Daniel ‘Chappie’ James Jr.

Daniel James Jr. was born on the eleventh of February 1920 at Pensacola, Florida, the youngest of seventeen children of Daniel James Sr. — a lamplighter of the Pensacola city gas-works — and Lillie Anna Brown James, the founder of a small one-room schoolhouse for Black children at the back of the James household. The family was working-class Black-Pensacola of the segregated post-First-World-War American South.

He was placed at four at his mother’s one-room schoolhouse — the principal Black primary school of the Pensacola of the period — and at the Washington High School at Pensacola for the secondary education. He took the bachelor’s in physical education at the Tuskegee Institute in 1942 — among the first generation of pre-war Tuskegee Institute bachelor’s graduates.

He entered the Tuskegee Civilian Pilot Training Program at Moton Field, Tuskegee in 1942 under C. Alfred Anderson (placed in this archive). He was commissioned a second lieutenant of the United States Army Air Forces from the Tuskegee Army Air Field flight programme on the twelfth of July 1943.

He served the closing years of the Second World War as a stateside instructor at Selfridge Field, Michigan and at Godman Field, Kentucky.

He deployed to the Korean War in 1950 with the 12th Fighter-Bomber Squadron of the 18th Fighter-Bomber Wing — flying one hundred and one combat missions in the F-51D Mustang and the F-80C Shooting Star across the closing year of the war. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

He deployed to the Vietnam War in 1966 as the vice-commander of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at the Royal Thai Air Force Base at Ubon, Thailand under Colonel Robin Olds — and flew across his Vietnam tour seventy-eight combat missions in the F-4C Phantom II. He participated on the second of January 1967 in the Operation Bolo MiG sweep — the principal Air Force air-to-air engagement of the war, in which the 8th Wing shot down seven North Vietnamese MiG-21s with no Air Force losses.

He was promoted to brigadier general on the fifth of July 1970 and to lieutenant general on the first of August 1973. He was promoted to four-star general of the United States Air Force on the first of September 1975 — the first African American to attain the rank of four-star general in the regular United States armed forces — and assigned the command of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and the United States Air Force Aerospace Defense Command at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. He commanded NORAD from 1975 to 1977.

He retired from the United States Air Force on the first of February 1978 after thirty-five years of regular service.

He died at Colorado Springs, Colorado on the twenty-fifth of February 1978 of a heart attack — twenty-four days after his retirement — at fifty-eight.

He is honored here as the first Black four-star general of the United States armed forces.