943. He was an 18-year-old Bronx native who had grown up attending a predominantly white school and local church. After graduating high school during World War II, he signed up for the fledgling black aviation program.
After earning his degree from MIT, Whitney worked for Republic Aircraft on stress analysis, then for the EDO Corporation on structural design of aircraft floats. In 1958, he and his family moved to Cameroon, where Whitney taught math and physics at a Presbyterian mission. The family returned to New York a decade later, although Whitney continued working for the United Presbyterian Church in minority education and international education in Africa, the U.S., and Asia. Whitney also earned a Master’s degree in math education and a doctorate in International Education from Columbia University.
