Benjamin O. Davis Jr.

Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr. was born on the eighteenth of December 1912 at Washington, D.C., the only son of Benjamin O. Davis Sr. (placed in this archive) — then a first lieutenant of the 9th United States Cavalry — and Elnora Dickerson Davis. He was raised in the household of his father across the segregated Army postings of Wilberforce University, Tuskegee Institute and the District of Columbia National Guard across the first eighteen years of his life.

He was placed at fifteen at the M Street High School at Washington — subsequently the Dunbar High School — and at the Western Reserve University at Cleveland and the University of Chicago across 1929 to 1932.

He was appointed in July 1932 to the United States Military Academy at West Point by the West Virginia Congressman Oscar Stanton De Priest — the only Black congressman of the period and the same Congressman who had appointed Davis’s father to West Point twenty-three years earlier. He was the fourth Black cadet ever to enter West Point and was the only Black cadet at the Academy across his four years.

He was subjected at West Point to the institutional silent treatment for the entire four years of his cadetship — under which no white cadet spoke to Davis except in the official line of duty. He roomed alone for the four years and ate alone at the cadet mess for the four years. He graduated thirty-fifth in the class of 1936 of two hundred and seventy-six cadets and was commissioned a second lieutenant of the regular United States Army on the twelfth of June 1936.

He was refused entry by the United States Army Air Corps on commissioning on the racial grounds of the Air Corps’ then-segregated officer corps and was instead assigned to the segregated 24th Infantry Regiment of the regular Army at Fort Benning, Georgia.

He was admitted on the nineteenth of May 1941 — at the establishment of the Tuskegee Army Air Field — to the Tuskegee Pre-Flight programme as one of the original thirteen cadets of the first Black flight training class of the United States Army Air Corps. He graduated from the Tuskegee primary flight programme on the seventh of March 1942 at the head of the class as the first Black graduate of the United States Army Air Corps Pilot Training Programme.

He commanded the 99th Fighter Squadron — the original squadron of the Tuskegee Airmen — at the North African and Italian theatres of operations from May 1943 through the closing months of 1943. He commanded the 332nd Fighter Group at the Italian and southern French theatres from October 1943 to June 1945 — the principal Black combat fighter group of the war.

The 332nd Fighter Group flew under Davis’s command across the closing two years of the European war over fifteen thousand combat sorties and was credited with one hundred and eleven confirmed enemy-aircraft destroyed, three Distinguished Unit Citations, eight Silver Stars, ninety-six Distinguished Flying Crosses, and the loss of sixty-six members in combat.

He was promoted to brigadier general of the United States Air Force on the twenty-second of October 1954 — the first African American general of the Air Force — and to lieutenant general on the second of November 1965, and to four-star general by retroactive promotion on the ninth of December 1998.

He died at Washington, D.C. on the fourth of July 2002 of complications of Alzheimer’s disease, at eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the commander of the Tuskegee Airmen.