You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen
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About this ebook
I WANT YOU! says the poster of Uncle Sam. But if you’re a young black man in 1940, he doesn’t want you in the cockpit of a war plane. Yet you are determined not to let that stop your dream of flying.
So when you hear of a civilian pilot training program at Tuskegee Institute, you leap at the chance. Soon you are learning engineering and mechanics, how to communicate in code, how to read a map. At last the day you’ve longed for is here: you are flying!
From training days in Alabama to combat on the front lines in Europe, this is the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the groundbreaking African-American pilots of World War II. In vibrant second-person poems, Carole Boston Weatherford teams up for the first time with her son, artist Jeffery Weatherford, in a powerful and inspiring book that allows readers to fly, too.
Carole Boston Weatherford
Carole Boston Weatherford has written many award-winning books for children, including Kin, illustrated by her son Jeffery and a Coretta Scott King Author Honor recipient; Box, which won a Newbery Honor; Unspeakable, which won the Coretta Scott King Award, a Caldecott Honor, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; Respect: Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, winner of the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award; ALA Notable Children’s Book You Can Fly; and Caldecott Honor winners Freedom in Congo Square; Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement; and Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom. Carole lives in North Carolina. Visit her at CBWeatherford.com.
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Book preview
You Can Fly - Carole Boston Weatherford
CONTENTS
Head to the Sky
The Civilian Pilot Training Program
Train Ride to the Clouds
A Shot
The First Cadets
Officers
The Odds
Keep ’Em Flying: Tuskegee Army Airfield Nurses
Ground School
Solo, At Last
Sugar, Sugar
The Other War
Downtime
Training Planes
Pearl Harbor
Dorie Miller Earns the Navy Cross
Private Joe Louis
Fighting Boredom
Second Lieutenant
William Henry Hastie
The Double V Campaign: Pens Mighty as Swords
Anxious
Fight Song
Facing the Enemy
Operation Prove Them Wrong
Routines
Lena Horne: More than a Pin-Up
Red Tail Angels
The Black Birdmen
Your Record
No Hero’s Welcome
A Long Line
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Time Line
Resources
About Carole Boston Weatherford and Jeffery Boston Weatherford
In memory of my father, Joseph A. Boston Jr., a World War II veteran.
To all who fly in their dreams
—C. B. W.
To my mom, my dad, and my tribe
—J. B. W.
Head to the Sky
No matter that there are only 130
licensed black pilots in the whole nation.
Your goal of being a pilot cannot be grounded
by top brass claiming blacks are not fit to fly.
Your vision of planes cannot be
blocked by clouds of doubt.
The engine of your ambition will not brake
for walls of injustice—no matter how high.
The sky’s no limit if you’ve flown
on your own power in countless dreams;
not if you’ve raised homing pigeons
on Harlem rooftops;
or watched crop dusters
buzzing over rows of cotton;
not if you’ve gazed at stars
and known God meant for you to soar.
The Civilian Pilot Training Program
You see the posters: Uncle Sam Wants You.
If only that meant in the cockpit.
But the Civilian Pilot Training Program—
the CPTP—is for whites only
until the NAACP and black newspapers push
Congress to fund programs at several black colleges—
including Howard, Hampton, and Tuskegee—
and at the Coffey