09/08/2026
Did You Know That…??
September 8, 2026
Via ~ Black History Remembered (Facebook)
They refused to speak to him unless military duty required it. No one would share room with him. He ate alone. For four years at West Point, the isolation was deliberate.
The other cadets were trying to force him out because he was Black, even as the academy claimed to teach honor, courage, and leadership. He entered West Point in 1932 at just 19 years old and endured that silence all the way to graduation.
Benjamin O. Davis Jr. finished 35th in his class. The men who tried to make him disappear had no idea what would come next.
The cadet they refused to speak to would go on to command Black fighter pilots during World War II, help lead the Tuskegee Airmen, and eventually become the first Black general in the United States Air Force. For four years, they tried to break him with silence.
He stayed anyway. And leaving West Point did not mean the barriers were over.
Davis had grown up around the Army, watching his father build a career in a military that placed strict limits on Black officers. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. would eventually become the first Black general in the United States Army in 1940.
His son wanted to fly. While still at West Point, Davis applied to the Army Air Corps, but the military had no Black flying units and would not send him to pilot training.
When he graduated in June 1936, he was commissioned as an infantry officer instead. He became only the fourth Black graduate in West Point history and the first Black man to graduate from the academy since Charles Young in 1889.
The Army sent him to the 24th Infantry Regiment, one of its segregated Black regiments, at Fort Benning, Georgia. Davis had earned his commission, but segregation still decided where a Black officer could serve.
In 1938, he was assigned to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to teach military science and tactics. His father had once held a similar assignment there, and the younger Davis was still working inside the narrow limits the Army placed on Black officers.
As the United States moved closer to war, pressure grew to allow Black Americans into military aviation. In 1941, Davis finally received the opportunity he had been denied when he began pilot training at Tuskegee.
He joined the first class of Black military aviation cadets. In March 1942, Davis and four other men completed the course and received their pilot wings.
The man the Army Air Corps had once refused to train was now a military pilot. Soon afterward, Lieutenant Colonel Davis was placed in command of the 99th Fighter Squadron, the first Black fighter squadron in the Army Air Forces.
The men trained at Tuskegee while the war spread across Europe and North Africa. In April 1943, they left the United States aboard the SS Mariposa and headed for North Africa.
On June 2, 1943, the 99th flew its first combat mission against enemy positions on the Italian island of Pantelleria. Davis was finally flying in combat from a cockpit the military had once told men like him they could not occupy.
Even combat did not end the argument over whether Black pilots belonged. Later that year, senior officers criticized the 99th's performance, and some called for the squadron to be removed from combat.
Davis returned to the United States and defended his men before military officials in Washington. Black military aviation was still being treated by some inside the armed forces as an experiment that could be shut down if the men failed to meet expectations.
The 99th stayed in the fight. In January 1944, its pilots shot down 12 German aircraft over two days while helping defend the Allied beachhead at Anzio, Italy.
By then, Davis had been given command of the 332nd Fighter Group. Its Black pilots would become some of the best-known members of the Tuskegee Airmen, recognized by the red markings painted on the tails of their fighters.
Flying from bases in Italy, the 332nd escorted American bombers deep into enemy territory. They stayed close to the bombers while enemy fighters, antiaircraft fire, bad weather, and mechanical problems could turn any mission deadly.
Davis was not leading from an office far from the fighting. He flew combat missions himself and received decorations that included the Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, and Air Medal.
On March 24, 1945, the 332nd escorted B-17 bombers on a mission to Berlin. The group fought enemy aircraft along the way and later received a Distinguished Unit Citation for its actions that day.
What those pilots accomplished mattered far beyond combat statistics. The military had once denied Black men the chance to fly, and now those same men were carrying out some of the war's most dangerous assignments.
When World War II ended, Davis returned to a country where the armed forces were still segregated. Victory overseas had not erased the barriers Black servicemen faced inside the military they had just fought for.
In July 1948, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. Davis helped develop the Air Force plan for carrying that order out.
The reversal was hard to miss. A man once denied pilot training because he was Black was now helping shape an Air Force where race would no longer officially decide who could serve beside whom.
His career continued to rise after the war. In 1954, Davis became a brigadier general, making him the first Black general in the United States Air Force.
He later became a major general and then a lieutenant general, serving in senior commands and assignments in the United States, Europe, Korea, and the Pacific. He retired from active duty in 1970 after a career that had begun in an Army where Black officers were few and segregation shaped almost every opportunity.
His story still was not finished. On December 9, 1998, President Bill Clinton advanced the retired Davis to four-star general.
He was 85 years old, more than six decades removed from the young cadet who had walked through West Point while classmates refused to speak to him. A military career that began in deliberate isolation had ended with four stars on his uniform.
Benjamin O. Davis Jr. died in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2002, at the age of 89. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
In 2019, the United States Air Force Academy named its airfield in his honor. The man once denied entrance into Army aviation now had an Air Force training field carrying his name.
That may be the part of his story worth remembering most. The people around him spent four years trying to convince him that he did not belong.
He stayed. And eventually, the institution had to change.
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