John L. Harrison Jr., of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, dies
Harrison was 22 when he became one of America's first black military airmen, one of nearly 1,000 pilots who trained as a segregated unit with the Army Air Forces at an airfield near Tuskegee, Alabama.
Fellow Tuskegee airman Eugene Robinson said that becoming a pilot was a childhood dream of Harrison's after seeing airplanes in Omaha, Nebraska, where he grew up, and reading in a magazine about black men being trained as pilots.
President George W. Bush saluted the then-300 surviving airmen at a ceremony in the Capitol, and apologized for "all the unreturned salutes and unforgivable indignities" they had endured.