University Times

Wendell Freeland

The first time Wendell G. Freeland was arrested, he was leading the pioneering sit-in of the 20th-century American civil rights movement  at a white U.S. Army officers’ club.

Freeland, now 87, was a Tuskegee Airman in World War II as a bombardier with the 477th Bombardment Group. African Americans had not been allowed to fly for the U.S. military prior to 1940; when the restriction was eased, an all-black squadron was formed at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute.

Freeland also has been a Pitt and UPMC Board of Trustees member, led the local Urban League and co-founded the Hill House Association. As a lawyer, he was central to several important Pittsburgh court cases, including ensuring the rights of African Americans to use the Highland Park swimming pool. Just three years ago, he convinced the state Supreme Court to admit George Vashon posthumously to the Allegheny County Bar. Vashon, a 19th-century African-American attorney who was rejected twice by the local lawyers’ group, had been admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.

But it was the lessons from Freeland’s earliest experiences that informed his Jan. 31 talk, “What You Should Know About Some of Our Past,” for the start of Black History Month.

“I’m going to use the term ‘Negro’ because that was the term we used among us,” Freeland said in prefacing his talk, which spanned his childhood and Army days.

His recollections of his childhood in Baltimore were quite clear. “My family was, as most Negroes were in the early 30s, Republicans” — at the time the more liberal party, and the party of Abraham Lincoln. “I was as close to a socialist as an 11-year-old could get.”

He grew up in an entirely segregated world, he said. He never had a white classmate, teacher, principal or superintendent. After high school, he won a scholarship to prestigious, all-black Howard University, where “I suppose the only white people on campus were the Communists trying to proselytize us,” he recalled.

He remembered sitting in the backs of buses and, in trains headed south, being shunted to cars behind the coal-burning engine, where black passengers who hadn’t packed their own meal for a long trip were out of luck — the dining car was off limits as well.

“It was in this kind of world that World War II began,” he said.

“Hitler wasn’t just against Jews, he was against blacks,” Freeland added, which helped fuel the young Howard student’s own hatred for fascism. He guessed that Hitler, if he were victorious in Europe, would target the United States next, “and we’d be worse off than we were under the democratic government.”

After being drafted in 1943, Freeland hoped to use the Army to advance in life.

But he had no dreams of flying: “There were lots of Negroes who wanted to fly. I couldn’t even drive a car. What I wanted to do was to walk down the street, get on a streetcar and go from place to place.”

Stationed first at Camp Lee, Virginia, Freeland did well on the tests soldiers took upon entry into the armed forces; he credited his trigonometry lessons from Howard. He soon encountered a white lieutenant who learned of his college career and suggested he join the Air Corps, then part of the Army.

“I said, ‘Everybody I know at Howard went into the Army Air Corps in Mississippi.’ I did not believe Mississippi existed” — its degree of segregation and oppression seemed unreal. Freeland had no desire to live there. The lieutenant assured Freeland that the Army Air Corps also did training in friendlier, northern states, where he could be sent instead.

His parents had to give written permission for him to fly — he would only turn the requisite 19 years old in February 1944. “Somebody came around and said, ‘Pack up your clothes, you’re leaving,’” he recalled. “We headed West into the sun, made a left, and did not stop until we got to Missi-goddamn-ssippi.

“There were very few things that were lucky about my life in the Army,” he added. But his next assignment was one of them: He was told to report for flight training at Tuskegee Institute.

Freeland wasn’t happy at first about the assignment. If Howard was the “capstone of Negro education” in 1943, Freeland said, Tuskegee was a “backwater.”

However, Tuskegee had a Civil Air Patrol base, where the fledgling black pilots could train — separately. There were enough black Air Corps hopefuls to fill double the number of squadrons they could join, he said.

Segregation and the assumptions of prejudice followed Freeland into the service. His commanders, who had been trained in the period between the world wars, thought blacks were inferior. “They learned that at the War College,” Freeland said. “There was a presumption that Negroes couldn’t fly. There was a presumption that maybe they could fly better at night, because they can see like cats.”

He noticed as well that he and other black officers were getting their meals nearly for free, unlike white officers, who had to pay dues to their segregated officers’ club. “That was a method of keeping us happy,” Freeland said. “And I didn’t want to be happy. Because if we were too happy, we wouldn’t want to change things.”

He decided to become a bombardier and navigator. After his first two days of class, the instructor announced: “‘OK, I’m going to teach you all you need to know about the bombing function,’” Freeland said, smiling today. “It was trigonometry.”

He and his fellow Airmen first learned to fly Piper Cubs. Training took his group to Florida for gunnery school, where he and his fellow black soldiers refused to be restricted to the balcony during movie night in town — so the command canceled movies for gunnery students. In Texas for navigators’ school, the white command felt there were too many black soldiers on base and forced Freeland and 12 others in his 37-man group back to Tuskegee.

Afraid he might not get his wings, Freeland persisted. His group was moved to Godman Army Airfield in Kentucky, across from Fort Knox. Here the discrimination was even more blatant: White officers used the fancier facilities at Fort Knox, while black officers were stuck in Godman. It was no better when the 477th Bombardment Group moved finally to another airfield in Indiana, where the local command had set up segregated meal queues and clubs.

Freeland knew that Army regulations actually outlawed discrimination among officers.

“So we decided on a course of action,” he said. “We … washed up, dressed up and went to the white officers’ club.”

A colonel outside the club ordered him not to go in. He entered anyway. Even the foyer looked impressive, he said. “I’d never been in a foyer before. There we were. I sat here … and established a beachhead.”

When Freeland left, the colonel told him, “Consider yourself under arrest and confined to quarters.”

Sixty-nine other officers followed Freeland’s lead. Those arrested were released, thanks to political concerns about the incident in Washington, D.C., Freeland said. Then all the black soldiers were called into a hanger and lectured about administrative rules that, in effect, would keep blacks and whites separate. They were ordered to sign a paper acknowledging the rules.

Many of the men refused to sign, including Freeland. They were told that failure to obey a direct order was grounds for court martial and punishable by death.

“It was frightening,” Freeland acknowledged. The group was shipped back to Godman Army Airfield, surrounded by armed guards, under blaring lights at night. Once again unwilling to create a public stir by trying Army members for attempting to desegregate their own facilities, Washington ordered the group released.

A black Army colonel was brought in to command the 477th. “The white command was out,” Freeland said. “We had won our battle.”

Of all the films fictionalizing the Tuskegee Airmen’s role in history, Freeland said “Red Tails” was the truest to history. “‘Red Tails’ does in fact portray actual experiences,” he said. “What it showed was that Negroes had the worst planes that were in the Air Corps, the P-40. If you touched the rudder of the P-40, it would fall off.”

When the Airmen were finally given P-51s, “then they would fly deep into Germany.”

Freeland spoke as part of the diversity in practice speaker series, cosponsored by the Office of Health Sciences Diversity.

Introducing Freeland to the crowd, Rory Cooper, faculty member in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, called him “a true American hero.” Congratulated later for being part of history, Freeland objected with a smile: “Lord knows I still raise hell.”

—Marty Levine