One of the last surviving combat pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group, best known as the Tuskegee Airmen, has died.
Retired Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr. was 100 years old.
The Associated Press reported that the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum confirmed his death, saying he died peacefully at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, on Sunday.
“Harry Stewart was a kind man of profound character and accomplishment with a distinguished career of service he continued long after fighting for our country in World War II,” the museum’s president and CEO, Brian Smith, said.
Stewart was born in Newport News, Virginia, on July 4, 1924, WJBK reported. He moved to New York with his family when he was a child, and would watch planes at LaGuardia airport, he said in his book “Soaring to Glory: A Tuskegee Airmen’s Firsthand Account of World War II.”
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the airmen, which was developed as an experiment to train Black military pilots, the AP reported.
“I did not recognize at the time the gravity of what we are facing. I just felt as though it was a duty of mine at the time. I just stood up to my duty,” Stewart told CNN last year.
He said he was shocked by the Jim Crow-era racism in the South because he grew up in a multicultural neighborhood, he explained in his book.
Stewart would say he enjoyed flying so much he did not realize he was making history at the time.
“I got to really enjoy the idea of the panorama, I would say, of the scene I would see before me with the hundreds of bombers and the hundreds of fighter planes up there and all of them pulling the condensation trails, and it was just the ballet in the sky and a feeling of belonging to something that was really big,” he told WAMC in 2020.
He was among the country’s first Black military pilots and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for shooting down three German aircraft during a dogfight on April 1, 1945, the AP reported. He was also part of the four-member team of Tuskegee Airmen, who won the U.S. Air Force Top Gun flying competition in 1949. It would take decades to be recognized for the feat.
After his service, he wanted to become a commercial airline pilot but wasn’t hired because he was Black. He ended up earning a mechanical engineering degree from New York University and moved to Detroit. He retired as vice president of a natural gas pipeline company, the AP reported.
He was moved when he took a flight in 2019 when he realized who was flying the plane, he told Michigan Public Radio.
“When I entered the plane, I looked into the cockpit there and there were two African American pilots. One was the co-pilot, and one was the pilot. But not only that, the thing that started bringing the tears to my eyes is that they were both female,” Stewart said.
Stewart leaves behind his daughter, Lori Collette Stewart, WJBK reported.
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