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Secretary Lloyd Austin is the first Black person to lead the entire Defense Department. We have a secretary of defense who can say I ve been there, I ve done that, a Black veteran told Insider.
A Tuskegee airman said it was just amazing how the attitudes in the military have changed.
Two celebrated Black veterans who shattered the military s color line heralded the arrival of the country s first African-American defense secretary as an exceptionally qualified officer and a sign of how far the services have progressed from the days of discrimination and segregation they once faced.
Raphael Warnock and the Solitude of the Black Senator
Raphael Warnock and the Solitude of the Black Senator The Georgia pastor will be just the 11th Black U.S. senator. His victory came amid an attempt to delegitimize election results a pattern for more than 150 years.
By Theodore R. Johnson
Illustration by Dakarai Akil
In late January 1870, the nation’s capital was riveted by a new arrival: the Mississippi legislator Hiram Rhodes Revels, who had traveled days by steamboat and train, forced into the “colored” sections by captains and conductors, en route to becoming the first Black United States senator. Not long after his train pulled in to the New Jersey Avenue Station, Revels, wearing a black suit and a neat beard beneath cheekbones fresh from a shave, was greeted by a rhapsodic Black public. There were lunches with leading civil rights advocates; daily congratulatory visits from as many as 50 men at the Capitol Hill home where he was the guest of a prominent Black
By Ryan Shepard
In 1954,
Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., became the first African American general in the U.S. Air Force. His father, Benjamin Sr. became in 1940 the first African-American brigadier general in the Army. A West Point graduate, Davis Jr. was among the first group of African-Americans admitted to pilot training in the Army Air Corps. At West Point, Davis felt fierce racism from the other cadets. At the time he got his commission in 1936, he was just the fourth Black West Point graduate and with his father, one of only two black officers in the Army.
Davis, Jr. would go on to form the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the first African-American air unit. The squadron flew tactical support missions in the Mediterranean Theatre. In 1943, Davis commanded the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee Airmen. During World War II, Davis flew 60 combat missions.