Tuskegee Airman's harrowing WWII tale [audio 12min]

In commemoration of Veterans Day, Tuskegee Airman Alexander Jefferson describes his service in World War II and the difficult adjustment that followed when he returned to a segregated United States. In 1941, America's skies were segregated, like everything else in the nation. Though the United States and its allies were at war with the Axis powers of Japan and Nazi Germany, the Army Air Corps refused to train black pilots. It took an act of Congress to change that, and the legend of the Tuskegee Airmen was born. More than 1,000 black college graduates where trained to become fighter pilots at Tuskegee University in Alabama during World War II. One of those pilots was Jefferson, a Detroit native and graduate of Clark University. On his 19th mission over Germany, Jefferson was shot down by anti-aircraft fire and spent the next year in Nazi prison camps. Ironically, he was given more respect by the Germans as a prisoner of war than as a black man back home in America. Liberated in April 1945 and returned to the United States, he was shocked to see that racism and segregation were still part of the fabric of American life -- there were signs at the end of the his troop ship's gangplank indicating"whites" and" colored" processing areas. Jefferson wrote about getting shot down over Germany and his experiences as a prisoner of war in his memoir Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW.