Tuskegee Airman speaks at NSCC

LYNN – Six decades ago, Lt. Luther McIlwain was a scared black college student from Massachusetts experiencing the segregated south for the first time as the world was once again on the cusp of a Great War.With rampant racism throughout both the government and the military, McIlwain endured hate and abuse that most Americans couldn’t conjure in a nightmare as he embarked on a personal journey of courage and determination, becoming one of the country’s first black fighter pilots – one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.Donning his well-decorated military garb and equipped with a Congressional gold medal awarded to the remaining 131 members of the group in 2007, McIlwain spoke to a small group of students and faculty at North Shore Community College’s Lynn campus Thursday in recognition of Black History Month.”We were the one and only. We are the Tuskegee Airmen. We are the best of the best,” McIlwain triumphantly stated as he began his speech. “Of the original 992 of us, there are only about 131 left. My duty to those that are fellow Black Eagles in Tuskegee is that I carry on.”Born in Methuen, McIlwain was the only black student in his high school class. Despite horror stories from his father, who escaped to Pittsburgh as a young man because of racism is South Carolina, the former school council president chose to attend an all-black college in that same state in the late 1930s.His journey to the military – one that he undertook his sophomore year – was not an easy one. At a time when blacks were believed by the military to have smaller brains and inferior work ethic to whites, McIlwain set out with a goal to become a fighter pilot.Reading from an actual Army document sent to Congress in 1939, McIlwain detailed blatant racism in the military as officers believed that along with being mentally and physically inferior, that blacks were “low on the scale of human evolution” and if any black soldier scored well on a military test they must have had a “heavy strain of white blood.”As a young man, McIlwain was told he could not excel beyond routine maintenance work in the military. He was even run out of a recruiter’s office in South Carolina and was only eventually able to enlist because of the help of a South Carolina game warden who employed the mother of a girl he had been after at school.Although his sights were set on the top-secret Tuskegee “experiment” taking place in Alabama, McIlwain was first sent to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where he was forced to write and translate letters for “60 black men plucked from the fields of North Carolina” who couldn’t read or write.At Fort Bragg, McIlwain recalls a sense of being held hostage, a feeling he would later recall at Tuskegee when his white flight instructors banned he and his fellow black pilots from reading black literature and newspapers.”If they had the technology we do today they would have taken our cell phones away, too,” he said. “We were held captive. We were held captive in Tuskegee, Alabama.”McIlwain’s story was less about his time in Tuskegee as it was about the struggles with racism that he and the other pilots experienced throughout their young adult lives in the military.The Tuskegee “experiment” was so frowned upon at the time that Americans were not even aware of the Air Force’s first batch of African American pilots until years later, when then President Dwight D. Eisenhower finally released the documents from Tuskegee, bringing their heroics – and racism in the military – to light.”There were two and a half to three million Americans that didn’t know (what happened in Tuskegee). But there was one man that did know, and that was probably why he was president and all the others weren’t,” he said. “He (Eisenhower) looked at (the confidential Tuskegee information) and said ‘enough is enough.’ He issued an executive order and said, ‘There will be no more of that.'”Since the history of Tuskegee was released, the story of McIlwain and his brothers has been recreated in m