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Another Tuskegee Airman flies to the Great Beyond...
Dabney Montgomery, Tuskegee Airman who safeguarded Martin Luther King Jr., dies at 93
September 4,`16 - For Dabney Montgomery, the indignities at home stung more because of the noble tasks he performed for his country abroad — serving with the Tuskegee Airmen to help win World War II in a role that would eventually earn him a Congressional Gold Medal.
Dabney Montgomery, Tuskegee Airman who safeguarded Martin Luther King Jr., dies at 93
September 4,`16 - For Dabney Montgomery, the indignities at home stung more because of the noble tasks he performed for his country abroad — serving with the Tuskegee Airmen to help win World War II in a role that would eventually earn him a Congressional Gold Medal.
But at a train station in Atlanta in 1945, carrying an Army duffel bag over his shoulder after receiving his honorable-discharge papers, he was abruptly confronted with Jim Crow America. “Before I could get in, a white officer threw up his hands [and said]: ‘You can’t come in this door, boy. You got to go around the back,'” Montgomery told Alice Bernstein in a video interview. “‘You can’t come in here; you’re black. You got to go around the corner.'” Montgomery, who served as a member of the all-black fighter group and, decades later, as a bodyguard to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. died at age 93 of natural causes Sept. 3, his wife, Amelia Montgomery, told the Associated Press.
Montgomery protected King during the famous 1965 march to Montgomery from Selma, Ala. — Montgomery’s home town. Heels from the shoes Montgomery wore in that march will hang in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, which opens Sept. 24, according to Smithsonian magazine. Montgomery was born in 1923 and inducted into the armed forces in 1943, serving in what was then the Army Air Corps as one of the Tuskegee Airmen. They got their name because they trained at Alabama’s historically black Tuskegee University, which had a civilian pilot-training program, according to the university’s historical page about the airmen.
Tuskegee Airman Dabney Montgomery waves to the crowd as he is introduced before the start of a baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles in June 5, 2013.
Black servicemen who trained at Tuskegee faced discrimination in the armed services and at home, but the “Red Tails,” as they were known, distinguished themselves in a March 1945 bombing run to Berlin and by discovering a German destroyer in the harbor of Trieste, Italy, according to the university. “The tenacious bomber escort cover provided by the 332nd ‘Red Tail’ fighters often discouraged enemy fighter pilots from attacking bombers escorted by the 332nd Fighter Group,” the university said. Despite the exploits of the airmen, Montgomery said he was often smacked with discrimination at home.
In Selma, fresh out of the army, he tried to register to vote, according to the Bernstein interview. A woman there, he said, told him that he had to find “three white men that would endorse me as a good negro that would not cause any trouble in Selma, Alabama, if I voted.” When he returned with the endorsements, he said, he was denied again. This time, the woman said, it was because he did not own land in Alabama.
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