George S. ‘Spanky’ Roberts

George Spencer Roberts was born on the twenty-fourth of September 1918 at Fairmont, West Virginia, the son of an Black coal miner of the Fairmont coal fields and a domestic worker. He was raised in the small Black community of the Fairmont coal-mining belt of north-central West Virginia and educated at the Dunbar High School at Fairmont — the segregated Black high school of the city.

He took the bachelor’s in agriculture at the West Virginia State College at Institute, West Virginia in 1938 — among the first generation of post-Depression-era Black West Virginia State graduates — and was admitted at the closing months of 1940 to the West Virginia State College Civilian Pilot Training Program. He completed the CPT primary course at the West Virginia State College in 1940 and the CPT secondary course in 1941.

He was admitted on the nineteenth of July 1941 to the United States Army Air Corps Tuskegee Army Air Field flight programme as one of the original thirteen cadets of the first Black flight training class — the same class as Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (placed in this archive). Roberts was the first member of the class to arrive at Tuskegee Army Air Field by railway from West Virginia and was thus accorded the historical distinction of being the first African American admitted to the Tuskegee flight programme.

He graduated from the Tuskegee primary flight programme on the seventh of March 1942 — second in the class behind Davis Jr. — and was commissioned a second lieutenant of the United States Army Air Forces.

He was assigned to the 99th Fighter Squadron of the Tuskegee Airmen at its establishment in March 1942 and deployed with the squadron to the North African theatre on the twenty-fourth of April 1943. He served the 99th Fighter Squadron across the campaigns of Tunisia, Sicily, the Allied invasion of Italy of September 1943, the Anzio beachhead of January 1944, and the air war over Rome of June 1944.

He was named commander of the 99th Fighter Squadron — the original squadron of the Tuskegee Airmen — on the second of October 1944 and held the command through to the close of the European war in May 1945. He flew across the active operational period seventy-eight combat missions over the North African and Italian theatres in the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, and the North American P-51 Mustang.

He was retained in the post-war regular United States Air Force in 1947 and served the closing portion of the Air Force segregated period as commander of the 332nd Fighter Wing operations at Lockbourne Air Force Base, Ohio.

He retired from the Air Force in 1968 as a colonel after twenty-seven years of regular service.

He died at Sacramento, California on the eighth of March 1984 of complications of a heart attack, at sixty-five.

He is honored here as the first cadet admitted to the Tuskegee flight programme.